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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Strictly Business, by O. Henry
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Strictly Business
+
+Author: O. Henry
+
+Release Date: April, 2000 [eBook #2141]
+[Most recently updated: October 4, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteers and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRICTLY BUSINESS ***
+
+
+
+
+Strictly Business
+
+by O. Henry
+
+
+Contents
+
+ I. STRICTLY BUSINESS
+ II. THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED
+ III. BABES IN THE JUNGLE
+ IV. THE DAY RESURGENT
+ V. THE FIFTH WHEEL
+ VI. THE POET AND THE PEASANT
+ VII. THE ROBE OF PEACE
+ VIII. THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT
+ IX. THE CALL OF THE TAME
+ X. THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
+ XI. THE THING'S THE PLAY
+ XII. A RAMBLE IN APHASIA
+ XIII. A MUNICIPAL REPORT
+ XIV. PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER
+ XV. A BIRD OF BAGDAD
+ XVI. COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON
+ XVII. A NIGHT IN NEW ARABIA
+ XVIII. THE GIRL AND THE HABIT
+ XIX. PROOF OF THE PUDDING
+ XX. PAST ONE AT ROONEY’S
+ XXI. THE VENTURERS
+ XXII. THE DUEL
+ XXIII. “WHAT YOU WANT”
+
+
+
+
+I
+STRICTLY BUSINESS
+
+
+I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You’ve been
+touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and
+the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the
+long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your
+ideas about the mysterious stageland would boil down to something like
+this:
+
+Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no
+better than your own (madam) if they weren’t padded. Chorus girls are
+inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back
+to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses
+reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their
+step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew’s real name is Boyle O’Kelley. The
+ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first
+sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H.
+Sothern; but Henry Miller is getting older than he was.
+
+All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink champagne
+and eat lobsters until noon the next day. After all, the moving
+pictures have got the whole bunch pounded to a pulp.
+
+Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people. If we did, the
+profession might be more overcrowded than it is. We look askance at the
+players with an eye full of patronizing superiority—and we go home and
+practise all sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our looking
+glasses.
+
+Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people in a new light.
+It seems to have been divulged that instead of being motoring
+bacchanalians and diamond-hungry _loreleis_ they are businesslike folk,
+students and ascetics with childer and homes and libraries, owning real
+estate, and conducting their private affairs in as orderly and
+unsensational a manner as any of us good citizens who are bound to the
+chariot wheels of the gas, rent, coal, ice, and wardmen.
+
+Whether the old or the new report of the sock-and-buskiners be the true
+one is a surmise that has no place here. I offer you merely this little
+story of two strollers; and for proof of its truth I can show you only
+the dark patch above the cast-iron of the stage-entrance door of
+Keetor’s old vaudeville theatre made there by the petulant push of
+gloved hands too impatient to finger the clumsy thumb-latch—and where I
+last saw Cherry whisking through like a swallow into her nest, on time
+to the minute, as usual, to dress for her act.
+
+The vaudeville team of Hart & Cherry was an inspiration. Bob Hart had
+been roaming through the Eastern and Western circuits for four years
+with a mixed-up act comprising a monologue, three lightning changes
+with songs, a couple of imitations of celebrated imitators, and a
+buck-and-wing dance that had drawn a glance of approval from the
+bass-viol player in more than one house—than which no performer ever
+received more satisfactory evidence of good work.
+
+The greatest treat an actor can have is to witness the pitiful
+performance with which all other actors desecrate the stage. In order
+to give himself this pleasure he will often forsake the sunniest
+Broadway corner between Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth to attend a
+matinée offering by his less gifted brothers. Once during the lifetime
+of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff and remains to go through with
+that most difficult exercise of Thespian muscles—the audible contact of
+the palm of one hand against the palm of the other.
+
+One afternoon Bob Hart presented his solvent, serious, well-known
+vaudevillian face at the box-office window of a rival attraction and
+got his d. h. coupon for an orchestra seat.
+
+A, B, C, and D glowed successively on the announcement spaces and
+passed into oblivion, each plunging Mr. Hart deeper into gloom. Others
+of the audience shrieked, squirmed, whistled, and applauded; but Bob
+Hart, “All the Mustard and a Whole Show in Himself,” sat with his face
+as long and his hands as far apart as a boy holding a hank of yarn for
+his grandmother to wind into a ball.
+
+But when H came on, “The Mustard” suddenly sat up straight. H was the
+happy alphabetical prognosticator of Winona Cherry, in Character Songs
+and Impersonations. There were scarcely more than two bites to Cherry;
+but she delivered the merchandise tied with a pink cord and charged to
+the old man’s account. She first showed you a deliciously dewy and
+ginghamy country girl with a basket of property daisies who informed
+you ingenuously that there were other things to be learned at the old
+log school-house besides cipherin’ and nouns, especially “When the
+Teach-er Kept Me in.” Vanishing, with a quick flirt of gingham
+apron-strings, she reappeared in considerably less than a “trice” as a
+fluffy “Parisienne”—so near does Art bring the old red mill to the
+Moulin Rouge. And then—
+
+But you know the rest. And so did Bob Hart; but he saw somebody else.
+He thought he saw that Cherry was the only professional on the short
+order stage that he had seen who seemed exactly to fit the part of
+“Helen Grimes” in the sketch he had written and kept tucked away in the
+tray of his trunk. Of course Bob Hart, as well as every other normal
+actor, grocer, newspaper man, professor, curb broker, and farmer, has a
+play tucked away somewhere. They tuck ’em in trays of trunks, trunks of
+trees, desks, haymows, pigeonholes, inside pockets, safe-deposit
+vaults, handboxes, and coal cellars, waiting for Mr. Frohman to call.
+They belong among the fifty-seven different kinds.
+
+But Bob Hart’s sketch was not destined to end in a pickle jar. He
+called it “Mice Will Play.” He had kept it quiet and hidden away ever
+since he wrote it, waiting to find a partner who fitted his conception
+of “Helen Grimes.” And here was “Helen” herself, with all the innocent
+abandon, the youth, the sprightliness, and the flawless stage art that
+his critical taste demanded.
+
+After the act was over Hart found the manager in the box office, and
+got Cherry’s address. At five the next afternoon he called at the musty
+old house in the West Forties and sent up his professional card.
+
+By daylight, in a secular shirtwaist and plain _voile_ skirt, with her
+hair curbed and her Sister of Charity eyes, Winona Cherry might have
+been playing the part of Prudence Wise, the deacon’s daughter, in the
+great (unwritten) New England drama not yet entitled anything.
+
+“I know your act, Mr. Hart,” she said after she had looked over his
+card carefully. “What did you wish to see me about?”
+
+“I saw you work last night,” said Hart. “I’ve written a sketch that
+I’ve been saving up. It’s for two; and I think you can do the other
+part. I thought I’d see you about it.”
+
+“Come in the parlor,” said Miss Cherry. “I’ve been wishing for
+something of the sort. I think I’d like to act instead of doing turns.”
+
+Bob Hart drew his cherished “Mice Will Play” from his pocket, and read
+it to her.
+
+“Read it again, please,” said Miss Cherry.
+
+And then she pointed out to him clearly how it could be improved by
+introducing a messenger instead of a telephone call, and cutting the
+dialogue just before the climax while they were struggling with the
+pistol, and by completely changing the lines and business of Helen
+Grimes at the point where her jealousy overcomes her. Hart yielded to
+all her strictures without argument. She had at once put her finger on
+the sketch’s weaker points. That was her woman’s intuition that he had
+lacked. At the end of their talk Hart was willing to stake the
+judgment, experience, and savings of his four years of vaudeville that
+“Mice Will Play” would blossom into a perennial flower in the garden of
+the circuits. Miss Cherry was slower to decide. After many puckerings
+of her smooth young brow and tappings on her small, white teeth with
+the end of a lead pencil she gave out her dictum.
+
+“Mr. Hart,” said she, “I believe your sketch is going to win out. That
+Grimes part fits me like a shrinkable flannel after its first trip to a
+handless hand laundry. I can make it stand out like the colonel of the
+Forty-fourth Regiment at a Little Mothers’ Bazaar. And I’ve seen you
+work. I know what you can do with the other part. But business is
+business. How much do you get a week for the stunt you do now?”
+
+“Two hundred,” answered Hart.
+
+“I get one hundred for mine,” said Cherry. “That’s about the natural
+discount for a woman. But I live on it and put a few simoleons every
+week under the loose brick in the old kitchen hearth. The stage is all
+right. I love it; but there’s something else I love better—that’s a
+little country home, some day, with Plymouth Rock chickens and six
+ducks wandering around the yard.
+
+“Now, let me tell you, Mr. Hart, I am STRICTLY BUSINESS. If you want me
+to play the opposite part in your sketch, I’ll do it. And I believe we
+can make it go. And there’s something else I want to say: There’s no
+nonsense in my make-up; I’m _on the level_, and I’m on the stage for
+what it pays me, just as other girls work in stores and offices. I’m
+going to save my money to keep me when I’m past doing my stunts. No Old
+Ladies’ Home or Retreat for Imprudent Actresses for me.
+
+“If you want to make this a business partnership, Mr. Hart, with all
+nonsense cut out of it, I’m in on it. I know something about vaudeville
+teams in general; but this would have to be one in particular. I want
+you to know that I’m on the stage for what I can cart away from it
+every pay-day in a little manila envelope with nicotine stains on it,
+where the cashier has licked the flap. It’s kind of a hobby of mine to
+want to cravenette myself for plenty of rainy days in the future. I
+want you to know just how I am. I don’t know what an all-night
+restaurant looks like; I drink only weak tea; I never spoke to a man at
+a stage entrance in my life, and I’ve got money in five savings banks.”
+
+“Miss Cherry,” said Bob Hart in his smooth, serious tones, “you’re in
+on your own terms. I’ve got ‘strictly business’ pasted in my hat and
+stenciled on my make-up box. When I dream of nights I always see a
+five-room bungalow on the north shore of Long Island, with a Jap
+cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen, and me with the title
+deeds to the place in my pongee coat pocket, swinging in a hammock on
+the side porch, reading Stanley’s ‘Explorations into Africa.’ And
+nobody else around. You never was interested in Africa, was you, Miss
+Cherry?”
+
+“Not any,” said Cherry. “What I’m going to do with my money is to bank
+it. You can get four per cent. on deposits. Even at the salary I’ve
+been earning, I’ve figured out that in ten years I’d have an income of
+about $50 a month just from the interest alone. Well, I might invest
+some of the principal in a little business—say, trimming hats or a
+beauty parlor, and make more.”
+
+“Well,” said Hart, “You’ve got the proper idea all right, all right,
+anyhow. There are mighty few actors that amount to anything at all who
+couldn’t fix themselves for the wet days to come if they’d save their
+money instead of blowing it. I’m glad you’ve got the correct business
+idea of it, Miss Cherry. I think the same way; and I believe this
+sketch will more than double what both of us earn now when we get it
+shaped up.”
+
+The subsequent history of “Mice Will Play” is the history of all
+successful writings for the stage. Hart & Cherry cut it, pieced it,
+remodeled it, performed surgical operations on the dialogue and
+business, changed the lines, restored ’em, added more, cut ’em out,
+renamed it, gave it back the old name, rewrote it, substituted a dagger
+for the pistol, restored the pistol—put the sketch through all the
+known processes of condensation and improvement.
+
+They rehearsed it by the old-fashioned boardinghouse clock in the
+rarely used parlor until its warning click at five minutes to the hour
+would occur every time exactly half a second before the click of the
+unloaded revolver that Helen Grimes used in rehearsing the thrilling
+climax of the sketch.
+
+Yes, that was a thriller and a piece of excellent work. In the act a
+real 32-caliber revolver was used loaded with a real cartridge. Helen
+Grimes, who is a Western girl of decidedly Buffalo Billish skill and
+daring, is tempestuously in love with Frank Desmond, the private
+secretary and confidential prospective son-in-law of her father,
+“Arapahoe” Grimes, quarter-million-dollar cattle king, owning a ranch
+that, judging by the scenery, is in either the Bad Lands or Amagansett,
+L. I. Desmond (in private life Mr. Bob Hart) wears puttees and Meadow
+Brook Hunt riding trousers, and gives his address as New York, leaving
+you to wonder why he comes to the Bad Lands or Amagansett (as the case
+may be) and at the same time to conjecture mildly why a cattleman
+should want puttees about his ranch with a secretary in ’em.
+
+Well, anyhow, you know as well as I do that we all like that kind of
+play, whether we admit it or not—something along in between “Bluebeard,
+Jr.,” and “Cymbeline” played in the Russian.
+
+There were only two parts and a half in “Mice Will Play.” Hart and
+Cherry were the two, of course; and the half was a minor part always
+played by a stage hand, who merely came in once in a Tuxedo coat and a
+panic to announce that the house was surrounded by Indians, and to turn
+down the gas fire in the grate by the manager’s orders.
+
+There was another girl in the sketch—a Fifth Avenue society
+swelless—who was visiting the ranch and who had sirened Jack Valentine
+when he was a wealthy club-man on lower Third Avenue before he lost his
+money. This girl appeared on the stage only in the photographic
+state—Jack had her Sarony stuck up on the mantel of the Amagan—of the
+Bad Lands droring room. Helen was jealous, of course.
+
+And now for the thriller. Old “Arapahoe” Grimes dies of angina pectoris
+one night—so Helen informs us in a stage-ferryboat whisper over the
+footlights—while only his secretary was present. And that same day he
+was known to have had $647,000 in cash in his (ranch) library just
+received for the sale of a drove of beeves in the East (that accounts
+for the price we pay for steak!). The cash disappears at the same time.
+Jack Valentine was the only person with the ranchman when he made his
+(alleged) croak.
+
+“Gawd knows I love him; but if he has done this deed—” you sabe, don’t
+you? And then there are some mean things said about the Fifth Avenue
+Girl—who doesn’t come on the stage—and can we blame her, with the
+vaudeville trust holding down prices until one actually must be
+buttoned in the back by a call boy, maids cost so much?
+
+But, wait. Here’s the climax. Helen Grimes, chaparralish as she can be,
+is goaded beyond imprudence. She convinces herself that Jack Valentine
+is not only a falsetto, but a financier. To lose at one fell swoop
+$647,000 and a lover in riding trousers with angles in the sides like
+the variations on the chart of a typhoid-fever patient is enough to
+make any perfect lady mad. So, then!
+
+They stand in the (ranch) library, which is furnished with mounted elk
+heads (didn’t the Elks have a fish fry in Amagensett once?), and the
+dénouement begins. I know of no more interesting time in the run of a
+play unless it be when the prologue ends.
+
+Helen thinks Jack has taken the money. Who else was there to take it?
+The box-office manager was at the front on his job; the orchestra
+hadn’t left their seats; and no man could get past “Old Jimmy,” the
+stage door-man, unless he could show a Skye terrier or an automobile as
+a guarantee of eligibility.
+
+Goaded beyond imprudence (as before said), Helen says to Jack
+Valentine: “Robber and thief—and worse yet, stealer of trusting hearts,
+this should be your fate!”
+
+With that out she whips, of course, the trusty 32-caliber.
+
+“But I will be merciful,” goes on Helen. “You shall live—that will be
+your punishment. I will show you how easily I could have sent you to
+the death that you deserve. There is _her_ picture on the mantel. I
+will send through her more beautiful face the bullet that should have
+pierced your craven heart.”
+
+And she does it. And there’s no fake blank cartridges or assistants
+pulling strings. Helen fires. The bullet—the actual bullet—goes through
+the face of the photograph—and then strikes the hidden spring of the
+sliding panel in the wall—and lo! the panel slides, and there is the
+missing $647,000 in convincing stacks of currency and bags of gold.
+It’s great. You know how it is. Cherry practised for two months at a
+target on the roof of her boarding house. It took good shooting. In the
+sketch she had to hit a brass disk only three inches in diameter,
+covered by wall paper in the panel; and she had to stand in exactly the
+same spot every night, and the photo had to be in exactly the same
+spot, and she had to shoot steady and true every time.
+
+Of course old “Arapahoe” had tucked the funds away there in the secret
+place; and, of course, Jack hadn’t taken anything except his salary
+(which really might have come under the head of “obtaining money
+under”; but that is neither here nor there); and, of course, the New
+York girl was really engaged to a concrete house contractor in the
+Bronx; and, necessarily, Jack and Helen ended in a half-Nelson—and
+there you are.
+
+After Hart and Cherry had gotten “Mice Will Play” flawless, they had a
+try-out at a vaudeville house that accommodates. The sketch was a house
+wrecker. It was one of those rare strokes of talent that inundates a
+theatre from the roof down. The gallery wept; and the orchestra seats,
+being dressed for it, swam in tears.
+
+After the show the booking agents signed blank checks and pressed
+fountain pens upon Hart and Cherry. Five hundred dollars a week was
+what it panned out.
+
+That night at 11:30 Bob Hart took off his hat and bade Cherry good
+night at her boarding-house door.
+
+“Mr. Hart,” said she thoughtfully, “come inside just a few minutes.
+We’ve got our chance now to make good and make money. What we want to
+do is to cut expenses every cent we can, and save all we can.”
+
+“Right,” said Bob. “It’s business with me. You’ve got your scheme for
+banking yours; and I dream every night of that bungalow with the Jap
+cook and nobody around to raise trouble. Anything to enlarge the net
+receipts will engage my attention.”
+
+“Come inside just a few minutes,” repeated Cherry, deeply thoughtful.
+“I’ve got a proposition to make to you that will reduce our expenses a
+lot and help you work out your own future and help me work out mine—and
+all on business principles.”
+
+“Mice Will Play” had a tremendously successful run in New York for ten
+weeks—rather neat for a vaudeville sketch—and then it started on the
+circuits. Without following it, it may be said that it was a solid
+drawing card for two years without a sign of abated popularity.
+
+Sam Packard, manager of one of Keetor’s New York houses, said of Hart &
+Cherry:
+
+“As square and high-toned a little team as ever came over the circuit.
+It’s a pleasure to read their names on the booking list. Quiet, hard
+workers, no Johnny and Mabel nonsense, on the job to the minute,
+straight home after their act, and each of ’em as gentlemanlike as a
+lady. I don’t expect to handle any attractions that give me less
+trouble or more respect for the profession.”
+
+And now, after so much cracking of a nutshell, here is the kernel of
+the story:
+
+At the end of its second season “Mice Will Play” came back to New York
+for another run at the roof gardens and summer theatres. There was
+never any trouble in booking it at the top-notch price. Bob Hart had
+his bungalow nearly paid for, and Cherry had so many savings-deposit
+bank books that she had begun to buy sectional bookcases on the
+instalment plan to hold them.
+
+I tell you these things to assure you, even if you can’t believe it,
+that many, very many of the stage people are workers with abiding
+ambitions—just the same as the man who wants to be president, or the
+grocery clerk who wants a home in Flatbush, or a lady who is anxious to
+flop out of the Count-pan into the Prince-fire. And I hope I may be
+allowed to say, without chipping into the contribution basket, that
+they often move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform.
+
+But, listen.
+
+At the first performance of “Mice Will Play” in New York at the
+Westphalia (no hams alluded to) Theatre, Winona Cherry was nervous.
+When she fired at the photograph of the Eastern beauty on the mantel,
+the bullet, instead of penetrating the photo and then striking the
+disk, went into the lower left side of Bob Hart’s neck. Not expecting
+to get it there, Hart collapsed neatly, while Cherry fainted in a most
+artistic manner.
+
+The audience, surmising that they viewed a comedy instead of a tragedy
+in which the principals were married or reconciled, applauded with
+great enjoyment. The Cool Head, who always graces such occasions, rang
+the curtain down, and two platoons of scene shifters respectively and
+more or less respectfully removed Hart & Cherry from the stage. The
+next turn went on, and all went as merry as an alimony bell.
+
+The stage hands found a young doctor at the stage entrance who was
+waiting for a patient with a decoction of Am. B’ty roses. The doctor
+examined Hart carefully and laughed heartily.
+
+“No headlines for you, Old Sport,” was his diagnosis. “If it had been
+two inches to the left it would have undermined the carotid artery as
+far as the Red Front Drug Store in Flatbush and Back Again. As it is,
+you just get the property man to bind it up with a flounce torn from
+any one of the girls’ Valenciennes and go home and get it dressed by
+the parlor-floor practitioner on your block, and you’ll be all right.
+Excuse me; I’ve got a serious case outside to look after.”
+
+After that, Bob Hart looked up and felt better. And then to where he
+lay came Vincente, the Tramp Juggler, great in his line. Vincente, a
+solemn man from Brattleboro, Vt., named Sam Griggs at home, sent toys
+and maple sugar home to two small daughters from every town he played.
+Vincente had moved on the same circuits with Hart & Cherry, and was
+their peripatetic friend.
+
+“Bob,” said Vincente in his serious way, “I’m glad it’s no worse. The
+little lady is wild about you.”
+
+“Who?” asked Hart.
+
+“Cherry,” said the juggler. “We didn’t know how bad you were hurt; and
+we kept her away. It’s taking the manager and three girls to hold her.”
+
+“It was an accident, of course,” said Hart. “Cherry’s all right. She
+wasn’t feeling in good trim or she couldn’t have done it. There’s no
+hard feelings. She’s strictly business. The doctor says I’ll be on the
+job again in three days. Don’t let her worry.”
+
+“Man,” said Sam Griggs severely, puckering his old, smooth, lined face,
+“are you a chess automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry’s crying her
+heart out for you—calling ‘Bob, Bob,’ every second, with them holding
+her hands and keeping her from coming to you.”
+
+“What’s the matter with her?” asked Hart, with wide-open eyes. “The
+sketch’ll go on again in three days. I’m not hurt bad, the doctor says.
+She won’t lose out half a week’s salary. I know it was an accident.
+What’s the matter with her?”
+
+“You seem to be blind, or a sort of a fool,” said Vincente. “The girl
+loves you and is almost mad about your hurt. What’s the matter with
+_you_? Is she nothing to you? I wish you could hear her call you.”
+
+“Loves me?” asked Bob Hart, rising from the stack of scenery on which
+he lay. “Cherry loves me? Why, it’s impossible.”
+
+“I wish you could see her and hear her,” said Griggs.
+
+“But, man,” said Bob Hart, sitting up, “it’s impossible. It’s
+impossible, I tell you. I never dreamed of such a thing.”
+
+“No human being,” said the Tramp Juggler, “could mistake it. She’s wild
+for love of you. How have you been so blind?”
+
+“But, my God,” said Bob Hart, rising to his feet, “it’s _too late_.
+It’s too late, I tell you, Sam; _it’s too late_. It can’t be. You must
+be wrong. It’s _impossible_. There’s some mistake.
+
+“She’s crying for you,” said the Tramp Juggler. “For love of you she’s
+fighting three, and calling your name so loud they don’t dare to raise
+the curtain. Wake up, man.”
+
+“For love of me?” said Bob Hart with staring eyes. “Don’t I tell you
+it’s too late? It’s too late, man. Why, _Cherry and I have been married
+two years!_”
+
+
+
+
+II
+THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED
+
+
+A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores
+you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.
+Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it. All is not
+gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in
+his bottle of testing acid.
+
+Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by George
+the Veracious is the Little Rialto. Here stand the actors of that
+quarter, and this is their shibboleth: “‘Nit,’ says I to Frohman, ‘you
+can’t touch me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,’ and out I walks.”
+
+Westward and southward from the Thespian glare are one or two streets
+where a Spanish-American colony has huddled for a little tropical
+warmth in the nipping North. The centre of life in this precinct is “El
+Refugio,” a café and restaurant that caters to the volatile exiles from
+the South. Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia, the rolling republics of
+Central America and the ireful islands of the Western Indies flit the
+cloaked and sombreroed señores, who are scattered like burning lava by
+the political eruptions of their several countries. Hither they come to
+lay counterplots, to bide their time, to solicit funds, to enlist
+filibusterers, to smuggle out arms and ammunitions, to play the game at
+long taw. In El Refugio, they find the atmosphere in which they thrive.
+
+In the restaurant of El Refugio are served compounds delightful to the
+palate of the man from Capricorn or Cancer. Altruism must halt the
+story thus long. On, diner, weary of the culinary subterfuges of the
+Gallic chef, hie thee to El Refugio! There only will you find a
+fish—bluefish, shad or pompano from the Gulf—baked after the Spanish
+method. Tomatoes give it color, individuality and soul; chili colorado
+bestows upon it zest, originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish
+piquancy and mystery, and—but its crowning glory deserves a new
+sentence. Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity—but never in
+it—hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and delicate that
+only the Society for Psychical Research could note its origin. Do not
+say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not otherwise than
+as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has wafted one kiss that
+lingers in the parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those kisses in
+life, “by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others.” And
+then, when Conchito, the waiter, brings you a plate of brown frijoles
+and a carafe of wine that has never stood still between Oporto and El
+Refugio—ah, Dios!
+
+One day a Hamburg-American liner deposited upon Pier No. 55 Gen.
+Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon, a passenger from Cartagena. The
+General was between a claybank and a bay in complexion, had a 42-inch
+waist and stood 5 feet 4 with his Du Barry heels. He had the mustache
+of a shooting-gallery proprietor, he wore the full dress of a Texas
+congressman and had the important aspect of an uninstructed delegate.
+
+Gen. Falcon had enough English under his hat to enable him to inquire
+his way to the street in which El Refugio stood. When he reached that
+neighborhood he saw a sign before a respectable red-brick house that
+read, “Hotel Español.” In the window was a card in Spanish, “Aqui se
+habla Español.” The General entered, sure of a congenial port.
+
+In the cozy office was Mrs. O’Brien, the proprietress. She had
+blond—oh, unimpeachably blond hair. For the rest she was amiability,
+and ran largely to inches around. Gen. Falcon brushed the floor with
+his broad-brimmed hat, and emitted a quantity of Spanish, the syllables
+sounding like firecrackers gently popping their way down the string of
+a bunch.
+
+“Spanish or Dago?” asked Mrs. O’Brien, pleasantly.
+
+“I am a Colombian, madam,” said the General, proudly. “I speak the
+Spanish. The advisement in your window say the Spanish he is spoken
+here. How is that?”
+
+“Well, you’ve been speaking it, ain’t you?” said the madam. “I’m sure I
+can’t.”
+
+At the Hotel Español General Falcon engaged rooms and established
+himself. At dusk he sauntered out upon the streets to view the wonders
+of this roaring city of the North. As he walked he thought of the
+wonderful golden hair of Mme. O’Brien. “It is here,” said the General
+to himself, no doubt in his own language, “that one shall find the most
+beautiful señoras in the world. I have not in my Colombia viewed among
+our beauties one so fair. But no! It is not for the General Falcon to
+think of beauty. It is my country that claims my devotion.”
+
+At the corner of Broadway and the Little Rialto the General became
+involved. The street cars bewildered him, and the fender of one upset
+him against a pushcart laden with oranges. A cab driver missed him an
+inch with a hub, and poured barbarous execrations upon his head. He
+scrambled to the sidewalk and skipped again in terror when the whistle
+of a peanut-roaster puffed a hot scream in his ear. “Válgame Dios! What
+devil’s city is this?”
+
+As the General fluttered out of the streamers of passers like a wounded
+snipe he was marked simultaneously as game by two hunters. One was
+“Bully” McGuire, whose system of sport required the use of a strong arm
+and the misuse of an eight-inch piece of lead pipe. The other Nimrod of
+the asphalt was “Spider” Kelley, a sportsman with more refined methods.
+
+In pouncing upon their self-evident prey, Mr. Kelley was a shade the
+quicker. His elbow fended accurately the onslaught of Mr. McGuire.
+
+“G’wan!” he commanded harshly. “I saw it first.” McGuire slunk away,
+awed by superior intelligence.
+
+“Pardon me,” said Mr. Kelley, to the General, “but you got balled up in
+the shuffle, didn’t you? Let me assist you.” He picked up the General’s
+hat and brushed the dust from it.
+
+The ways of Mr. Kelley could not but succeed. The General, bewildered
+and dismayed by the resounding streets, welcomed his deliverer as a
+caballero with a most disinterested heart.
+
+“I have a desire,” said the General, “to return to the hotel of
+O’Brien, in which I am stop. Caramba! señor, there is a loudness and
+rapidness of going and coming in the city of this Nueva York.”
+
+Mr. Kelley’s politeness would not suffer the distinguished Colombian to
+brave the dangers of the return unaccompanied. At the door of the Hotel
+Español they paused. A little lower down on the opposite side of the
+street shone the modest illuminated sign of El Refugio. Mr. Kelley, to
+whom few streets were unfamiliar, knew the place exteriorly as a “Dago
+joint.” All foreigners Mr. Kelley classed under the two heads of
+“Dagoes” and Frenchmen. He proposed to the General that they repair
+thither and substantiate their acquaintance with a liquid foundation.
+
+An hour later found General Falcon and Mr. Kelley seated at a table in
+the conspirator’s corner of El Refugio. Bottles and glasses were
+between them. For the tenth time the General confided the secret of his
+mission to the Estados Unidos. He was here, he declared, to purchase
+arms—2,000 stands of Winchester rifles—for the Colombian
+revolutionists. He had drafts in his pocket drawn by the Cartagena Bank
+on its New York correspondent for $25,000. At other tables other
+revolutionists were shouting their political secrets to their
+fellow-plotters; but none was as loud as the General. He pounded the
+table; he hallooed for some wine; he roared to his friend that his
+errand was a secret one, and not to be hinted at to a living soul. Mr.
+Kelley himself was stirred to sympathetic enthusiasm. He grasped the
+General’s hand across the table.
+
+“Monseer,” he said, earnestly, “I don’t know where this country of
+yours is, but I’m for it. I guess it must be a branch of the United
+States, though, for the poetry guys and the schoolmarms call us
+Columbia, too, sometimes. It’s a lucky thing for you that you butted
+into me to-night. I’m the only man in New York that can get this gun
+deal through for you. The Secretary of War of the United States is me
+best friend. He’s in the city now, and I’ll see him for you to-morrow.
+In the meantime, monseer, you keep them drafts tight in your inside
+pocket. I’ll call for you to-morrow, and take you to see him. Say! that
+ain’t the District of Columbia you’re talking about, is it?” concluded
+Mr. Kelley, with a sudden qualm. “You can’t capture that with no 2,000
+guns—it’s been tried with more.”
+
+“No, no, no!” exclaimed the General. “It is the Republic of Colombia—it
+is a g-r-reat republic on the top side of America of the South. Yes.
+Yes.”
+
+“All right,” said Mr. Kelley, reassured. “Now suppose we trek along
+home and go by-by. I’ll write to the Secretary to-night and make a date
+with him. It’s a ticklish job to get guns out of New York. McClusky
+himself can’t do it.”
+
+They parted at the door of the Hotel Español. The General rolled his
+eyes at the moon and sighed.
+
+“It is a great country, your Nueva York,” he said. “Truly the cars in
+the streets devastate one, and the engine that cooks the nuts terribly
+makes a squeak in the ear. But, ah, Señor Kelley—the señoras with hair
+of much goldness, and admirable fatness—they are magnificas! Muy
+magnificas!”
+
+Kelley went to the nearest telephone booth and called up McCrary’s
+café, far up on Broadway. He asked for Jimmy Dunn.
+
+“Is that Jimmy Dunn?” asked Kelley.
+
+“Yes,” came the answer.
+
+“You’re a liar,” sang back Kelley, joyfully. “You’re the Secretary of
+War. Wait there till I come up. I’ve got the finest thing down here in
+the way of a fish you ever baited for. It’s a Colorado-maduro, with a
+gold band around it and free coupons enough to buy a red hall lamp and
+a statuette of Psyche rubbering in the brook. I’ll be up on the next
+car.”
+
+Jimmy Dunn was an A. M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the confidence
+line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout
+drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended victim but
+the purest of drinks, if it had been possible to procure such a thing
+in New York. It was the ambition of “Spider” Kelley to elevate himself
+into Jimmy’s class.
+
+These two gentlemen held a conference that night at McCrary’s. Kelley
+explained.
+
+“He’s as easy as a gumshoe. He’s from the Island of Colombia, where
+there’s a strike, or a feud, or something going on, and they’ve sent
+him up here to buy 2,000 Winchesters to arbitrate the thing with. He
+showed me two drafts for $10,000 each, and one for $5,000 on a bank
+here. ’S truth, Jimmy, I felt real mad with him because he didn’t have
+it in thousand-dollar bills, and hand it to me on a silver waiter. Now,
+we’ve got to wait till he goes to the bank and gets the money for us.”
+
+They talked it over for two hours, and then Dunn said; “Bring him to
+No. –––– Broadway, at four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”
+
+In due time Kelley called at the Hotel Español for the General. He
+found the wily warrior engaged in delectable conversation with Mrs.
+O’Brien.
+
+“The Secretary of War is waitin’ for us,” said Kelley.
+
+The General tore himself away with an effort.
+
+“Ay, señor,” he said, with a sigh, “duty makes a call. But, señor, the
+señoras of your Estados Unidos—how beauties! For exemplification, take
+you la Madame O’Brien—que magnifica! She is one goddess—one Juno—what
+you call one ox-eyed Juno.”
+
+Now Mr. Kelley was a wit; and better men have been shriveled by the
+fire of their own imagination.
+
+“Sure!” he said with a grin; “but you mean a peroxide Juno, don’t you?”
+
+Mrs. O’Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous head. Her businesslike eye
+rested for an instant upon the disappearing form of Mr. Kelley. Except
+in street cars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.
+
+When the gallant Colombian and his escort arrived at the Broadway
+address, they were held in an anteroom for half an hour, and then
+admitted into a well-equipped office where a distinguished looking man,
+with a smooth face, wrote at a desk. General Falcon was presented to
+the Secretary of War of the United States, and his mission made known
+by his old friend, Mr. Kelley.
+
+“Ah—Colombia!” said the Secretary, significantly, when he was made to
+understand; “I’m afraid there will be a little difficulty in that case.
+The President and I differ in our sympathies there. He prefers the
+established government, while I—” the secretary gave the General a
+mysterious but encouraging smile. “You, of course, know, General
+Falcon, that since the Tammany war, an act of Congress has been passed
+requiring all manufactured arms and ammunition exported from this
+country to pass through the War Department. Now, if I can do anything
+for you I will be glad to do so to oblige my old friend, Mr. Kelley.
+But it must be in absolute secrecy, as the President, as I have said,
+does not regard favorably the efforts of your revolutionary party in
+Colombia. I will have my orderly bring a list of the available arms now
+in the warehouse.”
+
+The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly with the letters A. D. T.
+on his cap stepped promptly into the room.
+
+“Bring me Schedule B of the small arms inventory,” said the Secretary.
+
+The orderly quickly returned with a printed paper. The Secretary
+studied it closely.
+
+“I find,” he said, “that in Warehouse 9, of Government stores, there is
+shipment of 2,000 stands of Winchester rifles that were ordered by the
+Sultan of Morocco, who forgot to send the cash with his order. Our rule
+is that legal-tender money must be paid down at the time of purchase.
+My dear Kelley, your friend, General Falcon, shall have this lot of
+arms, if he desires it, at the manufacturer’s price. And you will
+forgive me, I am sure, if I curtail our interview. I am expecting the
+Japanese Minister and Charles Murphy every moment!”
+
+As one result of this interview, the General was deeply grateful to his
+esteemed friend, Mr. Kelley. As another, the nimble Secretary of War
+was extremely busy during the next two days buying empty rifle cases
+and filling them with bricks, which were then stored in a warehouse
+rented for that purpose. As still another, when the General returned to
+the Hotel Español, Mrs. O’Brien went up to him, plucked a thread from
+his lapel, and said:
+
+“Say, señor, I don’t want to ‘butt in,’ but what does that
+monkey-faced, cat-eyed, rubber-necked tin horn tough want with you?”
+
+“Sangre de mi vida!” exclaimed the General. “Impossible it is that you
+speak of my good friend, Señor Kelley.”
+
+“Come into the summer garden,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “I want to have a
+talk with you.”
+
+Let us suppose that an hour has elapsed.
+
+“And you say,” said the General, “that for the sum of $18,000 can be
+purchased the furnishment of the house and the lease of one year with
+this garden so lovely—so resembling unto the patios of my cara
+Colombia?”
+
+“And dirt cheap at that,” sighed the lady.
+
+“Ah, Dios!” breathed General Falcon. “What to me is war and politics?
+This spot is one paradise. My country it have other brave heroes to
+continue the fighting. What to me should be glory and the shooting of
+mans? Ah! no. It is here I have found one angel. Let us buy the Hotel
+Español and you shall be mine, and the money shall not be waste on
+guns.”
+
+Mrs. O’Brien rested her blond pompadour against the shoulder of the
+Colombian patriot.
+
+“Oh, señor,” she sighed, happily, “ain’t you terrible!”
+
+Two days later was the time appointed for the delivery of the arms to
+the General. The boxes of supposed rifles were stacked in the rented
+warehouse, and the Secretary of War sat upon them, waiting for his
+friend Kelley to fetch the victim.
+
+Mr. Kelley hurried, at the hour, to the Hotel Español. He found the
+General behind the desk adding up accounts.
+
+“I have decide,” said the General, “to buy not guns. I have to-day buy
+the insides of this hotel, and there shall be marrying of the General
+Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon with la Madame O’Brien.”
+
+Mr. Kelley almost strangled.
+
+“Say, you old bald-headed bottle of shoe polish,” he spluttered,
+“you’re a swindler—that’s what you are! You’ve bought a boarding house
+with money belonging to your infernal country, wherever it is.”
+
+“Ah,” said the General, footing up a column, “that is what you call
+politics. War and revolution they are not nice. Yes. It is not best
+that one shall always follow Minerva. No. It is of quite desirable to
+keep hotels and be with that Juno—that ox-eyed Juno. Ah! what hair of
+the gold it is that she have!”
+
+Mr. Kelley choked again.
+
+“Ah, Senor Kelley!” said the General, feelingly and finally, “is it
+that you have never eaten of the corned beef hash that Madame O’Brien
+she make?”
+
+
+
+
+III
+BABES IN THE JUNGLE
+
+
+Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West,
+says to me once in Little Rock: “If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and
+get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York. In
+the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in
+chunks of roe—you can’t count ’em!”
+
+Two years afterward I found that I couldn’t remember the names of the
+Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear; so I
+knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver’s advice.
+
+I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up Broadway. And
+I run against Silver himself, all encompassed up in a spacious kind of
+haberdashery, leaning against a hotel and rubbing the half-moons on his
+nails with a silk handkerchief.
+
+“Paresis or superannuated?” I asks him.
+
+“Hello, Billy,” says Silver; “I’m glad to see you. Yes, it seemed to me
+that the West was accumulating a little too much wiseness. I’ve been
+saving New York for dessert. I know it’s a low-down trick to take
+things from these people. They only know this and that and pass to and
+fro and think ever and anon. I’d hate for my mother to know I was
+skinning these weak-minded ones. She raised me better.”
+
+“Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms of the old doctor that
+does skin grafting?” I asks.
+
+“Well, no,” says Silver; “you needn’t back Epidermis to win to-day.
+I’ve only been here a month. But I’m ready to begin; and the members of
+Willie Manhattan’s Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to
+contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well
+send their photos to the _Evening Daily_.
+
+“I’ve been studying the town,” says Silver, “and reading the papers
+every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an
+O’Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and kick when
+you are the least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up in my
+room and I’ll tell you. We’ll work the town together, Billy, for the
+sake of old times.”
+
+Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant objects
+lying about.
+
+“There’s more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,”
+says Silver, “than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, S. C.
+They’ll bite at anything. The brains of most of ’em commute. The wiser
+they are in intelligence the less perception of cognizance they have.
+Why, didn’t a man the other day sell J. P. Morgan an oil portrait of
+Rockefeller, Jr., for Andrea del Sarto’s celebrated painting of the
+young Saint John!
+
+“You see that bundle of printed stuff in the corner, Billy? That’s gold
+mining stock. I started out one day to sell that, but I quit it in two
+hours. Why? Got arrested for blocking the street. People fought to buy
+it. I sold the policeman a block of it on the way to the station-house,
+and then I took it off the market. I don’t want people to give me their
+money. I want some little consideration connected with the transaction
+to keep my pride from being hurt. I want ’em to guess the missing
+letter in Chic—go, or draw to a pair of nines before they pay me a cent
+of money.
+
+“Now there’s another little scheme that worked so easy I had to quit
+it. You see that bottle of blue ink on the table? I tattooed an anchor
+on the back of my hand and went to a bank and told ’em I was Admiral
+Dewey’s nephew. They offered to cash my draft on him for a thousand,
+but I didn’t know my uncle’s first name. It shows, though, what an easy
+town it is. As for burglars, they won’t go in a house now unless
+there’s a hot supper ready and a few college students to wait on ’em.
+They’re slugging citizens all over the upper part of the city and I
+guess, taking the town from end to end, it’s a plain case of assault
+and Battery.”
+
+“Monty,” says I, when Silver had slacked, up, “you may have Manhattan
+correctly discriminated in your perorative, but I doubt it. I’ve only
+been in town two hours, but it don’t dawn upon me that it’s ours with a
+cherry in it. There ain’t enough rus in urbe about it to suit me. I’d
+be a good deal much better satisfied if the citizens had a straw or
+more in their hair, and run more to velveteen vests and buckeye watch
+charms. They don’t look easy to me.”
+
+“You’ve got it, Billy,” says Silver. “All emigrants have it. New York’s
+bigger than Little Rock or Europe, and it frightens a foreigner. You’ll
+be all right. I tell you I feel like slapping the people here because
+they don’t send me all their money in laundry baskets, with germicide
+sprinkled over it. I hate to go down on the street to get it. Who wears
+the diamonds in this town? Why, Winnie, the Wiretapper’s wife, and
+Bella, the Buncosteerer’s bride. New Yorkers can be worked easier than
+a blue rose on a tidy. The only thing that bothers me is I know I’ll
+break the cigars in my vest pocket when I get my clothes all full of
+twenties.”
+
+“I hope you are right, Monty,” says I; “but I wish all the same I had
+been satisfied with a small business in Little Rock. The crop of
+farmers is never so short out there but what you can get a few of ’em
+to sign a petition for a new post office that you can discount for $200
+at the county bank. The people here appear to possess instincts of
+self-preservation and illiberality. I fear me that we are not cultured
+enough to tackle this game.”
+
+“Don’t worry,” says Silver. “I’ve got this Jayville-near-Tarrytown
+correctly estimated as sure as North River is the Hudson and East River
+ain’t a river. Why, there are people living in four blocks of Broadway
+who never saw any kind of a building except a skyscraper in their
+lives! A good, live hustling Western man ought to get conspicuous
+enough here inside of three months to incur either Jerome’s clemency or
+Lawson’s displeasure.”
+
+“Hyperbole aside,” says I, “do you know of any immediate system of
+buncoing the community out of a dollar or two except by applying to the
+Salvation Army or having a fit on Miss Helen Gould’s doorsteps?”
+
+“Dozens of ’em,” says Silver. “How much capital have you got, Billy?”
+
+“A thousand,” I told him.
+
+“I’ve got $1,200,” says he. “We’ll pool and do a big piece of business.
+There’s so many ways we can make a million that I don’t know how to
+begin.”
+
+The next morning Silver meets me at the hotel and he is all sonorous
+and stirred with a kind of silent joy.
+
+“We’re to meet J. P. Morgan this afternoon,” says he. “A man I know in
+the hotel wants to introduce us. He’s a friend of his. He says he likes
+to meet people from the West.”
+
+“That sounds nice and plausible,” says I. “I’d like to know Mr.
+Morgan.”
+
+“It won’t hurt us a bit,” says Silver, “to get acquainted with a few
+finance kings. I kind of like the social way New York has with
+strangers.”
+
+The man Silver knew was named Klein. At three o’clock Klein brought his
+Wall Street friend to see us in Silver’s room. “Mr. Morgan” looked some
+like his pictures, and he had a Turkish towel wrapped around his left
+foot, and he walked with a cane.
+
+“Mr. Silver and Mr. Pescud,” says Klein. “It sounds superfluous,” says
+he, “to mention the name of the greatest financial—”
+
+“Cut it out, Klein,” says Mr. Morgan. “I’m glad to know you gents; I
+take great interest in the West. Klein tells me you’re from Little
+Rock. I think I’ve a railroad or two out there somewhere. If either of
+you guys would like to deal a hand or two of stud poker I—”
+
+“Now, Pierpont,” cuts in Klein, “you forget!”
+
+“Excuse me, gents!” says Morgan; “since I’ve had the gout so bad I
+sometimes play a social game of cards at my house. Neither of you never
+knew One-eyed Peters, did you, while you was around Little Rock? He
+lived in Seattle, New Mexico.”
+
+Before we could answer, Mr. Morgan hammers on the floor with his cane
+and begins to walk up and down, swearing in a loud tone of voice.
+
+“They have been pounding your stocks to-day on the Street, Pierpont?”
+asks Klein, smiling.
+
+“Stocks! No!” roars Mr. Morgan. “It’s that picture I sent an agent to
+Europe to buy. I just thought about it. He cabled me to-day that it
+ain’t to be found in all Italy. I’d pay $50,000 to-morrow for that
+picture—yes, $75,000. I give the agent a la carte in purchasing it. I
+cannot understand why the art galleries will allow a De Vinchy to—”
+
+“Why, Mr. Morgan,” says Klein; “I thought you owned all of the De
+Vinchy paintings.”
+
+“What is the picture like, Mr. Morgan?” asks Silver. “It must be as big
+as the side of the Flatiron Building.”
+
+“I’m afraid your art education is on the bum, Mr. Silver,” says Morgan.
+“The picture is 27 inches by 42; and it is called ‘Love’s Idle Hour.’
+It represents a number of cloak models doing the two-step on the bank
+of a purple river. The cablegram said it might have been brought to
+this country. My collection will never be complete without that
+picture. Well, so long, gents; us financiers must keep early hours.”
+
+Mr. Morgan and Klein went away together in a cab. Me and Silver talked
+about how simple and unsuspecting great people was; and Silver said
+what a shame it would be to try to rob a man like Mr. Morgan; and I
+said I thought it would be rather imprudent, myself. Klein proposes a
+stroll after dinner; and me and him and Silver walks down toward
+Seventh Avenue to see the sights. Klein sees a pair of cuff links that
+instigate his admiration in a pawnshop window, and we all go in while
+he buys ’em.
+
+After we got back to the hotel and Klein had gone, Silver jumps at me
+and waves his hands.
+
+“Did you see it?” says he. “Did you see it, Billy?”
+
+“What?” I asks.
+
+“Why, that picture that Morgan wants. It’s hanging in that pawnshop,
+behind the desk. I didn’t say anything because Klein was there. It’s
+the article sure as you live. The girls are as natural as paint can
+make them, all measuring 36 and 25 and 42 skirts, if they had any
+skirts, and they’re doing a buck-and-wing on the bank of a river with
+the blues. What did Mr. Morgan say he’d give for it? Oh, don’t make me
+tell you. They can’t know what it is in that pawnshop.”
+
+When the pawnshop opened the next morning me and Silver was standing
+there as anxious as if we wanted to soak our Sunday suit to buy a
+drink. We sauntered inside, and began to look at watch-chains.
+
+“That’s a violent specimen of a chromo you’ve got up there,” remarked
+Silver, casual, to the pawnbroker. “But I kind of enthuse over the girl
+with the shoulder-blades and red bunting. Would an offer of $2.25 for
+it cause you to knock over any fragile articles of your stock in
+hurrying it off the nail?”
+
+The pawnbroker smiles and goes on showing us plate watch-chains.
+
+“That picture,” says he, “was pledged a year ago by an Italian
+gentleman. I loaned him $500 on it. It is called ‘Love’s Idle Hour,’
+and it is by Leonardo de Vinchy. Two days ago the legal time expired,
+and it became an unredeemed pledge. Here is a style of chain that is
+worn a great deal now.”
+
+At the end of half an hour me and Silver paid the pawnbroker $2,000 and
+walked out with the picture. Silver got into a cab with it and started
+for Morgan’s office. I goes to the hotel and waits for him. In two
+hours Silver comes back.
+
+“Did you see Mr. Morgan?” I asks. “How much did he pay you for it?”
+
+Silver sits down and fools with a tassel on the table cover.
+
+“I never exactly saw Mr. Morgan,” he says, “because Mr. Morgan’s been
+in Europe for a month. But what’s worrying me, Billy, is this: The
+department stores have all got that same picture on sale, framed, for
+$3.48. And they charge $3.50 for the frame alone—that’s what I can’t
+understand.”
+
+
+
+
+IV
+THE DAY RESURGENT
+
+
+I can see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown when it comes
+to drawing his Easter picture; for his legitimate pictorial conceptions
+of figures pertinent to the festival are but four in number.
+
+First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have
+free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper
+number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice St. Vavasour, the
+well-known model, will pose for it in the “Lethergogallagher,” or
+whatever it was that Trilby called it.
+
+Second—the melancholy lady with upturned eyes in a framework of lilies.
+This is magazine-covery, but reliable.
+
+Third—Miss Manhattan in the Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday parade.
+
+Fourth—Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in her old straw hat, happy
+and self-conscious, in the Grand Street turnout.
+
+Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the Easter eggs, since the
+higher criticism has hard-boiled them.
+
+The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that Easter, of
+all our festival days, is the most vague and shifting in our
+conception. It belongs to all religions, although the pagans invented
+it. Going back still further to the first spring, we can see Eve
+choosing with pride a new green leaf from the tree _ficus carica_.
+
+Now, the object of this critical and learned preamble is to set forth
+the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season, a festival, a
+holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out if you follow in
+the footsteps of Danny McCree.
+
+Easter Sunday dawned as it should, bright and early, in its place on
+the calendar between Saturday and Monday. At 5.24 the sun rose, and at
+10.30 Danny followed its example. He went into the kitchen and washed
+his face at the sink. His mother was frying bacon. She looked at his
+hard, smooth, knowing countenance as he juggled with the round cake of
+soap, and thought of his father when she first saw him stopping a hot
+grounder between second and third twenty-two years before on a vacant
+lot in Harlem, where the La Paloma apartment house now stands. In the
+front room of the flat Danny’s father sat by an open window smoking his
+pipe, with his dishevelled gray hair tossed about by the breeze. He
+still clung to his pipe, although his sight had been taken from him two
+years before by a precocious blast of giant powder that went off
+without permission. Very few blind men care for smoking, for the reason
+that they cannot see the smoke. Now, could you enjoy having the news
+read to you from an evening newspaper unless you could see the colors
+of the headlines?
+
+“’Tis Easter Day,” said Mrs. McCree.
+
+“Scramble mine,” said Danny.
+
+After breakfast he dressed himself in the Sabbath morning costume of
+the Canal Street importing house dray chauffeur—frock coat, striped
+trousers, patent leathers, gilded trace chain across front of vest, and
+wing collar, rolled-brim derby and butterfly bow from Schonstein’s
+(between Fourteenth Street and Tony’s fruit stand) Saturday night sale.
+
+“You’ll be goin’ out this day, of course, Danny,” said old man McCree,
+a little wistfully. “’Tis a kind of holiday, they say. Well, it’s fine
+spring weather. I can feel it in the air.”
+
+“Why should I not be going out?” demanded Danny in his grumpiest chest
+tones. “Should I stay in? Am I as good as a horse? One day of rest my
+team has a week. Who earns the money for the rent and the breakfast
+you’ve just eat, I’d like to know? Answer me that!”
+
+“All right, lad,” said the old man. “I’m not complainin’. While me two
+eyes was good there was nothin’ better to my mind than a Sunday out.
+There’s a smell of turf and burnin’ brush comin’ in the windy. I have
+me tobaccy. A good fine day and rist to ye, lad. Times I wish your
+mother had larned to read, so I might hear the rest about the
+hippopotamus—but let that be.”
+
+“Now, what is this foolishness he talks of hippopotamuses?” asked Danny
+of his mother, as he passed through the kitchen. “Have you been taking
+him to the Zoo? And for what?”
+
+“I have not,” said Mrs. McCree. “He sets by the windy all day. ’Tis
+little recreation a blind man among the poor gets at all. I’m thinkin’
+they wander in their minds at times. One day he talks of grease without
+stoppin’ for the most of an hour. I looks to see if there’s lard
+burnin’ in the fryin’ pan. There is not. He says I do not understand.
+’Tis weary days, Sundays, and holidays and all, for a blind man, Danny.
+There was no better nor stronger than him when he had his two eyes.
+’Tis a fine day, son. Injoy yeself ag’inst the morning. There will be
+cold supper at six.”
+
+“Have you heard any talk of a hippopotamus?” asked Danny of Mike, the
+janitor, as he went out the door downstairs.
+
+“I have not,” said Mike, pulling his shirtsleeves higher. “But ’tis the
+only subject in the animal, natural and illegal lists of outrages that
+I’ve not been complained to about these two days. See the landlord. Or
+else move out if ye like. Have ye hippopotamuses in the lease? No,
+then?”
+
+“It was the old man who spoke of it,” said Danny. “Likely there’s
+nothing in it.”
+
+Danny walked up the street to the Avenue and then struck northward into
+the heart of the district where Easter—modern Easter, in new, bright
+raiment—leads the pascal march. Out of towering brown churches came the
+blithe music of anthems from the choirs. The broad sidewalks were
+moving parterres of living flowers—so it seemed when your eye looked
+upon the Easter girl.
+
+Gentlemen, frock-coated, silk-hatted, gardeniaed, sustained the
+background of the tradition. Children carried lilies in their hands.
+The windows of the brownstone mansions were packed with the most
+opulent creations of Flora, the sister of the Lady of the Lilies.
+
+Around a corner, white-gloved, pink-gilled and tightly buttoned, walked
+Corrigan, the cop, shield to the curb. Danny knew him.
+
+“Why, Corrigan,” he asked, “is Easter? I know it comes the first time
+you’re full after the moon rises on the seventeenth of March—but why?
+Is it a proper and religious ceremony, or does the Governor appoint it
+out of politics?”
+
+“’Tis an annual celebration,” said Corrigan, with the judicial air of
+the Third Deputy Police Commissioner, “peculiar to New York. It extends
+up to Harlem. Sometimes they has the reserves out at One Hundred and
+Twenty-fifth Street. In my opinion ’tis not political.”
+
+“Thanks,” said Danny. “And say—did you ever hear a man complain of
+hippopotamuses? When not specially in drink, I mean.”
+
+“Nothing larger than sea turtles,” said Corrigan, reflecting, “and
+there was wood alcohol in that.”
+
+Danny wandered. The double, heavy incumbency of enjoying simultaneously
+a Sunday and a festival day was his.
+
+The sorrows of the hand-toiler fit him easily. They are worn so often
+that they hang with the picturesque lines of the best tailor-made
+garments. That is why well-fed artists of pencil and pen find in the
+griefs of the common people their most striking models. But when the
+Philistine would disport himself, the grimness of Melpomene, herself,
+attends upon his capers. Therefore, Danny set his jaw hard at Easter,
+and took his pleasure sadly.
+
+The family entrance of Dugan’s café was feasible; so Danny yielded to
+the vernal season as far as a glass of bock. Seated in a dark,
+linoleumed, humid back room, his heart and mind still groped after the
+mysterious meaning of the springtime jubilee.
+
+“Say, Tim,” he said to the waiter, “why do they have Easter?”
+
+“Skiddoo!” said Tim, closing a sophisticated eye. “Is that a new one?
+All right. Tony Pastor’s for you last night, I guess. I give it up.
+What’s the answer—two apples or a yard and a half?”
+
+From Dugan’s Danny turned back eastward. The April sun seemed to stir
+in him a vague feeling that he could not construe. He made a wrong
+diagnosis and decided that it was Katy Conlon.
+
+A block from her house on Avenue A he met her going to church. They
+pumped hands on the corner.
+
+“Gee! but you look dumpish and dressed up,” said Katy. “What’s wrong?
+Come away with me to church and be cheerful.”
+
+“What’s doing at church?” asked Danny.
+
+“Why, it’s Easter Sunday. Silly! I waited till after eleven expectin’
+you might come around to go.”
+
+“What does this Easter stand for, Katy,” asked Danny gloomily. “Nobody
+seems to know.”
+
+“Nobody as blind as you,” said Katy with spirit. “You haven’t even
+looked at my new hat. And skirt. Why, it’s when all the girls put on
+new spring clothes. Silly! Are you coming to church with me?”
+
+“I will,” said Danny. “If this Easter is pulled off there, they ought
+to be able to give some excuse for it. Not that the hat ain’t a beauty.
+The green roses are great.”
+
+At church the preacher did some expounding with no pounding. He spoke
+rapidly, for he was in a hurry to get home to his early Sabbath dinner;
+but he knew his business. There was one word that controlled his
+theme—resurrection. Not a new creation; but a new life arising out of
+the old. The congregation had heard it often before. But there was a
+wonderful hat, a combination of sweet peas and lavender, in the sixth
+pew from the pulpit. It attracted much attention.
+
+After church Danny lingered on a corner while Katy waited, with pique
+in her sky-blue eyes.
+
+“Are you coming along to the house?” she asked. “But don’t mind me.
+I’ll get there all right. You seem to be studyin’ a lot about
+something. All right. Will I see you at any time specially, Mr.
+McCree?”
+
+“I’ll be around Wednesday night as usual,” said Danny, turning and
+crossing the street.
+
+Katy walked away with the green roses dangling indignantly. Danny
+stopped two blocks away. He stood still with his hands in his pockets,
+at the curb on the corner. His face was that of a graven image. Deep in
+his soul something stirred so small, so fine, so keen and leavening
+that his hard fibres did not recognize it. It was something more tender
+than the April day, more subtle than the call of the senses, purer and
+deeper-rooted than the love of woman—for had he not turned away from
+green roses and eyes that had kept him chained for a year? And Danny
+did not know what it was. The preacher, who was in a hurry to go to his
+dinner, had told him, but Danny had had no libretto with which to
+follow the drowsy intonation. But the preacher spoke the truth.
+
+Suddenly Danny slapped his leg and gave forth a hoarse yell of delight.
+
+“Hippopotamus!” he shouted to an elevated road pillar. “Well, how is
+that for a bum guess? Why, blast my skylights! I know what he was
+driving at now.
+
+“Hippopotamus! Wouldn’t that send you to the Bronx! It’s been a year
+since he heard it; and he didn’t miss it so very far. We quit at 469 B.
+C., and this comes next. Well, a wooden man wouldn’t have guessed what
+he was trying to get out of him.”
+
+Danny caught a crosstown car and went up to the rear flat that his
+labor supported.
+
+Old man McCree was still sitting by the window. His extinct pipe lay on
+the sill.
+
+“Will that be you, lad?” he asked.
+
+Danny flared into the rage of a strong man who is surprised at the
+outset of committing a good deed.
+
+“Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten in this house?” he
+snapped, viciously. “Have I no right to come in?”
+
+“Ye’re a faithful lad,” said old man McCree, with a sigh. “Is it
+evening yet?”
+
+Danny reached up on a shelf and took down a thick book labeled in gilt
+letters, “The History of Greece.” Dust was on it half an inch thick. He
+laid it on the table and found a place in it marked by a strip of
+paper. And then he gave a short roar at the top of his voice, and said:
+
+“Was it the hippopotamus you wanted to be read to about then?”
+
+“Did I hear ye open the book?” said old man McCree. “Many and weary be
+the months since my lad has read it to me. I dinno; but I took a great
+likings to them Greeks. Ye left off at a place. ’Tis a fine day
+outside, lad. Be out and take rest from your work. I have gotten used
+to me chair by the windy and me pipe.”
+
+“Pel-Peloponnesus was the place where we left off, and not
+hippopotamus,” said Danny. “The war began there. It kept something
+doing for thirty years. The headlines says that a guy named Philip of
+Macedon, in 338 B. C., got to be boss of Greece by getting the decision
+at the battle of Cher-Cheronoea. I’ll read it.”
+
+With his hand to his ear, rapt in the Peloponnesian War, old man McCree
+sat for an hour, listening.
+
+Then he got up and felt his way to the door of the kitchen. Mrs. McCree
+was slicing cold meat. She looked up. Tears were running from old man
+McCree’s eyes.
+
+“Do you hear our lad readin’ to me?” he said. “There is none finer in
+the land. My two eyes have come back to me again.”
+
+After supper he said to Danny: “’Tis a happy day, this Easter. And now
+ye will be off to see Katy in the evening. Well enough.”
+
+“Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten in this house?” said
+Danny, angrily. “Have I no right to stay in it? After supper there is
+yet to come the reading of the battle of Corinth, 146 B. C., when the
+kingdom, as they say, became an in-integral portion of the Roman
+Empire. Am I nothing in this house?”
+
+
+
+
+V
+THE FIFTH WHEEL
+
+
+The ranks of the Bed Line moved closer together; for it was cold. They
+were alluvial deposit of the stream of life lodged in the delta of
+Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The Bed Liners stamped their freezing feet,
+looked at the empty benches in Madison Square whence Jack Frost had
+evicted them, and muttered to one another in a confusion of tongues.
+The Flatiron Building, with its impious, cloud-piercing architecture
+looming mistily above them on the opposite delta, might well have stood
+for the tower of Babel, whence these polyglot idlers had been called by
+the winged walking delegate of the Lord.
+
+Standing on a pine box a head higher than his flock of goats, the
+Preacher exhorted whatever transient and shifting audience the north
+wind doled out to him. It was a slave market. Fifteen cents bought you
+a man. You deeded him to Morpheus; and the recording angel gave you
+credit.
+
+The preacher was incredibly earnest and unwearied. He had looked over
+the list of things one may do for one’s fellow man, and had assumed for
+himself the task of putting to bed all who might apply at his soap box
+on the nights of Wednesday and Sunday. That left but five nights for
+other philanthropists to handle; and had they done their part as well,
+this wicked city might have become a vast Arcadian dormitory where all
+might snooze and snore the happy hours away, letting problem plays and
+the rent man and business go to the deuce.
+
+The hour of eight was but a little while past; sightseers in a small,
+dark mass of pay ore were gathered in the shadow of General Worth’s
+monument. Now and then, shyly, ostentatiously, carelessly, or with
+conscientious exactness one would step forward and bestow upon the
+Preacher small bills or silver. Then a lieutenant of Scandinavian
+coloring and enthusiasm would march away to a lodging house with a
+squad of the redeemed. All the while the Preacher exhorted the crowd in
+terms beautifully devoid of eloquence—splendid with the deadly,
+accusative monotony of truth. Before the picture of the Bed Liners
+fades you must hear one phrase of the Preacher’s—the one that formed
+his theme that night. It is worthy of being stenciled on all the white
+ribbons in the world.
+
+_“No man ever learned to be a drunkard on five-cent whisky.”_
+
+Think of it, tippler. It covers the ground from the sprouting rye to
+the Potter’s Field.
+
+A clean-profiled, erect young man in the rear rank of the bedless
+emulated the terrapin, drawing his head far down into the shell of his
+coat collar. It was a well-cut tweed coat; and the trousers still
+showed signs of having flattened themselves beneath the compelling
+goose. But, conscientiously, I must warn the milliner’s apprentice who
+reads this, expecting a Reginald Montressor in straits, to peruse no
+further. The young man was no other than Thomas McQuade, ex-coachman,
+discharged for drunkenness one month before, and now reduced to the
+grimy ranks of the one-night bed seekers.
+
+If you live in smaller New York you must know the Van Smuythe family
+carriage, drawn by the two 1,500-pound, 100 to 1-shot bays. The
+carriage is shaped like a bath-tub. In each end of it reclines an old
+lady Van Smuythe holding a black sunshade the size of a New Year’s Eve
+feather tickler. Before his downfall Thomas McQuade drove the Van
+Smuythe bays and was himself driven by Annie, the Van Smuythe lady’s
+maid. But it is one of the saddest things about romance that a tight
+shoe or an empty commissary or an aching tooth will make a temporary
+heretic of any Cupid-worshiper. And Thomas’s physical troubles were not
+few. Therefore, his soul was less vexed with thoughts of his lost
+lady’s maid than it was by the fancied presence of certain non-existent
+things that his racked nerves almost convinced him were flying,
+dancing, crawling, and wriggling on the asphalt and in the air above
+and around the dismal campus of the Bed Line army. Nearly four weeks of
+straight whisky and a diet limited to crackers, bologna, and pickles
+often guarantees a psycho-zoological sequel. Thus desperate, freezing,
+angry, beset by phantoms as he was, he felt the need of human sympathy
+and intercourse.
+
+The Bed Liner standing at his right was a young man of about his own
+age, shabby but neat.
+
+“What’s the diagnosis of your case, Freddy?” asked Thomas, with the
+freemasonic familiarity of the damned—“Booze? That’s mine. You don’t
+look like a panhandler. Neither am I. A month ago I was pushing the
+lines over the backs of the finest team of Percheron buffaloes that
+ever made their mile down Fifth Avenue in 2.85. And look at me now!
+Say; how do you come to be at this bed bargain-counter rummage sale.”
+
+The other young man seemed to welcome the advances of the airy
+ex-coachman.
+
+“No,” said he, “mine isn’t exactly a case of drink. Unless we allow
+that Cupid is a bartender. I married unwisely, according to the opinion
+of my unforgiving relatives. I’ve been out of work for a year because I
+don’t know how to work; and I’ve been sick in Bellevue and other
+hospitals for months. My wife and kid had to go back to her mother. I
+was turned out of the hospital yesterday. And I haven’t a cent. That’s
+my tale of woe.”
+
+“Tough luck,” said Thomas. “A man alone can pull through all right. But
+I hate to see the women and kids get the worst of it.”
+
+Just then there hummed up Fifth Avenue a motor car so splendid, so red,
+so smoothly running, so craftily demolishing the speed regulations that
+it drew the attention even of the listless Bed Liners. Suspended and
+pinioned on its left side was an extra tire.
+
+When opposite the unfortunate company the fastenings of this tire
+became loosed. It fell to the asphalt, bounded and rolled rapidly in
+the wake of the flying car.
+
+Thomas McQuade, scenting an opportunity, darted from his place among
+the Preacher’s goats. In thirty seconds he had caught the rolling tire,
+swung it over his shoulder, and was trotting smartly after the car. On
+both sides of the avenue people were shouting, whistling, and waving
+canes at the red car, pointing to the enterprising Thomas coming up
+with the lost tire.
+
+One dollar, Thomas had estimated, was the smallest guerdon that so
+grand an automobilist could offer for the service he had rendered, and
+save his pride.
+
+Two blocks away the car had stopped. There was a little, brown, muffled
+chauffeur driving, and an imposing gentleman wearing a magnificent
+sealskin coat and a silk hat on a rear seat.
+
+Thomas proffered the captured tire with his best ex-coachman manner and
+a look in the brighter of his reddened eyes that was meant to be
+suggestive to the extent of a silver coin or two and receptive up to
+higher denominations.
+
+But the look was not so construed. The sealskinned gentleman received
+the tire, placed it inside the car, gazed intently at the ex-coachman,
+and muttered to himself inscrutable words.
+
+“Strange—strange!” said he. “Once or twice even I, myself, have fancied
+that the Chaldean Chiroscope has availed. Could it be possible?”
+
+Then he addressed less mysterious words to the waiting and hopeful
+Thomas.
+
+“Sir, I thank you for your kind rescue of my tire. And I would ask you,
+if I may, a question. Do you know the family of Van Smuythes living in
+Washington Square North?”
+
+“Oughtn’t I to?” replied Thomas. “I lived there. Wish I did yet.”
+
+The sealskinned gentleman opened a door of the car.
+
+“Step in please,” he said. “You have been expected.”
+
+Thomas McQuade obeyed with surprise but without hesitation. A seat in a
+motor car seemed better than standing room in the Bed Line. But after
+the lap-robe had been tucked about him and the auto had sped on its
+course, the peculiarity of the invitation lingered in his mind.
+
+“Maybe the guy hasn’t got any change,” was his diagnosis. “Lots of
+these swell rounders don’t lug about any ready money. Guess he’ll dump
+me out when he gets to some joint where he can get cash on his mug.
+Anyhow, it’s a cinch that I’ve got that open-air bed convention beat to
+a finish.”
+
+Submerged in his greatcoat, the mysterious automobilist seemed,
+himself, to marvel at the surprises of life. “Wonderful! amazing!
+strange!” he repeated to himself constantly.
+
+When the car had well entered the crosstown Seventies it swung eastward
+a half block and stopped before a row of high-stooped, brownstone-front
+houses.
+
+“Be kind enough to enter my house with me,” said the sealskinned
+gentleman when they had alighted. “He’s going to dig up, sure,”
+reflected Thomas, following him inside.
+
+There was a dim light in the hall. His host conducted him through a
+door to the left, closing it after him and leaving them in absolute
+darkness. Suddenly a luminous globe, strangely decorated, shone faintly
+in the centre of an immense room that seemed to Thomas more splendidly
+appointed than any he had ever seen on the stage or read of in fairy
+tales.
+
+The walls were hidden by gorgeous red hangings embroidered with
+fantastic gold figures. At the rear end of the room were draped
+portières of dull gold spangled with silver crescents and stars. The
+furniture was of the costliest and rarest styles. The ex-coachman’s
+feet sank into rugs as fleecy and deep as snowdrifts. There were three
+or four oddly shaped stands or tables covered with black velvet
+drapery.
+
+Thomas McQuade took in the splendors of this palatial apartment with
+one eye. With the other he looked for his imposing conductor—to find
+that he had disappeared.
+
+“B’gee!” muttered Thomas, “this listens like a spook shop. Shouldn’t
+wonder if it ain’t one of these Moravian Nights’ adventures that you
+read about. Wonder what became of the furry guy.”
+
+Suddenly a stuffed owl that stood on an ebony perch near the
+illuminated globe slowly raised his wings and emitted from his eyes a
+brilliant electric glow.
+
+With a fright-born imprecation, Thomas seized a bronze statuette of
+Hebe from a cabinet near by and hurled it with all his might at the
+terrifying and impossible fowl. The owl and his perch went over with a
+crash. With the sound there was a click, and the room was flooded with
+light from a dozen frosted globes along the walls and ceiling. The gold
+portières parted and closed, and the mysterious automobilist entered
+the room. He was tall and wore evening dress of perfect cut and
+accurate taste. A Vandyke beard of glossy, golden brown, rather long
+and wavy hair, smoothly parted, and large, magnetic, orientally occult
+eyes gave him a most impressive and striking appearance. If you can
+conceive a Russian Grand Duke in a Rajah’s throne-room advancing to
+greet a visiting Emperor, you will gather something of the majesty of
+his manner. But Thomas McQuade was too near his _d t’s_ to be mindful
+of his _p’s_ and _q’s_. When he viewed this silken, polished, and
+somewhat terrifying host he thought vaguely of dentists.
+
+“Say, doc,” said he resentfully, “that’s a hot bird you keep on tap. I
+hope I didn’t break anything. But I’ve nearly got the williwalloos, and
+when he threw them 32-candle-power lamps of his on me, I took a
+snap-shot at him with that little brass Flatiron Girl that stood on the
+sideboard.”
+
+“That is merely a mechanical toy,” said the gentleman with a wave of
+his hand. “May I ask you to be seated while I explain why I brought you
+to my house. Perhaps you would not understand nor be in sympathy with
+the psychological prompting that caused me to do so. So I will come to
+the point at once by venturing to refer to your admission that you know
+the Van Smuythe family, of Washington Square North.”
+
+“Any silver missing?” asked Thomas tartly. “Any joolry displaced? Of
+course I know ’em. Any of the old ladies’ sunshades disappeared? Well,
+I know ’em. And then what?”
+
+The Grand Duke rubbed his white hands together softly.
+
+“Wonderful!” he murmured. “Wonderful! Shall I come to believe in the
+Chaldean Chiroscope myself? Let me assure you,” he continued, “that
+there is nothing for you to fear. Instead, I think I can promise you
+that very good fortune awaits you. We will see.”
+
+“Do they want me back?” asked Thomas, with something of his old
+professional pride in his voice. “I’ll promise to cut out the booze and
+do the right thing if they’ll try me again. But how did you get wise,
+doc? B’gee, it’s the swellest employment agency I was ever in, with its
+flashlight owls and so forth.”
+
+With an indulgent smile the gracious host begged to be excused for two
+minutes. He went out to the sidewalk and gave an order to the
+chauffeur, who still waited with the car. Returning to the mysterious
+apartment, he sat by his guest and began to entertain him so well by
+his witty and genial converse that the poor Bed Liner almost forgot the
+cold streets from which he had been so recently and so singularly
+rescued. A servant brought some tender cold fowl and tea biscuits and a
+glass of miraculous wine; and Thomas felt the glamour of Arabia envelop
+him. Thus half an hour sped quickly; and then the honk of the returned
+motor car at the door suddenly drew the Grand Duke to his feet, with
+another soft petition for a brief absence.
+
+Two women, well muffled against the cold, were admitted at the front
+door and suavely conducted by the master of the house down the hall
+through another door to the left and into a smaller room, which was
+screened and segregated from the larger front room by heavy, double
+portières. Here the furnishings were even more elegant and exquisitely
+tasteful than in the other. On a gold-inlaid rosewood table were
+scattered sheets of white paper and a queer, triangular instrument or
+toy, apparently of gold, standing on little wheels.
+
+The taller woman threw back her black veil and loosened her cloak. She
+was fifty, with a wrinkled and sad face. The other, young and plump,
+took a chair a little distance away and to the rear as a servant or an
+attendant might have done.
+
+“You sent for me, Professor Cherubusco,” said the elder woman, wearily.
+“I hope you have something more definite than usual to say. I’ve about
+lost the little faith I had in your art. I would not have responded to
+your call this evening if my sister had not insisted upon it.”
+
+“Madam,” said the professor, with his princeliest smile, “the true Art
+cannot fail. To find the true psychic and potential branch sometimes
+requires time. We have not succeeded, I admit, with the cards, the
+crystal, the stars, the magic formulæ of Zarazin, nor the Oracle of Po.
+But we have at last discovered the true psychic route. The Chaldean
+Chiroscope has been successful in our search.”
+
+The professor’s voice had a ring that seemed to proclaim his belief in
+his own words. The elderly lady looked at him with a little more
+interest.
+
+“Why, there was no sense in those words that it wrote with my hands on
+it,” she said. “What do you mean?”
+
+“The words were these,” said Professor Cherubusco, rising to his full
+magnificent height: “_‘By the fifth wheel of the chariot he shall
+come.’_”
+
+“I haven’t seen many chariots,” said the lady, “but I never saw one
+with five wheels.”
+
+“Progress,” said the professor—“progress in science and mechanics has
+accomplished it—though, to be exact, we may speak of it only as an
+extra tire. Progress in occult art has advanced in proportion. Madam, I
+repeat that the Chaldean Chiroscope has succeeded. I can not only
+answer the question that you have propounded, but I can produce before
+your eyes the proof thereof.”
+
+And now the lady was disturbed both in her disbelief and in her poise.
+
+“O professor!” she cried anxiously—“When?—where? Has he been found? Do
+not keep me in suspense.”
+
+“I beg you will excuse me for a very few minutes,” said Professor
+Cherubusco, “and I think I can demonstrate to you the efficacy of the
+true Art.”
+
+Thomas was contentedly munching the last crumbs of the bread and fowl
+when the enchanter appeared suddenly at his side.
+
+“Are you willing to return to your old home if you are assured of a
+welcome and restoration to favor?” he asked, with his courteous, royal
+smile.
+
+“Do I look bughouse?” answered Thomas. “Enough of the footback life for
+me. But will they have me again? The old lady is as fixed in her ways
+as a nut on a new axle.”
+
+“My dear young man,” said the other, “she has been searching for you
+everywhere.”
+
+“Great!” said Thomas. “I’m on the job. That team of dropsical
+dromedaries they call horses is a handicap for a first-class coachman
+like myself; but I’ll take the job back, sure, doc. They’re good people
+to be with.”
+
+And now a change came o’er the suave countenance of the Caliph of
+Bagdad. He looked keenly and suspiciously at the ex-coachman.
+
+“May I ask what your name is?” he said shortly.
+
+“You’ve been looking for me,” said Thomas, “and don’t know my name?
+You’re a funny kind of sleuth. You must be one of the Central Office
+gumshoers. I’m Thomas McQuade, of course; and I’ve been chauffeur of
+the Van Smuythe elephant team for a year. They fired me a month ago
+for—well, doc, you saw what I did to your old owl. I went broke on
+booze, and when I saw the tire drop off your whiz wagon I was standing
+in that squad of hoboes at the Worth monument waiting for a free bed.
+Now, what’s the prize for the best answer to all this?”
+
+To his intense surprise Thomas felt himself lifted by the collar and
+dragged, without a word of explanation, to the front door. This was
+opened, and he was kicked forcibly down the steps with one heavy,
+disillusionizing, humiliating impact of the stupendous Arabian’s shoe.
+
+As soon as the ex-coachman had recovered his feet and his wits he
+hastened as fast as he could eastward toward Broadway.
+
+“Crazy guy,” was his estimate of the mysterious automobilist. “Just
+wanted to have some fun kiddin’, I guess. He might have dug up a
+dollar, anyhow. Now I’ve got to hurry up and get back to that gang of
+bum bed hunters before they all get preached to sleep.”
+
+When Thomas reached the end of his two-mile walk he found the ranks of
+the homeless reduced to a squad of perhaps eight or ten. He took the
+proper place of a newcomer at the left end of the rear rank. In a file
+in front of him was the young man who had spoken to him of hospitals
+and something of a wife and child.
+
+“Sorry to see you back again,” said the young man, turning to speak to
+him. “I hoped you had struck something better than this.”
+
+“Me?” said Thomas. “Oh, I just took a run around the block to keep
+warm! I see the public ain’t lending to the Lord very fast to-night.”
+
+“In this kind of weather,” said the young man, “charity avails itself
+of the proverb, and both begins and ends at home.”
+
+And the Preacher and his vehement lieutenant struck up a last hymn of
+petition to Providence and man. Those of the Bed Liners whose windpipes
+still registered above 32 degrees hopelessly and tunelessly joined in.
+
+In the middle of the second verse Thomas saw a sturdy girl with
+wind-tossed drapery battling against the breeze and coming straight
+toward him from the opposite sidewalk. “Annie!” he yelled, and ran
+toward her.
+
+“You fool, you fool!” she cried, weeping and laughing, and hanging upon
+his neck, “why did you do it?”
+
+“The Stuff,” explained Thomas briefly. “You know. But subsequently nit.
+Not a drop.” He led her to the curb. “How did you happen to see me?”
+
+“I came to find you,” said Annie, holding tight to his sleeve. “Oh, you
+big fool! Professor Cherubusco told us that we might find you here.”
+
+“Professor Ch–––– Don’t know the guy. What saloon does he work in?”
+
+“He’s a clairvoyant, Thomas; the greatest in the world. He found you
+with the Chaldean telescope, he said.”
+
+“He’s a liar,” said Thomas. “I never had it. He never saw me have
+anybody’s telescope.”
+
+“And he said you came in a chariot with five wheels or something.”
+
+“Annie,” said Thoms solicitously, “you’re giving me the wheels now. If
+I had a chariot I’d have gone to bed in it long ago. And without any
+singing and preaching for a nightcap, either.”
+
+“Listen, you big fool. The Missis says she’ll take you back. I begged
+her to. But you must behave. And you can go up to the house to-night;
+and your old room over the stable is ready.”
+
+“Great!” said Thomas earnestly. “You are It, Annie. But when did these
+stunts happen?”
+
+“To-night at Professor Cherubusco’s. He sent his automobile for the
+Missis, and she took me along. I’ve been there with her before.”
+
+“What’s the professor’s line?”
+
+“He’s a clearvoyant and a witch. The Missis consults him. He knows
+everything. But he hasn’t done the Missis any good yet, though she’s
+paid him hundreds of dollars. But he told us that the stars told him we
+could find you here.”
+
+“What’s the old lady want this cherry-buster to do?”
+
+“That’s a family secret,” said Annie. “And now you’ve asked enough
+questions. Come on home, you big fool.”
+
+They had moved but a little way up the street when Thomas stopped.
+
+“Got any dough with you, Annie?” he asked.
+
+Annie looked at him sharply.
+
+“Oh, I know what that look means,” said Thomas. “You’re wrong. Not
+another drop. But there’s a guy that was standing next to me in the bed
+line over there that’s in bad shape. He’s the right kind, and he’s got
+wives or kids or something, and he’s on the sick list. No booze. If you
+could dig up half a dollar for him so he could get a decent bed I’d
+like it.”
+
+Annie’s fingers began to wiggle in her purse.
+
+“Sure, I’ve got money,” said she. “Lots of it. Twelve dollars.” And
+then she added, with woman’s ineradicable suspicion of vicarious
+benevolence: “Bring him here and let me see him first.”
+
+Thomas went on his mission. The wan Bed Liner came readily enough. As
+the two drew near, Annie looked up from her purse and screamed:
+
+“Mr. Walter— Oh—Mr. Walter!
+
+“Is that you, Annie?” said the young man meekly.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Walter!—and the Missis hunting high and low for you!”
+
+“Does mother want to see me?” he asked, with a flush coming out on his
+pale cheek.
+
+“She’s been hunting for you high and low. Sure, she wants to see you.
+She wants you to come home. She’s tried police and morgues and lawyers
+and advertising and detectives and rewards and everything. And then she
+took up clearvoyants. You’ll go right home, won’t you, Mr. Walter?”
+
+“Gladly, if she wants me,” said the young man. “Three years is a long
+time. I suppose I’ll have to walk up, though, unless the street cars
+are giving free rides. I used to walk and beat that old plug team of
+bays we used to drive to the carriage. Have they got them yet?”
+
+“They have,” said Thomas, feelingly. “And they’ll have ’em ten years
+from now. The life of the royal elephantibus truckhorseibus is one
+hundred and forty-nine years. I’m the coachman. Just got my
+reappointment five minutes ago. Let’s all ride up in a surface car—that
+is—er—if Annie will pay the fares.”
+
+On the Broadway car Annie handed each one of the prodigals a nickel to
+pay the conductor.
+
+“Seems to me you are mighty reckless the way you throw large sums of
+money around,” said Thomas sarcastically.
+
+“In that purse,” said Annie decidedly, “is exactly $11.85. I shall take
+every cent of it to-morrow and give it to professor Cherubusco, the
+greatest man in the world.”
+
+“Well,” said Thomas, “I guess he must be a pretty fly guy to pipe off
+things the way he does. I’m glad his spooks told him where you could
+find me. If you’ll give me his address, some day I’ll go up there,
+myself, and shake his hand.”
+
+Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and thoughtfully felt
+an abrasion or two on his knees and his elbows.
+
+“Say, Annie,” said he confidentially, maybe it’s one of the last dreams
+of booze, but I’ve a kind of a recollection of riding in an automobile
+with a swell guy that took me to a house full of eagles and arc lights.
+He fed me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked me down the front
+steps. If it was the _d t’s_, why am I so sore?”
+
+“Shut up, you fool,” said Annie.
+
+“If I could find that funny guy’s house,” said Thomas, in conclusion,
+“I’d go up there some day and punch his nose for him.”
+
+
+
+
+VI
+THE POET AND THE PEASANT
+
+
+The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communion
+with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor.
+
+It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the
+song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.
+
+When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a beefsteak
+dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment:
+
+“Too artificial.”
+
+Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, and
+swallowed indignation with slippery forkfuls.
+
+And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a
+well-arrived writer of fiction—a man who had trod on asphalt all his
+life, and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes except with
+sensations of disgust from the windows of express trains.
+
+Conant wrote a poem and called it “The Doe and the Brook.” It was a
+fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet who had
+strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the florist’s windows, and whose
+sole ornithological discussion had been carried on with a waiter.
+Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to the same editor.
+
+But this has very little to do with the story.
+
+Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next
+morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped
+slowly up Forty-second Street.
+
+The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip and
+hair the exact color of the little orphan’s (afterward discovered to be
+the earl’s daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney’s plays. His trousers were
+corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his
+back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You looked expectantly,
+though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its shape inaugurating
+the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor.
+In his hand was a valise—description of it is an impossible task; a
+Boston man would not have carried his lunch and law books to his office
+in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay—the rustic’s
+letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of
+the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the gold-brick men.
+
+Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw the raw
+stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall
+buildings. At this they ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It
+had been done so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see what
+Coney “attraction” or brand of chewing gum he might be thus dinning
+into his memory. But for the most part he was ignored. Even the
+newsboys looked bored when he scampered like a circus clown out of the
+way of cabs and street cars.
+
+At Eighth Avenue stood “Bunco Harry,” with his dyed mustache and shiny,
+good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be pained at the
+sight of an actor overdoing his part. He edged up to the countryman,
+who had stopped to open his mouth at a jewelry store window, and shook
+his head.
+
+“Too thick, pal,” he said, critically—“too thick by a couple of inches.
+I don’t know what your lay is; but you’ve got the properties too thick.
+That hay, now—why, they don’t even allow that on Proctor’s circuit any
+more.”
+
+“I don’t understand you, mister,” said the green one. “I’m not lookin’
+for any circus. I’ve just run down from Ulster County to look at the
+town, bein’ that the hayin’s over with. Gosh! but it’s a whopper. I
+thought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this here town is five times
+as big.”
+
+“Oh, well,” said “Bunco Harry,” raising his eyebrows, “I didn’t mean to
+butt in. You don’t have to tell. I thought you ought to tone down a
+little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at your graft,
+whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow.”
+
+“I wouldn’t mind having a glass of lager beer,” acknowledged the other.
+
+They went to a café frequented by men with smooth faces and shifty
+eyes, and sat at their drinks.
+
+“I’m glad I come across you, mister,” said Haylocks. “How’d you like to
+play a game or two of seven-up? I’ve got the keerds.”
+
+He fished them out of Noah’s valise—a rare, inimitable deck, greasy
+with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields.
+
+“Bunco Harry” laughed loud and briefly.
+
+“Not for me, sport,” he said, firmly. “I don’t go against that make-up
+of yours for a cent. But I still say you’ve overdone it. The Reubs
+haven’t dressed like that since ’79. I doubt if you could work Brooklyn
+for a key-winding watch with that layout.”
+
+“Oh, you needn’t think I ain’t got the money,” boasted Haylocks. He
+drew forth a tightly rolled mass of bills as large as a teacup, and
+laid it on the table.
+
+“Got that for my share of grandmother’s farm,” he announced. “There’s
+$950 in that roll. Thought I’d come to the city and look around for a
+likely business to go into.”
+
+“Bunco Harry” took up the roll of money and looked at it with almost
+respect in his smiling eyes.
+
+“I’ve seen worse,” he said, critically. “But you’ll never do it in them
+clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a straw
+hat with a colored band, and talk a good deal about Pittsburg and
+freight differentials, and drink sherry for breakfast in order to work
+off phony stuff like that.”
+
+“What’s his line?” asked two or three shifty-eyed men of “Bunco Harry”
+after Haylocks had gathered up his impugned money and departed.
+
+“The queer, I guess,” said Harry. “Or else he’s one of Jerome’s men. Or
+some guy with a new graft. He’s too much hayseed. Maybe that his—I
+wonder now—oh, no, it couldn’t have been real money.”
+
+Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he dived
+into a dark groggery on a side street and bought beer. At first sight
+of him their eyes brightened; but when his insistent and exaggerated
+rusticity became apparent their expressions changed to wary suspicion.
+
+Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.
+
+“Keep that a while for me, mister,” he said, chewing at the end of a
+virulent claybank cigar. “I’ll be back after I knock around a spell.
+And keep your eye on it, for there’s $950 inside of it, though maybe
+you wouldn’t think so to look at me.”
+
+Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and Haylocks was
+off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back.
+
+“Divvy, Mike,” said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly at one
+another.
+
+“Honest, now,” said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. “You
+don’t think I’d fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain’t no jay.
+One of McAdoo’s come-on squad, I guess. He’s a shine if he made himself
+up. There ain’t no parts of the country now where they dress like that
+since they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he’s
+got nine-fifty in that valise it’s a ninety-eight cent Waterbury that’s
+stopped at ten minutes to ten.”
+
+When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he
+returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling
+the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway
+rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest
+of the “gags” that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly
+impossible, so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish
+products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that
+he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his
+hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so
+clamorously rural that even a shell-game man would have put up his peas
+and folded his table at the sight of it.
+
+Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once more
+exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer one, a
+twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.
+
+“Son,” said he, “run somewhere and get this changed for me. I’m mighty
+nigh out of chicken feed. I guess you’ll get a nickel if you’ll hurry
+up.”
+
+A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy’s face.
+
+“Aw, watchert’ink! G’wan and get yer funny bill changed yerself. Dey
+ain’t no farm clothes yer got on. G’wan wit yer stage money.”
+
+On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-house. He saw
+Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous.
+
+“Mister,” said the rural one. “I’ve heard of places in this here town
+where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card at
+keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old Ulster to see
+the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on about $9 or $10?
+I’m goin’ to have some sport, and then maybe I’ll buy out a business of
+some kind.”
+
+The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left
+forefinger nail.
+
+“Cheese it, old man,” he murmured, reproachfully. “The Central Office
+must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. You
+couldn’t get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them Tony
+Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has got you beat
+a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanical
+accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded
+halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace.”
+
+Rebuffed once again by the great city that is so swift to detect
+artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the curb and presented his thoughts
+to hold a conference.
+
+“It’s my clothes,” said he; “durned if it ain’t. They think I’m a
+hayseed and won’t have nothin’ to do with me. Nobody never made fun of
+this hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks to notice you in
+New York you must dress up like they do.”
+
+So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake through their
+noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line ecstatically over
+the bulge in his inside pocket where reposed a red nubbin of corn with
+an even number of rows. And messengers bearing parcels and boxes
+streamed to his hotel on Broadway within the lights of Long Acre.
+
+At 9 o’clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk whom Ulster
+County would have foresworn. Bright tan were his shoes; his hat the
+latest block. His light gray trousers were deeply creased; a gay blue
+silk handkerchief flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant English
+walking coat. His collar might have graced a laundry window; his blond
+hair was trimmed close; the wisp of hay was gone.
+
+For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of a
+boulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his evening
+pleasures. And then he turned down the gay, bright street with the easy
+and graceful tread of a millionaire.
+
+But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes in
+the city had enveloped him in their field of vision. A stout man with
+gray eyes picked two of his friends with a lift of his eyebrows from
+the row of loungers in front of the hotel.
+
+“The juiciest jay I’ve seen in six months,” said the man with gray
+eyes. “Come along.”
+
+It was half-past eleven when a man galloped into the West Forty-seventh
+Street Police Station with the story of his wrongs.
+
+“Nine hundred and fifty dollars,” he gasped, “all my share of
+grandmother’s farm.”
+
+The desk sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue, of Locust
+Valley farm, Ulster County, and then began to take descriptions of the
+strong-arm gentlemen.
+
+When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he was
+received over the head of the office boy into the inner office that is
+decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown.
+
+“When I read the first line of ‘The Doe and the Brook,’” said the
+editor, “I knew it to be the work of one whose life has been heart to
+heart with Nature. The finished art of the line did not blind me to
+that fact. To use a somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a wild,
+free child of the woods and fields were to don the garb of fashion and
+walk down Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man would show.”
+
+“Thanks,” said Conant. “I suppose the check will be round on Thursday,
+as usual.”
+
+The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can take your
+choice of “Stay on the Farm” or “Don’t Write Poetry.”
+
+
+
+
+VII
+THE ROBE OF PEACE
+
+
+Mysteries follow one another so closely in a great city that the
+reading public and the friends of Johnny Bellchambers have ceased to
+marvel at his sudden and unexplained disappearance nearly a year ago.
+This particular mystery has now been cleared up, but the solution is so
+strange and incredible to the mind of the average man that only a
+select few who were in close touch with Bellchambers will give it full
+credence.
+
+Johnny Bellchambers, as is well known, belonged to the intrinsically
+inner circle of the _élite_. Without any of the ostentation of the
+fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice by eccentric display of
+wealth and show he still was _au fait_ in everything that gave deserved
+lustre to his high position in the ranks of society.
+
+Especially did he shine in the matter of dress. In this he was the
+despair of imitators. Always correct, exquisitely groomed, and
+possessed of an unlimited wardrobe, he was conceded to be the
+best-dressed man in New York, and, therefore, in America. There was not
+a tailor in Gotham who would not have deemed it a precious boon to have
+been granted the privilege of making Bellchambers’ clothes without a
+cent of pay. As he wore them, they would have been a priceless
+advertisement. Trousers were his especial passion. Here nothing but
+perfection would he notice. He would have worn a patch as quickly as he
+would have overlooked a wrinkle. He kept a man in his apartments always
+busy pressing his ample supply. His friends said that three hours was
+the limit of time that he would wear these garments without exchanging.
+
+Bellchambers disappeared very suddenly. For three days his absence
+brought no alarm to his friends, and then they began to operate the
+usual methods of inquiry. All of them failed. He had left absolutely no
+trace behind. Then the search for a motive was instituted, but none was
+found. He had no enemies, he had no debts, there was no woman. There
+were several thousand dollars in his bank to his credit. He had never
+showed any tendency toward mental eccentricity; in fact, he was of a
+particularly calm and well-balanced temperament. Every means of tracing
+the vanished man was made use of, but without avail. It was one of
+those cases—more numerous in late years—where men seem to have gone out
+like the flame of a candle, leaving not even a trail of smoke as a
+witness.
+
+In May, Tom Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam, two of Bellchambers’ old
+friends, went for a little run on the other side. While pottering
+around in Italy and Switzerland, they happened, one day, to hear of a
+monastery in the Swiss Alps that promised something outside of the
+ordinary tourist-beguiling attractions. The monastery was almost
+inaccessible to the average sightseer, being on an extremely rugged and
+precipitous spur of the mountains. The attractions it possessed but did
+not advertise were, first, an exclusive and divine cordial made by the
+monks that was said to far surpass benedictine and chartreuse. Next a
+huge brass bell so purely and accurately cast that it had not ceased
+sounding since it was first rung three hundred years ago. Finally, it
+was asserted that no Englishman had ever set foot within its walls.
+Eyres and Gilliam decided that these three reports called for
+investigation.
+
+It took them two days with the aid of two guides to reach the monastery
+of St. Gondrau. It stood upon a frozen, wind-swept crag with the snow
+piled about it in treacherous, drifting masses. They were hospitably
+received by the brothers whose duty it was to entertain the infrequent
+guest. They drank of the precious cordial, finding it rarely potent and
+reviving. They listened to the great, ever-echoing bell, and learned
+that they were pioneer travelers, in those gray stone walls, over the
+Englishman whose restless feet have trodden nearly every corner of the
+earth.
+
+At three o’clock on the afternoon they arrived, the two young
+Gothamites stood with good Brother Cristofer in the great, cold hallway
+of the monastery to watch the monks march past on their way to the
+refectory. They came slowly, pacing by twos, with their heads bowed,
+treading noiselessly with sandaled feet upon the rough stone flags. As
+the procession slowly filed past, Eyres suddenly gripped Gilliam by the
+arm. “Look,” he whispered, eagerly, “at the one just opposite you
+now—the one on this side, with his hand at his waist—if that isn’t
+Johnny Bellchambers then I never saw him!”
+
+Gilliam saw and recognized the lost glass of fashion.
+
+“What the deuce,” said he, wonderingly, “is old Bell doing here? Tommy,
+it surely can’t be he! Never heard of Bell having a turn for the
+religious. Fact is, I’ve heard him say things when a four-in-hand
+didn’t seem to tie up just right that would bring him up for
+court-martial before any church.”
+
+“It’s Bell, without a doubt,” said Eyres, firmly, “or I’m pretty badly
+in need of an oculist. But think of Johnny Bellchambers, the Royal High
+Chancellor of swell togs and the Mahatma of pink teas, up here in cold
+storage doing penance in a snuff-colored bathrobe! I can’t get it
+straight in my mind. Let’s ask the jolly old boy that’s doing the
+honors.”
+
+Brother Cristofer was appealed to for information. By that time the
+monks had passed into the refectory. He could not tell to which one
+they referred. Bellchambers? Ah, the brothers of St. Gondrau abandoned
+their worldly names when they took the vows. Did the gentlemen wish to
+speak with one of the brothers? If they would come to the refectory and
+indicate the one they wished to see, the reverend abbot in authority
+would, doubtless, permit it.
+
+Eyres and Gilliam went into the dining hall and pointed out to Brother
+Cristofer the man they had seen. Yes, it was Johnny Bellchambers. They
+saw his face plainly now, as he sat among the dingy brothers, never
+looking up, eating broth from a coarse, brown bowl.
+
+Permission to speak to one of the brothers was granted to the two
+travelers by the abbot, and they waited in a reception room for him to
+come. When he did come, treading softly in his sandals, both Eyres and
+Gilliam looked at him in perplexity and astonishment. It was Johnny
+Bellchambers, but he had a different look. Upon his smooth-shaven face
+was an expression of ineffable peace, of rapturous attainment, of
+perfect and complete happiness. His form was proudly erect, his eyes
+shone with a serene and gracious light. He was as neat and well-groomed
+as in the old New York days, but how differently was he clad! Now he
+seemed clothed in but a single garment—a long robe of rough brown
+cloth, gathered by a cord at the waist, and falling in straight, loose
+folds nearly to his feet. He shook hands with his visitors with his old
+ease and grace of manner. If there was any embarrassment in that
+meeting it was not manifested by Johnny Bellchambers. The room had no
+seats; they stood to converse.
+
+“Glad to see you, old man,” said Eyres, somewhat awkwardly. “Wasn’t
+expecting to find you up here. Not a bad idea though, after all.
+Society’s an awful sham. Must be a relief to shake the giddy whirl and
+retire to—er—contemplation and—er—prayer and hymns, and those things.
+
+“Oh, cut that, Tommy,” said Bellchambers, cheerfully. “Don’t be afraid
+that I’ll pass around the plate. I go through these thing-um-bobs with
+the rest of these old boys because they are the rules. I’m Brother
+Ambrose here, you know. I’m given just ten minutes to talk to you
+fellows. That’s rather a new design in waistcoats you have on, isn’t
+it, Gilliam? Are they wearing those things on Broadway now?”
+
+“It’s the same old Johnny,” said Gilliam, joyfully. “What the devil—I
+mean why— Oh, confound it! what did you do it for, old man?”
+
+“Peel the bathrobe,” pleaded Eyres, almost tearfully, “and go back with
+us. The old crowd’ll go wild to see you. This isn’t in your line, Bell.
+I know half a dozen girls that wore the willow on the quiet when you
+shook us in that unaccountable way. Hand in your resignation, or get a
+dispensation, or whatever you have to do to get a release from this ice
+factory. You’ll get catarrh here, Johnny—and— My God! you haven’t any
+socks on!”
+
+Bellchambers looked down at his sandaled feet and smiled.
+
+“You fellows don’t understand,” he said, soothingly. “It’s nice of you
+to want me to go back, but the old life will never know me again. I
+have reached here the goal of all my ambitions. I am entirely happy and
+contented. Here I shall remain for the remainder of my days. You see
+this robe that I wear?” Bellchambers caressingly touched the
+straight-hanging garment: “At last I have found something that will not
+bag at the knees. I have attained—”
+
+At that moment the deep boom of the great brass bell reverberated
+through the monastery. It must have been a summons to immediate
+devotions, for Brother Ambrose bowed his head, turned and left the
+chamber without another word. A slight wave of his hand as he passed
+through the stone doorway seemed to say a farewell to his old friends.
+They left the monastery without seeing him again.
+
+And this is the story that Tommy Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam brought
+back with them from their latest European tour.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT
+
+
+The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a
+conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the
+Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from
+speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden
+toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to
+a pulp.
+
+Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he comes to New York for a
+rest. He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and Thou in the
+wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure to him as
+sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft. “Give me,”
+says Pogue, “a big city for my vacation. Especially New York. I’m not
+much fond of New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only place on the
+globe where I don’t find any.”
+
+While in the metropolis Pogue can always be found at one of two places.
+One is a little second-hand book-shop on Fourth Avenue, where he reads
+books about his hobbies, Mahometanism and taxidermy. I found him at the
+other—his hall bedroom in Eighteenth Street—where he sat in his
+stocking feet trying to pluck “The Banks of the Wabash” out of a small
+zither. Four years he has practised this tune without arriving near
+enough to cast the longest trout line to the water’s edge. On the
+dresser lay a blued-steel Colt’s forty-five and a tight roll of tens
+and twenties large enough around to belong to the spring
+rattlesnake-story class. A chambermaid with a room-cleaning air
+fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized
+by the stocking feet, aghast at the Colt’s, yet powerless, with her
+metropolitan instincts, to remove herself beyond the magic influence of
+the yellow-hued roll.
+
+I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No one could be franker
+or more candid in his conversation. Beside his expression the cry of
+Henry James for lacteal nourishment at the age of one month would have
+seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram. He told me stories of his profession
+with pride, for he considered it an art. And I was curious enough to
+ask him whether he had known any women who followed it.
+
+“Ladies?” said Pogue, with Western chivalry. “Well, not to any great
+extent. They don’t amount to much in special lines of graft, because
+they’re all so busy in general lines. What? Why, they have to. Who’s
+got the money in the world? The men. Did you ever know a man to give a
+woman a dollar without any consideration? A man will shell out his dust
+to another man free and easy and gratis. But if he drops a penny in one
+of the machines run by the Madam Eve’s Daughters’ Amalgamated
+Association and the pineapple chewing gum don’t fall out when he pulls
+the lever you can hear him kick to the superintendent four blocks away.
+Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go up against. He’s the
+low-grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay. Two times
+out of five she’s salted. She can’t put in crushers and costly
+machinery. He’d notice ’em and be onto the game. They have to pan out
+what they get, and it hurts their tender hands. Some of ’em are natural
+sluice troughs and can carry out $1,000 to the ton. The dry-eyed ones
+have to depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo
+walk, cowhide whips, ability to cook, sentimental juries,
+conversational powers, silk underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous
+letters, violet sachet powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms,
+carbolic acid, moonlight, cold cream and the evening newspapers.”
+
+“You are outrageous, Ferg,” I said. “Surely there is none of this
+‘graft’ as you call it, in a perfect and harmonious matrimonial union!”
+
+“Well,” said Pogue, “nothing that would justify you every time in
+calling Police Headquarters and ordering out the reserves and a
+vaudeville manager on a dead run. But it’s this way: Suppose you’re a
+Fifth Avenue millionaire, soaring high, on the right side of copper and
+cappers.
+
+“You come home at night and bring a $9,000,000 diamond brooch to the
+lady who’s staked you for a claim. You hand it over. She says, ‘Oh,
+George!’ and looks to see if it’s backed. She comes up and kisses you.
+You’ve waited for it. You get it. All right. It’s graft.
+
+“But I’m telling you about Artemisia Blye. She was from Kansas and she
+suggested corn in all of its phases. Her hair was as yellow as the
+silk; her form was as tall and graceful as a stalk in the low grounds
+during a wet summer; her eyes were as big and startling as bunions, and
+green was her favorite color.
+
+“On my last trip into the cool recesses of your sequestered city I met
+a human named Vaucross. He was worth—that is, he had a million. He told
+me he was in business on the street. ‘A sidewalk merchant?’ says I,
+sarcastic. ‘Exactly,’ says he, ‘Senior partner of a paving concern.’
+
+“I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him on Broadway one
+night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place. He was all silk
+hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him
+you would have only looked yourself in the face. I looked like a cross
+between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster. I was out of luck. I had—but
+let me lay my eyes on that dealer again.
+
+“Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few minutes and then he took me to
+a high-toned restaurant to eat dinner. There was music, and then some
+Beethoven, and Bordelaise sauce, and cussing in French, and
+frangipangi, and some hauteur and cigarettes. When I am flush I know
+them places.
+
+“I declare, I must have looked as bad as a magazine artist sitting
+there without any money and my hair all rumpled like I was booked to
+read a chapter from ‘Elsie’s School Days’ at a Brooklyn Bohemian
+smoker. But Vaucross treated me like a bear hunter’s guide. He wasn’t
+afraid of hurting the waiter’s feelings.
+
+“‘Mr. Pogue,’ he explains to me, ‘I am using you.’
+
+“‘Go on,’ says I; ‘I hope you don’t wake up.’
+
+“And then he tells me, you know, the kind of man he was. He was a New
+Yorker. His whole ambition was to be noticed. He wanted to be
+conspicuous. He wanted people to point him out and bow to him, and tell
+others who he was. He said it had been the desire of his life always.
+He didn’t have but a million, so he couldn’t attract attention by
+spending money. He said he tried to get into public notice one time by
+planting a little public square on the east side with garlic for free
+use of the poor; but Carnegie heard of it, and covered it over at once
+with a library in the Gaelic language. Three times he had jumped in the
+way of automobiles; but the only result was five broken ribs and a
+notice in the papers that an unknown man, five feet ten, with four
+amalgam-filled teeth, supposed to be the last of the famous Red Leary
+gang had been run over.
+
+“‘Ever try the reporters,’ I asked him.
+
+“‘Last month,’ says Mr. Vaucross, ‘my expenditure for lunches to
+reporters was $124.80.’
+
+“‘Get anything out of that?’ I asks.
+
+“‘That reminds me,’ says he; ‘add $8.50 for pepsin. Yes, I got
+indigestion.’
+
+“‘How am I supposed to push along your scramble for prominence?’ I
+inquires. ‘Contrast?’
+
+“‘Something of that sort to-night,’ says Vaucross. ‘It grieves me; but
+I am forced to resort to eccentricity.’ And here he drops his napkin in
+his soup and rises up and bows to a gent who is devastating a potato
+under a palm across the room.
+
+“‘The Police Commissioner,’ says my climber, gratified. ‘Friend’, says
+I, in a hurry, ‘have ambitions but don’t kick a rung out of your
+ladder. When you use me as a stepping stone to salute the police you
+spoil my appetite on the grounds that I may be degraded and
+incriminated. Be thoughtful.’
+
+“At the Quaker City squab en casserole the idea about Artemisia Blye
+comes to me.
+
+“‘Suppose I can manage to get you in the papers,’ says I—‘a column or
+two every day in all of ’em and your picture in most of ’em for a week.
+How much would it be worth to you?’
+
+“‘Ten thousand dollars,’ says Vaucross, warm in a minute. ‘But no
+murder,’ says he; ‘and I won’t wear pink pants at a cotillon.’
+
+“‘I wouldn’t ask you to,’ says I. ‘This is honorable, stylish and
+uneffeminate. Tell the waiter to bring a demi tasse and some other
+beans, and I will disclose to you the opus moderandi.’
+
+“We closed the deal an hour later in the rococo rouge et noise room. I
+telegraphed that night to Miss Artemisia in Salina. She took a couple
+of photographs and an autograph letter to an elder in the Fourth
+Presbyterian Church in the morning, and got some transportation and
+$80. She stopped in Topeka long enough to trade a flashlight interior
+and a valentine to the vice-president of a trust company for a mileage
+book and a package of five-dollar notes with $250 scrawled on the band.
+
+“The fifth evening after she got my wire she was waiting, all
+décolletée and dressed up, for me and Vaucross to take her to dinner in
+one of these New York feminine apartment houses where a man can’t get
+in unless he plays bezique and smokes depilatory powder cigarettes.
+
+“‘She’s a stunner,’ says Vaucross when he saw her. ‘They’ll give her a
+two-column cut sure.’
+
+“This was the scheme the three of us concocted. It was business
+straight through. Vaucross was to rush Miss Blye with all the style and
+display and emotion he could for a month. Of course, that amounted to
+nothing as far as his ambitions were concerned. The sight of a man in a
+white tie and patent leather pumps pouring greenbacks through the large
+end of a cornucopia to purchase nutriment and heartsease for tall,
+willowy blondes in New York is as common a sight as blue turtles in
+delirium tremens. But he was to write her love letters—the worst kind
+of love letters, such as your wife publishes after you are dead—every
+day. At the end of the month he was to drop her, and she would bring
+suit for $100,000 for breach of promise.
+
+“Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she won the suit that was all;
+and if she lost she was to get it anyhow. There was a signed contract
+to that effect.
+
+“Sometimes they had me out with ’em, but not often. I couldn’t keep up
+to their style. She used to pull out his notes and criticize them like
+bills of lading.
+
+“‘Say, you!’ she’d say. ‘What do you call this—letter to a Hardware
+Merchant from His Nephew on Learning that His Aunt Has Nettlerash? You
+Eastern duffers know as much about writing love letters as a Kansas
+grasshopper does about tugboats. “My dear Miss Blye!”—wouldn’t that put
+pink icing and a little red sugar bird on your bridal cake? How long do
+you expect to hold an audience in a court-room with that kind of stuff?
+You want to get down to business, and call me “Tweedlums Babe” and
+“Honeysuckle,” and sign yourself “Mama’s Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy Boy”
+if you want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs.
+Get sappy.’
+
+“After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible tabasco. His notes
+read like something or other in the original. I could see a jury
+sitting up, and women tearing one another’s hats to hear ’em read. And
+I could see piling up for Mr. Vaucross as much notoriousness as
+Archbishop Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese-on-salad ever
+enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at the prospects.
+
+“They agreed on a night; and I stood on Fifth Avenue outside a solemn
+restaurant and watched ’em. A process-server walked in and handed
+Vaucross the papers at his table. Everybody looked at ’em; and he
+looked as proud as Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five-cent
+cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good as ours.
+
+“About two hours later somebody knocked at my door. There stood
+Vaucross and Miss Artemisia, and she was clinging—yes, sir, clinging—to
+his arm. And they tells me they’d been out and got married. And they
+articulated some trivial cadences about love and such. And they laid
+down a bundle on the table and said ‘Good night’ and left.
+
+“And that’s why I say,” concluded Ferguson Pogue, “that a woman is too
+busy occupied with her natural vocation and instinct of graft such as
+is given her for self-preservation and amusement to make any great
+success in special lines.”
+
+“What was in the bundle that they left?” I asked, with my usual
+curiosity.
+
+“Why,” said Ferguson, “there was a scalper’s railroad ticket as far as
+Kansas City and two pairs of Mr. Vaucross’s old pants.”
+
+
+
+
+IX
+THE CALL OF THE TAME
+
+
+When the inauguration was accomplished—the proceedings were made smooth
+by the presence of the Rough Riders—it is well known that a herd of
+those competent and loyal ex-warriors paid a visit to the big city. The
+newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks the old broad-brimmed hats
+and leather belts that they wear to North Beach fish fries, and mixed
+with the visitors. No damage was done beyond the employment of the
+wonderful plural “tenderfeet” in each of the scribe’s stories. The
+Westerners mildly contemplated the skyscrapers as high as the third
+story, yawned at Broadway, hunched down in the big chairs in hotel
+corridors, and altogether looked as bored and dejected as a member of
+Ye Ancient and Honorable Artillery separated during a sham battle from
+his valet.
+
+Out of this sightseeing delegations of good King Teddy’s Gentlemen of
+the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye, of Pin Feather, Ariz.
+
+The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue’s rush hour swept him away from the
+company of his pardners true. The dust from a thousand rustling skirts
+filled his eyes. The mighty roar of trains rushing across the sky
+deafened him. The lightning-flash of twice ten hundred beaming eyes
+confused his vision.
+
+The storm was so sudden and tremendous that Greenbrier’s first impulse
+was to lie down and grab a root. And then he remembered that the
+disturbance was human, and not elemental; and he backed out of it with
+a grin into a doorway.
+
+The reporters had written that but for the wide-brimmed hats the West
+was not visible upon these gauchos of the North. Heaven sharpen their
+eyes! The suit of black diagonal, wrinkled in impossible places; the
+bright blue four-in-hand, factory tied; the low, turned-down collar,
+pattern of the days of Seymour and Blair, white glazed as the letters
+on the window of the open-day-and-night-except-Sunday restaurants; the
+out-curve at the knees from the saddle grip; the peculiar spread of the
+half-closed right thumb and fingers from the stiff hold upon the
+circling lasso; the deeply absorbed weather tan that the hottest sun of
+Cape May can never equal; the seldom-winking blue eyes that
+unconsciously divided the rushing crowds into fours, as though they
+were being counted out of a corral; the segregated loneliness and
+solemnity of expression, as of an Emperor or of one whose horizons have
+not intruded upon him nearer than a day’s ride—these brands of the West
+were set upon Greenbrier Nye. Oh, yes; he wore a broad-brimmed hat,
+gentle reader—just like those the Madison Square Post Office mail
+carriers wear when they go up to Bronx Park on Sunday afternoons.
+
+Suddenly Greenbrier Nye jumped into the drifting herd of metropolitan
+cattle, seized upon a man, dragged him out of the stream and gave him a
+buffet upon his collar-bone that sent him reeling against a wall.
+
+The victim recovered his hat, with the angry look of a New Yorker who
+has suffered an outrage and intends to write to the Trib. about it. But
+he looked at his assailant, and knew that the blow was in consideration
+of love and affection after the manner of the West, which greets its
+friends with contumely and uproar and pounding fists, and receives its
+enemies in decorum and order, such as the judicious placing of the
+welcoming bullet demands.
+
+“God in the mountains!” cried Greenbrier, holding fast to the foreleg
+of his cull. “Can this be Longhorn Merritt?”
+
+The other man was—oh, look on Broadway any day for the pattern—business
+man—latest rolled-brim derby—good barber, business, digestion and
+tailor.
+
+“Greenbrier Nye!” he exclaimed, grasping the hand that had smitten him.
+“My dear fellow! So glad to see you! How did you come to—oh, to be
+sure—the inaugural ceremonies—I remember you joined the Rough Riders.
+You must come and have luncheon with me, of course.”
+
+Greenbrier pinned him sadly but firmly to the wall with a hand the
+size, shape and color of a McClellan saddle.
+
+“Longy,” he said, in a melancholy voice that disturbed traffic, “what
+have they been doing to you? You act just like a citizen. They done
+made you into an inmate of the city directory. You never made no such
+Johnny Branch execration of yourself as that out on the Gila. ‘Come and
+have lunching with me!’ You never defined grub by any such terms of
+reproach in them days.”
+
+“I’ve been living in New York seven years,” said Merritt. “It’s been
+eight since we punched cows together in Old Man Garcia’s outfit. Well,
+let’s go to a café, anyhow. It sounds good to hear it called ‘grub?’
+again.”
+
+They picked their way through the crowd to a hotel, and drifted, as by
+a natural law, to the bar.
+
+“Speak up,” invited Greenbrier.
+
+“A dry Martini,” said Merritt.
+
+“Oh, Lord!” cried Greenbrier; “and yet me and you once saw the same
+pink Gila monsters crawling up the walls of the same hotel in Cañon
+Diablo! A dry—but let that pass. Whiskey straight—and they’re on you.”
+
+Merritt smiled, and paid.
+
+They lunched in a small extension of the dining room that connected
+with the café. Merritt dexterously diverted his friend’s choice, that
+hovered over ham and eggs, to a purée of celery, a salmon cutlet, a
+partridge pie and a desirable salad.
+
+“On the day,” said Greenbrier, grieved and thunderous, “when I can’t
+hold but one drink before eating when I meet a friend I ain’t seen in
+eight years at a 2 by 4 table in a thirty-cent town at 1 o’clock on the
+third day of the week, I want nine broncos to kick me forty times over
+a 640-acre section of land. Get them statistics?”
+
+“Right, old man,” laughed Merritt. “Waiter, bring an absinthe frappé
+and—what’s yours, Greenbrier?”
+
+“Whiskey straight,” mourned Nye. “Out of the neck of a bottle you used
+to take it, Longy—straight out of the neck of a bottle on a galloping
+pony—Arizona redeye, not this ab—oh, what’s the use? They’re on you.”
+
+Merritt slipped the wine card under his glass.
+
+“All right. I suppose you think I’m spoiled by the city. I’m as good a
+Westerner as you are, Greenbrier; but, somehow, I can’t make up my mind
+to go back out there. New York is comfortable—comfortable. I make a
+good living, and I live it. No more wet blankets and riding herd in
+snowstorms, and bacon and cold coffee, and blowouts once in six months
+for me. I reckon I’ll hang out here in the future. We’ll take in the
+theatre to-night, Greenbrier, and after that we’ll dine at—”
+
+“I’ll tell you what you are, Merritt,” said Greenbrier, laying one
+elbow in his salad and the other in his butter. “You are a
+concentrated, effete, unconditional, short-sleeved, gotch-eared Miss
+Sally Walker. God made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle
+and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore you have suffered his
+handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to New York and putting on
+little shoes tied with strings, and making faces when you talk. I’ve
+seen you rope and tie a steer in 42½. If you was to see one now you’d
+write to the Police Commissioner about it. And these flapdoodle drinks
+that you inoculate your system with—these little essences of cowslip
+with acorns in ’em, and paregoric flip—they ain’t anyways in assent
+with the cordiality of manhood. I hate to see you this way.”
+
+“Well, Mr. Greenbrier,” said Merritt, with apology in his tone, “in a
+way you are right. Sometimes I do feel like I was being raised on the
+bottle. But, I tell you, New York is comfortable—comfortable. There’s
+something about it—the sights and the crowds, and the way it changes
+every day, and the very air of it that seems to tie a one-mile-long
+stake rope around a man’s neck, with the other end fastened somewhere
+about Thirty-fourth Street. I don’t know what it is.”
+
+“God knows,” said Greenbrier sadly, “and I know. The East has gobbled
+you up. You was venison, and now you’re veal. You put me in mind of a
+japonica in a window. You’ve been signed, sealed and diskivered.
+Requiescat in hoc signo. You make me thirsty.”
+
+“A green chartreuse here,” said Merritt to the waiter.
+
+“Whiskey straight,” sighed Greenbrier, “and they’re on you, you
+renegade of the round-ups.”
+
+“Guilty, with an application for mercy,” said Merritt. “You don’t know
+how it is, Greenbrier. It’s so comfortable here that—”
+
+“Please loan me your smelling salts,” pleaded Greenbrier. “If I hadn’t
+seen you once bluff three bluffers from Mazatzal City with an empty gun
+in Phoenix—”
+
+Greenbrier’s voice died away in pure grief.
+
+“Cigars!” he called harshly to the waiter, to hide his emotion.
+
+“A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine,” said Merritt.
+
+“They’re on you,” chanted Greenbrier, struggling to conceal his
+contempt.
+
+At seven they dined in the Where-to-Dine-Well column.
+
+That evening a galaxy had assembled there. Bright shone the lights o’er
+fair women and br—let it go, anyhow—brave men. The orchestra played
+charmingly. Hardly had a tip from a diner been placed in its hands by a
+waiter when it would burst forth into soniferousness. The more beer you
+contributed to it the more Meyerbeer it gave you. Which is reciprocity.
+
+Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner. Greenbrier was his old
+friend, and he liked him. He persuaded him to drink a cocktail.
+
+“I take the horehound tea,” said Greenbrier, “for old times’ sake. But
+I’d prefer whiskey straight. They’re on you.”
+
+“Right!” said Merritt. “Now, run your eye down that bill of fare and
+see if it seems to hitch on any of these items.”
+
+“Lay me on my lava bed!” said Greenbrier, with bulging eyes. “All these
+specimens of nutriment in the grub wagon! What’s this? Horse with the
+heaves? I pass. But look along! Here’s truck for twenty round-ups all
+spelled out in different directions. Wait till I see.”
+
+The viands ordered, Merritt turned to the wine list.
+
+“This Medoc isn’t bad,” he suggested.
+
+“You’re the doc,” said Greenbrier. “I’d rather have whiskey straight.
+It’s on you.”
+
+Greenbrier looked around the room. The waiter brought things and took
+dishes away. He was observing. He saw a New York restaurant crowd
+enjoying itself.
+
+“How was the range when you left the Gila?” asked Merritt.
+
+“Fine,” said Greenbrier. “You see that lady in the red speckled silk at
+that table. Well, she could warm over her beans at my campfire. Yes,
+the range was good. She looks as nice as a white mustang I see once on
+Black River.”
+
+When the coffee came, Greenbrier put one foot on the seat of the chair
+next to him.
+
+“You said it was a comfortable town, Longy,” he said, meditatively.
+“Yes, it’s a comfortable town. It’s different from the plains in a blue
+norther. What did you call that mess in the crock with the handle,
+Longy? Oh, yes, squabs in a cash roll. They’re worth the roll. That
+white mustang had just such a way of turning his head and shaking his
+mane—look at her, Longy. If I thought I could sell out my ranch at a
+fair price, I believe I’d—
+
+“Gyar—song!” he suddenly cried, in a voice that paralyzed every knife
+and fork in the restaurant.
+
+The waiter dived toward the table.
+
+“Two more of them cocktail drinks,” ordered Greenbrier.
+
+Merritt looked at him and smiled significantly.
+
+“They’re on me,” said Greenbrier, blowing a puff of smoke to the
+ceiling.
+
+
+
+
+X
+THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
+
+
+The poet Longfellow—or was it Confucius, the inventor of
+wisdom?—remarked:
+
+“Life is real, life is earnest;
+And things are not what they seem.”
+
+
+As mathematics are—or is: thanks, old subscriber!—the only just rule by
+which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust
+our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great
+goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures—unassailable sums in
+addition—shall be set over against whatever opposing element there may
+be.
+
+A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would
+say: “Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that X plus—that is, that
+life is real—then things (all of which life includes) are real.
+Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the
+proposition that ‘things are not what they seem,’ why—”
+
+But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we
+would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued,
+satisfying, mysterious X.
+
+Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an
+old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated the discovery that
+bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that
+the flour crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no
+perceptible effect on the growing wheat, Mr. Kinsolving cornered the
+flour market.
+
+The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never
+had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accommodated) bought a
+five-cent loaf of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which
+went to Mr. Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.
+
+A second result was that Mr. Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000
+prof—er—rake-off.
+
+Mr. Kinsolving’s son Dan was at college when the mathematical
+experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and
+found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading “Little Dorrit”
+on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square.
+He had retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from
+bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the
+earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.
+
+Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village
+to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always admired
+Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious,
+mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of
+oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning
+watch-making in his father’s jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial,
+easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers. The two
+foregathered joyously, being opposites. And then Dan went back to
+college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings—and to his private library in
+the rear of the jewelry shop.
+
+Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the
+accumulations of B. A. and two years of Europe thick upon him. He took
+a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving’s elaborate tombstone in Greenwood
+and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family
+lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire,
+hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.
+
+Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his
+parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches
+for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington
+Square. Dan had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a dignity
+that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz was more serious, more
+intense, more learned, philosophical and socialistic.
+
+“I know about it now,” said Dan, finally. “I pumped it out of the
+eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad’s collections
+of bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken. And I am told that
+he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of
+bread at little bakeries around the corner. You’ve studied economics,
+Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and the masses, and octopuses,
+and the rights of laboring people. I never thought about those things
+before. Football and trying to be white to my fellow-man were about the
+extent of my college curriculum.
+
+“But since I came back and found out how dad made his money I’ve been
+thinking. I’d like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give
+up too much money for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income
+for a good many yards; but I’d like to make it square with ’em. Is
+there any way it can be done, old Ways and Means?”
+
+Kenwitz’s big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin, intellectual face
+took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan’s arm with the grip of a
+friend and a judge.
+
+“You can’t do it!” he said, emphatically. “One of the chief punishments
+of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent you find
+that you have lost the power to make reparation or restitution. I
+admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can’t do anything. Those
+people were robbed of their precious pennies. It’s too late to remedy
+the evil. You can’t pay them back”
+
+“Of course,” said Dan, lighting his pipe, “we couldn’t hunt up every
+one of the duffers and hand ’em back the right change. There’s an awful
+lot of ’em buying bread all the time. Funny taste they have—I never
+cared for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with the
+Roquefort. But we might find a few of ’em and chuck some of dad’s cash
+back where it came from. I’d feel better if I could. It seems tough for
+people to be held up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn’t mind
+standing a rise in broiled lobsters or deviled crabs. Get to work and
+think, Ken. I want to pay back all of that money I can.”
+
+“There are plenty of charities,” said Kenwitz, mechanically.
+
+“Easy enough,” said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. “I suppose I could give
+the city a park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But I don’t
+want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold
+Peter. It’s the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken.”
+
+The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.
+
+“Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the losses of
+consumers during that corner in flour?” he asked.
+
+“I do not.” said Dan, stoutly. “My lawyer tells me that I have two
+millions.”
+
+“If you had a hundred millions,” said Kenwitz, vehemently, “you
+couldn’t repair a thousandth part of the damage that has been done. You
+cannot conceive of the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth.
+Each penny that was wrung from the lean purses of the poor reacted a
+thousandfold to their harm. You do not understand. You do not see how
+hopeless is your desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance
+can it be done.”
+
+“Back up, philosopher!” said Dan. “The penny has no sorrow that the
+dollar cannot heal.”
+
+“Not in one instance,” repeated Kenwitz. “I will give you one, and let
+us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick Street.
+He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of flour went up he
+had to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor to pay it,
+Boyne’s business failed and he lost his $1,000 capital—all he had in
+the world.”
+
+Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow with his fist.
+
+“I accept the instance,” he cried. “Take me to Boyne. I will repay his
+thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery.”
+
+“Write your check,” said Kenwitz, without moving, “and then begin to
+write checks in payment of the train of consequences. Draw the next one
+for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his failure and set fire to the
+building from which he was about to be evicted. The loss amounted to
+that much. Boyne died in an asylum.”
+
+“Stick to the instance,” said Dan. “I haven’t noticed any insurance
+companies on my charity list.”
+
+“Draw your next check for $100,000,” went on Kenwitz. “Boyne’s son fell
+into bad ways after the bakery closed, and was accused of murder. He
+was acquitted last week after a three years’ legal battle, and the
+state draws upon taxpayers for that much expense.”
+
+“Back to the bakery!” exclaimed Dan, impatiently. “The Government
+doesn’t need to stand in the bread line.”
+
+“The last item of the instance is—come and I will show you,” said
+Kenwitz, rising.
+
+The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-baiter by
+nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath
+that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch
+needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.
+
+He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square and into ragged,
+poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid
+brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked
+on a door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.
+
+In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing at a machine. She
+nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream of
+sunlight through the dingy window burnished her heavy hair to the color
+of an ancient Tuscan’s shield. She flashed a rippling smile at Kenwitz
+and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry.
+
+Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in
+heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last
+item of the Instance.
+
+“How many this week, Miss Mary?” asked the watchmaker. A mountain of
+coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor.
+
+“Nearly thirty dozen,” said the young woman cheerfully. “I’ve made
+almost $4. I’m improving, Mr. Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so
+much money.” Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A
+little pink spot came out on her round, pale cheek.
+
+Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.
+
+“Miss Boyne,” he said, “let me present Mr. Kinsolving, the son of the
+man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do
+something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that act.”
+
+The smile left the young woman’s face. She rose and pointed her
+forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in
+the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.
+
+The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism
+and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the
+moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared
+to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him
+warmly.
+
+“I’m obliged to you, Ken, old man,” he said, vaguely—“a thousand times
+obliged.”
+
+“Mein Gott! you are crazy!” cried the watchmaker, dropping his
+spectacles for the first time in years.
+
+Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway
+with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the
+proprietor.
+
+A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.
+
+“These loaves are ten cents,” said the clerk.
+
+“I always get them at eight cents uptown,” said the lady. “You need not
+fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home.”
+
+The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.
+
+“Mr. Kenwitz!” cried the lady, heartily. “How do you do?”
+
+Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension
+on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.
+
+“Why, Miss Boyne!” he began.
+
+“Mrs. Kinsolving,” she corrected. “Dan and I were married a month ago.”
+
+
+
+
+XI
+THE THING’S THE PLAY
+
+
+Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free
+passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the
+popular vaudeville houses.
+
+One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much
+past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a
+taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I
+regarded the man.
+
+“There was a story about that chap a month or two ago,” said the
+reporter. “They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was
+to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to
+like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I’m working
+on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the
+details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned
+in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I
+couldn’t seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you
+could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I’ll give
+you the details.”
+
+After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts
+over the Würzburger.
+
+“I see no reason,” said I, when he had concluded, “why that shouldn’t
+make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn’t have
+acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real
+actors in a real theatre. I’m really afraid that all the stage is a
+world, anyhow, and all the players men and women. ‘The thing’s the
+play,’ is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare.”
+
+“Try it,” said the reporter.
+
+“I will,” said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a
+humorous column of it for his paper.
+
+There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there
+has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions
+and stationery are sold.
+
+One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the
+store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was
+married to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen,
+and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the
+headlines of a “Wholesale Female Murderess” story from Butte, Mont. But
+after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized
+your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as
+one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west
+side.
+
+Frank Barry and John Delaney were “prominent” young beaux of the same
+side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other
+every time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra
+seats and fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has
+turned up in the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen’s
+hand. When Frank won, John shook his hand and congratulated
+him—honestly, he did.
+
+After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was
+getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to Old
+Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of gibbering
+cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress
+gaiters and paper bags of hominy.
+
+Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the
+mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his
+forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one,
+entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or
+any old place where there are Italian skies and _dolce far niente_.
+
+It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him.
+With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by demanding
+whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that way.
+
+In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had possessed
+him departed. He bowed low, and said something about “irresistible
+impulse” and “forever carry in his heart the memory of”—and she
+suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going down.
+
+“I will away,” said John Delaney, “to the furthermost parts of the
+earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another’s. I will
+to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for—”
+
+“For goodness sake, get out,” said Helen. “Somebody might come in.”
+
+He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that he
+might give it a farewell kiss.
+
+Girls, was this choice boon of the great little god Cupid ever
+vouchsafed you—to have the fellow you want hard and fast, and have the
+one you don’t want come with a damp curl on his forehead and kneel to
+you and babble of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shall
+forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To know your power, and to
+feel the sweet security of your own happy state; to send the unlucky
+one, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourself
+as he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails are
+well manicured—say, girls, it’s galluptious—don’t ever let it get by
+you.
+
+And then, of course—how did you guess it?—the door opened and in
+stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.
+
+The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen’s hand, and out of the
+window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.
+
+A little slow music, if you please—faint violin, just a breath in the
+clarinet and a touch of the ‘cello. Imagine the scene. Frank,
+white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from him.
+Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her
+wrists and tears them from his shoulders—once, twice, thrice he sways
+her this way and that—the stage manager will show you how—and throws
+her from him to the floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he
+cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from the house
+through the staring groups of astonished guests.
+
+And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience must
+stroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow gray,
+rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of twenty years which
+must precede the rising of the curtain again.
+
+Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she could
+have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and
+general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but
+she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth
+balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.
+
+One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and
+ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him.
+
+“I’m really much obliged to you,” said Helen, cheerfully, “but I
+married another man twenty years ago. He was more a goose than a man,
+but I think I love him yet. I have never seen him since about half an
+hour after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just
+writing fluid?”
+
+The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a
+respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes,
+however romantic, may be overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight,
+beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have got from her
+lovers were approaches and adieus. Worse still, in the last one she had
+lost a customer, too.
+
+Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two large
+rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Roomers
+came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode
+of neatness, comfort and taste.
+
+One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above.
+The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend had
+sent him to this oasis in the desert of noise.
+
+Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short,
+pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and
+his artist’s temperament—revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic
+manner—was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.
+
+Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was
+singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side
+of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the
+floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and
+office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business
+letters; and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red
+light and sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that
+he spent much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of
+Paris, where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy
+fiddler.
+
+Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40’s,
+with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes.
+He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of
+Romeo and Othello’s tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes
+and wooed her by respectful innuendo.
+
+From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the
+presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the
+days of her youth’s romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to it,
+and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor in
+that romance. And then with a woman’s reasoning (oh, yes, they do,
+sometimes) she leaped over common syllogisms and theory, and logic, and
+was sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyes
+love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and
+remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love requited,
+which is the _sine qua non_ in the house that Jack built.
+
+But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twenty
+years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers
+laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar.
+There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration. A little
+purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be
+trusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or
+suspected.
+
+And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent out
+on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing
+story of—but I will not knock a brother—let us go on with the story.
+
+One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen’s hall-office-reception-room and
+told his love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist.
+His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the
+heart of a man who is a dreamer and doer combined.
+
+“But before you give me an answer,” he went on, before she could accuse
+him of suddenness, “I must tell you that ‘Ramonti?’ is the only name I
+have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or
+where I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a
+hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life
+before that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in
+the street with a wound on my head and was brought there in an
+ambulance. They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the
+stones. There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to
+remember. After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the
+violin. I have had success. Mrs. Barry—I do not know your name except
+that—I love you; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the
+one woman in the world for me—and”—oh, a lot of stuff like that.
+
+Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrill
+of vanity went all over her; and then she looked Ramonti in the eyes,
+and a tremendous throb went through her heart. She hadn’t expected that
+throb. It took her by surprise. The musician had become a big factor in
+her life, and she hadn’t been aware of it.
+
+“Mr. Ramonti,” she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage,
+remember; it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), “I’m awfully
+sorry, but I’m a married woman.”
+
+And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a heroine must do,
+sooner or later, either to a theatrical manager or to a reporter.
+
+Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to his
+room.
+
+Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand. Well she might. Three
+suitors had kissed it, mounted their red roan steeds and ridden away.
+
+In an hour entered the mysterious stranger with the haunting eyes.
+Helen was in the willow rocker, knitting a useless thing in
+cotton-wool. He ricocheted from the stairs and stopped for a chat.
+Sitting across the table from her, he also poured out his narrative of
+love. And then he said: “Helen, do you not remember me? I think I have
+seen it in your eyes. Can you forgive the past and remember the love
+that has lasted for twenty years? I wronged you deeply—I was afraid to
+come back to you—but my love overpowered my reason. Can you, will you,
+forgive me?”
+
+Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of her hands in a
+strong and trembling clasp.
+
+There she stood, and I pity the stage that it has not acquired a scene
+like that and her emotions to portray.
+
+For she stood with a divided heart. The fresh, unforgettable, virginal
+love for her bridegroom was hers; the treasured, sacred, honored memory
+of her first choice filled half her soul. She leaned to that pure
+feeling. Honor and faith and sweet, abiding romance bound her to it.
+But the other half of her heart and soul was filled with something
+else—a later, fuller, nearer influence. And so the old fought against
+the new.
+
+And while she hesitated, from the room above came the soft, racking,
+petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the
+noblest. The daws may peck upon one’s sleeve without injury, but
+whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far from the
+neck.
+
+This music and the musician called her, and at her side honor and the
+old love held her back.
+
+“Forgive me,” he pleaded.
+
+“Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say you
+love,” she declared, with a purgatorial touch.
+
+“How could I tell?” he begged. “I will conceal nothing from you. That
+night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark
+street I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him. His head had
+struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with love and
+jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance take him away. Although
+you married him, Helen—”
+
+“_Who Are You?_” cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching her
+hand away.
+
+“Don’t you remember me, Helen—the one who has always loved you best? I
+am John Delaney. If you can forgive—”
+
+But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs
+toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for
+his in each of his two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed,
+cried and sang: “Frank! Frank! Frank!”
+
+Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiard
+balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn’t see anything funny in it!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+A RAMBLE IN APHASIA
+
+
+My wife and I parted on that morning in precisely our usual manner. She
+left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front door. There she
+plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act
+of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me to take care of my cold. I
+had no cold. Next came her kiss of parting—the level kiss of
+domesticity flavored with Young Hyson. There was no fear of the
+extemporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite custom. With the deft
+touch of long malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf pin; and
+then, as I closed the door, I heard her morning slippers pattering back
+to her cooling tea.
+
+When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to occur.
+The attack came suddenly.
+
+For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a famous
+railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few days previously. In
+fact, I had been digging away at the law almost without cessation for
+many years. Once or twice good Doctor Volney, my friend and physician,
+had warned me.
+
+“If you don’t slacken up, Bellford,” he said, “you’ll go suddenly to
+pieces. Either your nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me, does a
+week pass in which you do not read in the papers of a case of
+aphasia—of some man lost, wandering nameless, with his past and his
+identity blotted out—and all from that little brain clot made by
+overwork or worry?”
+
+“I always thought,” said I, “that the clot in those instances was
+really to be found on the brains of the newspaper reporters.”
+
+Doctor Volney shook his head.
+
+“The disease exists,” he said. “You need a change or a rest.
+Court-room, office and home—there is the only route you travel. For
+recreation you—read law books. Better take warning in time.”
+
+“On Thursday nights,” I said, defensively, “my wife and I play
+cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me the weekly letter from her mother.
+That law books are not a recreation remains yet to be established.”
+
+That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney’s words. I was
+feeling as well as I usually did—possibly in better spirits than usual.
+
+I awoke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept long on the
+incommodious seat of a day coach. I leaned my head against the seat and
+tried to think. After a long time I said to myself: “I must have a name
+of some sort.” I searched my pockets. Not a card; not a letter; not a
+paper or monogram could I find. But I found in my coat pocket nearly
+$3,000 in bills of large denomination. “I must be some one, of course,”
+I repeated to myself, and began again to consider.
+
+The car was well crowded with men, among whom, I told myself, there
+must have been some common interest, for they intermingled freely, and
+seemed in the best good humor and spirits. One of them—a stout,
+spectacled gentleman enveloped in a decided odor of cinnamon and
+aloes—took the vacant half of my seat with a friendly nod, and unfolded
+a newspaper. In the intervals between his periods of reading, we
+conversed, as travelers will, on current affairs. I found myself able
+to sustain the conversation on such subjects with credit, at least to
+my memory. By and by my companion said:
+
+“You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the West sends in this
+time. I’m glad they held the convention in New York; I’ve never been
+East before. My name’s R. P. Bolder—Bolder & Son, of Hickory Grove,
+Missouri.”
+
+Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men will when put to it.
+Now must I hold a christening, and be at once babe, parson and parent.
+My senses came to the rescue of my slower brain. The insistent odor of
+drugs from my companion supplied one idea; a glance at his newspaper,
+where my eye met a conspicuous advertisement, assisted me further.
+
+“My name,” said I, glibly, “is Edward Pinkhammer. I am a druggist, and
+my home is in Cornopolis, Kansas.”
+
+“I knew you were a druggist,” said my fellow traveler, affably. “I saw
+the callous spot on your right forefinger where the handle of the
+pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to our National Convention.”
+
+“Are all these men druggists?” I asked, wonderingly.
+
+“They are. This car came through from the West. And they’re your
+old-time druggists, too—none of your patent tablet-and-granule
+pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a prescription desk.
+We percolate our own paregoric and roll our own pills, and we ain’t
+above handling a few garden seeds in the spring, and carrying a side
+line of confectionery and shoes. I tell you Hampinker, I’ve got an idea
+to spring on this convention—new ideas is what they want. Now, you know
+the shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et Pot. Tart.
+and Sod. et Pot. Tart.—one’s poison, you know, and the other’s
+harmless. It’s easy to mistake one label for the other. Where do
+druggists mostly keep ’em? Why, as far apart as possible, on different
+shelves. That’s wrong. I say keep ’em side by side, so when you want
+one you can always compare it with the other and avoid mistakes. Do you
+catch the idea?”
+
+“It seems to me a very good one,” I said.
+
+“All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it up. We’ll
+make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-cream
+professors that think they’re the only lozenges in the market look like
+hypodermic tablets.”
+
+“If I can be of any aid,” I said, warming, “the two bottles of—er—”
+
+“Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and potash.”
+
+“Shall henceforth sit side by side,” I concluded, firmly.
+
+“Now, there’s another thing,” said Mr. Bolder. “For an excipient in
+manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer—the magnesia carbonate or
+the pulverised glycerrhiza radix?”
+
+“The—er—magnesia,” I said. It was easier to say than the other word.
+
+Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.
+
+“Give me the glycerrhiza,” said he. “Magnesia cakes.”
+
+“Here’s another one of these fake aphasia cases,” he said, presently,
+handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon an article. “I
+don’t believe in ’em. I put nine out of ten of ’em down as frauds. A
+man gets sick of his business and his folks and wants to have a good
+time. He skips out somewhere, and when they find him he pretends to
+have lost his memory—don’t know his own name, and won’t even recognize
+the strawberry mark on his wife’s left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why
+can’t they stay at home and forget?”
+
+I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the following:
+
+“DENVER, June 12.—Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, is
+mysteriously missing from his home since three days ago, and all
+efforts to locate him have been in vain. Mr. Bellford is a well-known
+citizen of the highest standing, and has enjoyed a large and lucrative
+law practice. He is married and owns a fine home and the most extensive
+private library in the State. On the day of his disappearance, he drew
+quite a large sum of money from his bank. No one can be found who saw
+him after he left the bank. Mr. Bellford was a man of singularly quiet
+and domestic tastes, and seemed to find his happiness in his home and
+profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange disappearance, it
+may be found in the fact that for some months he has been deeply
+absorbed in an important law case in connection with the Q. Y. and Z.
+Railroad Company. It is feared that overwork may have affected his
+mind. Every effort is being made to discover the whereabouts of the
+missing man.”
+
+
+“It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical, Mr. Bolder,” I said,
+after I had read the despatch. “This has the sound, to me, of a genuine
+case. Why should this man, prosperous, happily married, and respected,
+choose suddenly to abandon everything? I know that these lapses of
+memory do occur, and that men do find themselves adrift without a name,
+a history or a home.”
+
+“Oh, gammon and jalap!” said Mr. Bolder. “It’s larks they’re after.
+There’s too much education nowadays. Men know about aphasia, and they
+use it for an excuse. The women are wise, too. When it’s all over they
+look you in the eye, as scientific as you please, and say: ‘He
+hypnotized me.’”
+
+Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid, me with his comments and
+philosophy.
+
+We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in a cab to a hotel,
+and I wrote my name “Edward Pinkhammer” in the register. As I did so I
+felt pervade me a splendid, wild, intoxicating buoyancy—a sense of
+unlimited freedom, of newly attained possibilities. I was just born
+into the world. The old fetters—whatever they had been—were stricken
+from my hands and feet. The future lay before me a clear road such as
+an infant enters, and I could set out upon it equipped with a man’s
+learning and experience.
+
+I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too long. I had no
+baggage.
+
+“The Druggists’ Convention,” I said. “My trunk has somehow failed to
+arrive.” I drew out a roll of money.
+
+“Ah!” said he, showing an auriferous tooth, “we have quite a number of
+the Western delegates stopping here.” He struck a bell for the boy.
+
+I endeavored to give color to my rôle.
+
+“There is an important movement on foot among us Westerners,” I said,
+“in regard to a recommendation to the convention that the bottles
+containing the tartrate of antimony and potash, and the tartrate of
+sodium and potash be kept in a contiguous position on the shelf.”
+
+“Gentleman to three-fourteen,” said the clerk, hastily. I was whisked
+away to my room.
+
+The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to live the life
+of Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax my brain with endeavors to solve
+problems of the past.
+
+It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held up
+to my lips. I drank of it gratefully. The keys of Manhattan belong to
+him who is able to bear them. You must be either the city’s guest or
+its victim.
+
+The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward Pinkhammer, yet
+counting back to his birth by hours only, knew the rare joy of having
+come upon so diverting a world full-fledged and unrestrained. I sat
+entranced on the magic carpets provided in theatres and roof-gardens,
+that transported one into strange and delightful lands full of
+frolicsome music, pretty girls and grotesque drolly extravagant
+parodies upon human kind. I went here and there at my own dear will,
+bound by no limits of space, time or comportment. I dined in weird
+cabarets, at weirder _tables d’hôte_ to the sound of Hungarian music
+and the wild shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again,
+where the night life quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic
+picture, and the millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones
+whom they adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for
+good cheer and the spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that
+I have mentioned I learned one thing that I never knew before. And that
+is that the key to liberty is not in the hands of License, but
+Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or
+you may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the glitter, the seeming
+disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law, unobtrusive, yet
+like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey these
+unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of the free. If you decline
+to be bound by them, you put on shackles.
+
+Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly
+murmuring palm rooms, redolent with high-born life and delicate
+restraint, in which to dine. Again I would go down to the waterways in
+steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked, unchecked love-making clerks
+and shop-girls to their crude pleasures on the island shores. And there
+was always Broadway—glistening, opulent, wily, varying, desirable
+Broadway—growing upon one like an opium habit.
+
+One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose and a
+black mustache blocked my way in the corridor. When I would have passed
+around him, he greet me with offensive familiarity.
+
+“Hello, Bellford!” he cried, loudly. “What the deuce are you doing in
+New York? Didn’t know anything could drag you away from that old book
+den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little business run alone,
+eh?”
+
+“You have made a mistake, sir,” I said, coldly, releasing my hand from
+his grasp. “My name is Pinkhammer. You will excuse me.”
+
+The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I walked to the
+clerk’s desk I heard him call to a bell boy and say something about
+telegraph blanks.
+
+“You will give me my bill,” I said to the clerk, “and have my baggage
+brought down in half an hour. I do not care to remain where I am
+annoyed by confidence men.”
+
+I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned one on
+lower Fifth Avenue.
+
+There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could be
+served almost _al fresco_ in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet
+and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in which to
+take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there picking my way
+to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve caught.
+
+“Mr. Bellford!” exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.
+
+I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone—a lady of about thirty,
+with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as though I had been
+her very dear friend.
+
+“You were about to pass me,” she said, accusingly. “Don’t tell me you
+do not know me. Why should we not shake hands—at least once in fifteen
+years?”
+
+I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the
+table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady was
+philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a _crème de menthe_. Her
+hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it, because you could
+not look away from her eyes. But you were conscious of it as you are
+conscious of sunset while you look into the profundities of a wood at
+twilight.
+
+“Are you sure you know me?” I asked.
+
+“No,” she said, smiling. “I was never sure of that.”
+
+“What would you think,” I said, a little anxiously, “if I were to tell
+you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, Kansas?”
+
+“What would I think?” she repeated, with a merry glance. “Why, that you
+had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of course. I do
+wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian.” Her voice lowered
+slightly—“You haven’t changed much, Elwyn.”
+
+I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more closely.
+
+“Yes, you have,” she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note in
+her latest tones; “I see it now. You haven’t forgotten. You haven’t
+forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you never could.”
+
+I poked my straw anxiously in the _crème de menthe_.
+
+“I’m sure I beg your pardon,” I said, a little uneasy at her gaze. “But
+that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I’ve forgotten everything.”
+
+She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she seemed
+to see in my face.
+
+“I’ve heard of you at times,” she went on. “You’re quite a big lawyer
+out West—Denver, isn’t it, or Los Angeles? Marian must be very proud of
+you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six months after you did. You
+may have seen it in the papers. The flowers alone cost two thousand
+dollars.”
+
+She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time.
+
+“Would it be too late,” I asked, somewhat timorously, “to offer you
+congratulations?”
+
+“Not if you dare do it,” she answered, with such fine intrepidity that
+I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb
+nail.
+
+“Tell me one thing,” she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly—“a
+thing I have wanted to know for many years—just from a woman’s
+curiosity, of course—have you ever dared since that night to touch,
+smell or look at white roses—at white roses wet with rain and dew?”
+
+I took a sip of _crème de menthe_.
+
+“It would be useless, I suppose,” I said, with a sigh, “for me to
+repeat that I have no recollection at all about these things. My memory
+is completely at fault. I need not say how much I regret it.”
+
+The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes disdained
+my words and went traveling by their own route direct to my soul. She
+laughed softly, with a strange quality in the sound—it was a laugh of
+happiness—yes, and of content—and of misery. I tried to look away from
+her.
+
+“You lie, Elwyn Bellford,” she breathed, blissfully. “Oh, I know you
+lie!”
+
+I gazed dully into the ferns.
+
+“My name is Edward Pinkhammer,” I said. “I came with the delegates to
+the Druggists’ National Convention. There is a movement on foot for
+arranging a new position for the bottles of tartrate of antimony and
+tartrate of potash, in which, very likely, you would take little
+interest.”
+
+A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I took her
+hand, and bowed.
+
+“I am deeply sorry,” I said to her, “that I cannot remember. I could
+explain, but fear you would not understand. You will not concede
+Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the—the roses and
+other things.”
+
+“Good-by, Mr. Bellford,” she said, with her happy, sorrowful smile, as
+she stepped into her carriage.
+
+I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel, a quiet
+man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his finger nails
+with a silk handkerchief, appeared, magically, at my side.
+
+ “Mr. Pinkhammer,” he said, giving the bulk of his attention to his
+ forefinger, “may I request you to step aside with me for a little
+ conversation? There is a room here.”
+
+“Certainly,” I answered.
+
+He conducted me into a small, private parlor. A lady and a gentleman
+were there. The lady, I surmised, would have been unusually
+good-looking had her features not been clouded by an expression of keen
+worry and fatigue. She was of a style of figure and possessed coloring
+and features that were agreeable to my fancy. She was in a traveling
+dress; she fixed upon me an earnest look of extreme anxiety, and
+pressed an unsteady hand to her bosom. I think she would have started
+forward, but the gentleman arrested her movement with an authoritative
+motion of his hand. He then came, himself, to meet me. He was a man of
+forty, a little gray about the temples, and with a strong, thoughtful
+face.
+
+“Bellford, old man,” he said, cordially, “I’m glad to see you again. Of
+course we know everything is all right. I warned you, you know, that
+you were overdoing it. Now, you’ll go back with us, and be yourself
+again in no time.”
+
+I smiled ironically.
+
+“I have been ‘Bellforded’ so often,” I said, “that it has lost its
+edge. Still, in the end, it may grow wearisome. Would you be willing at
+all to entertain the hypothesis that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, and
+that I never saw you before in my life?”
+
+Before the man could reply a wailing cry came from the woman. She
+sprang past his detaining arm. “Elwyn!” she sobbed, and cast herself
+upon me, and clung tight. “Elwyn,” she cried again, “don’t break my
+heart. I am your wife—call my name once—just once. I could see you dead
+rather than this way.”
+
+I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.
+
+“Madam,” I said, severely, “pardon me if I suggest that you accept a
+resemblance too precipitately. It is a pity,” I went on, with an amused
+laugh, as the thought occurred to me, “that this Bellford and I could
+not be kept side by side upon the same shelf like tartrates of sodium
+and antimony for purposes of identification. In order to understand the
+allusion,” I concluded airily, “it may be necessary for you to keep an
+eye on the proceedings of the Druggists’ National Convention.”
+
+The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm.
+
+“What is it, Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it?” she moaned.
+
+He led her to the door.
+
+“Go to your room for a while,” I heard him say. “I will remain and talk
+with him. His mind? No, I think not—only a portion of the brain. Yes, I
+am sure he will recover. Go to your room and leave me with him.”
+
+The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went outside, still
+manicuring himself in a thoughtful way. I think he waited in the hall.
+
+“I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pinkhammer, if I may,” said
+the gentleman who remained.
+
+“Very well, if you care to,” I replied, “and will excuse me if I take
+it comfortably; I am rather tired.” I stretched myself upon a couch by
+a window and lit a cigar. He drew a chair nearby.
+
+“Let us speak to the point,” he said, soothingly. “Your name is not
+Pinkhammer.”
+
+“I know that as well as you do,” I said, coolly. “But a man must have a
+name of some sort. I can assure you that I do not extravagantly admire
+the name of Pinkhammer. But when one christens one’s self suddenly, the
+fine names do not seem to suggest themselves. But, suppose it had been
+Scheringhausen or Scroggins! I think I did very well with Pinkhammer.”
+
+“Your name,” said the other man, seriously, “is Elwyn C. Bellford. You
+are one of the first lawyers in Denver. You are suffering from an
+attack of aphasia, which has caused you to forget your identity. The
+cause of it was over-application to your profession, and, perhaps, a
+life too bare of natural recreation and pleasures. The lady who has
+just left the room is your wife.”
+
+“She is what I would call a fine-looking woman,” I said, after a
+judicial pause. “I particularly admire the shade of brown in her hair.”
+
+“She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance, nearly two
+weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her eyes. We learned that you were
+in New York through a telegram sent by Isidore Newman, a traveling man
+from Denver. He said that he had met you in a hotel here, and that you
+did not recognize him.”
+
+“I think I remember the occasion,” I said. “The fellow called me
+‘Bellford,’ if I am not mistaken. But don’t you think it about time,
+now, for you to introduce yourself?”
+
+“I am Robert Volney—Doctor Volney. I have been your close friend for
+twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I came with Mrs. Bellford
+to trace you as soon as we got the telegram. Try, Elwyn, old man—try to
+remember!”
+
+“What’s the use to try?” I asked, with a little frown. “You say you are
+a physician. Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his memory does it
+return slowly, or suddenly?”
+
+“Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as suddenly as it
+went.”
+
+“Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor Volney?” I asked.
+
+“Old friend,” said he, “I’ll do everything in my power, and will have
+done everything that science can do to cure you.”
+
+“Very well,” said I. “Then you will consider that I am your patient.
+Everything is in confidence now—professional confidence.”
+
+“Of course,” said Doctor Volney.
+
+I got up from the couch. Some one had set a vase of white roses on the
+centre table—a cluster of white roses, freshly sprinkled and fragrant.
+I threw them far out of the window, and then I laid myself upon the
+couch again.
+
+“It will be best, Bobby,” I said, “to have this cure happen suddenly.
+I’m rather tired of it all, anyway. You may go now and bring Marian in.
+But, oh, Doc,” I said, with a sigh, as I kicked him on the shin—“good
+old Doc—it was glorious!”
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+A MUNICIPAL REPORT
+
+
+     The cities are full of pride,
+            Challenging each to each—
+     This from her mountainside,
+            That from her burthened beach.
+
+
+R. KIPLING.
+
+
+Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville,
+Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that
+are “story cities”—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the
+lot, San Francisco.—FRANK NORRIS.
+
+
+East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians.
+Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a
+State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no
+less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and
+speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Californians
+go into detail.
+
+Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half
+an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear.
+But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for conviction,
+madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate
+as the Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a matter of opinion, no
+refutation is necessary. But, dear cousins all (from Adam and Eve
+descended), it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and
+say: “In this town there can be no romance—what could happen here?”
+Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history,
+romance, and Rand and McNally.
+
+NASHVILLE—A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the State of
+Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N. C. & St. L. and the
+L. & N. railroads.  This city is regarded as the most important
+educational centre in the South.
+
+
+I stepped off the train at 8 P.M. Having searched the thesaurus in vain
+for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison in the
+form of a recipe.
+
+Take a London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts;
+dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of
+honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.
+
+The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville
+drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soup;
+but ’tis enough—’twill serve.
+
+I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-suppression for
+me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation of
+Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone era and
+driven by something dark and emancipated.
+
+I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid it
+the fifty cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure you).
+I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about its old
+“marster” or anything that happened “befo’ de wah.”
+
+The hotel was one of the kind described as “renovated.” That means
+$20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights and brass
+cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. & N. time table and a lithograph
+of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The
+management was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite
+Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and
+as good-humored as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth traveling a
+thousand miles for. There is no other hotel in the world where you can
+get such chicken livers _en brochette_.
+
+At dinner I asked a Negro waiter if there was anything doing in town.
+He pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: “Well, boss, I
+don’t really reckon there’s anything at all doin’ after sundown.”
+
+Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the drizzle long
+before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went forth upon the
+streets in the drizzle to see what might be there.
+
+It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted by
+electricity at a cost of $32,470 per annum.
+
+
+As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged a
+company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus, armed with—no, I saw with
+relief that they were not rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a caravan
+of black, clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring shouts, “Kyar you
+anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents,” I reasoned that I was
+merely a “fare” instead of a victim.
+
+I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I wondered how those
+streets ever came down again. Perhaps they didn’t until they were
+“graded.” On a few of the “main streets” I saw lights in stores here
+and there; saw street cars go by conveying worthy burghers hither and
+yon; saw people pass engaged in the art of conversation, and heard a
+burst of semi-lively laughter issuing from a soda-water and ice-cream
+parlor. The streets other than “main” seemed to have enticed upon their
+borders houses consecrated to peace and domesticity. In many of them
+lights shone behind discreetly drawn window shades; in a few pianos
+tinkled orderly and irreproachable music. There was, indeed, little
+“doing.” I wished I had come before sundown. So I returned to my hotel.
+
+In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced against
+Nashville, where he shut up a National force under General Thomas. The
+latter then sallied forth and defeated the Confederates in a terrible
+conflict.
+
+
+All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine
+marksmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the
+tobacco-chewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There
+were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in the
+great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so wide-mouthed that the
+crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should have been able to throw a
+ball into one of them at five paces distant. But, although a terrible
+battle had raged and was still raging, the enemy had not suffered.
+Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched, they stood. But, shades of
+Jefferson Brick! the tile floor—the beautiful tile floor! I could not
+avoid thinking of the battle of Nashville, and trying to draw, as is my
+foolish habit, some deductions about hereditary marksmanship.
+
+Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Wentworth Caswell. I
+knew him for a type the moment my eyes suffered from the sight of him.
+A rat has no geographical habitat. My old friend, A. Tennyson, said, as
+he so well said almost everything:
+
+  Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,
+  And curse me the British vermin, the rat.
+
+
+Let us regard the word “British” as interchangeable _ad lib_. A rat is
+a rat.
+
+This man was hunting about the hotel lobby like a starved dog that had
+forgotten where he had buried a bone. He had a face of great acreage,
+red, pulpy, and with a kind of sleepy massiveness like that of Buddha.
+He possessed one single virtue—he was very smoothly shaven. The mark of
+the beast is not indelible upon a man until he goes about with a
+stubble. I think that if he had not used his razor that day I would
+have repulsed his advances, and the criminal calendar of the world
+would have been spared the addition of one murder.
+
+I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when Major
+Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been observant enough to perceive
+that the attacking force was using Gatlings instead of squirrel rifles;
+so I side-stepped so promptly that the major seized the opportunity to
+apologize to a noncombatant. He had the blabbing lip. In four minutes
+he had become my friend and had dragged me to the bar.
+
+I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not one
+by profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat, the
+Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman, and
+plug chewing. When the orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer. I slide a
+little lower on the leather-cornered seat and, well, order another
+Würzburger and wish that Longstreet had—but what’s the use?
+
+Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at Fort
+Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one at Appomattox I began to
+hope. But then he began on family trees, and demonstrated that Adam was
+only a third cousin of a collateral branch of the Caswell family.
+Genealogy disposed of, he took up, to my distaste, his private family
+matters. He spoke of his wife, traced her descent back to Eve, and
+profanely denied any possible rumor that she may have had relations in
+the land of Nod.
+
+By this time I was beginning to suspect that he was trying to obscure
+by noise the fact that he had ordered the drinks, on the chance that I
+would be bewildered into paying for them. But when they were down he
+crashed a silver dollar loudly upon the bar. Then, of course, another
+serving was obligatory. And when I had paid for that I took leave of
+him brusquely; for I wanted no more of him. But before I had obtained
+my release he had prated loudly of an income that his wife received,
+and showed a handful of silver money.
+
+When I got my key at the desk the clerk said to me courteously: “If
+that man Caswell has annoyed you, and if you would like to make a
+complaint, we will have him ejected. He is a nuisance, a loafer, and
+without any known means of support, although he seems to have some
+money most the time. But we don’t seem to be able to hit upon any means
+of throwing him out legally.”
+
+“Why, no,” said I, after some reflection; “I don’t see my way clear to
+making a complaint. But I would like to place myself on record as
+asserting that I do not care for his company. Your town,” I continued,
+“seems to be a quiet one. What manner of entertainment, adventure, or
+excitement have you to offer to the stranger within your gates?”
+
+“Well, sir,” said the clerk, “there will be a show here next Thursday.
+It is—I’ll look it up and have the announcement sent up to your room
+with the ice water. Good night.”
+
+After I went up to my room I looked out the window. It was only about
+ten o’clock, but I looked upon a silent town. The drizzle continued,
+spangled with dim lights, as far apart as currants in a cake sold at
+the Ladies’ Exchange.
+
+“A quiet place,” I said to myself, as my first shoe struck the ceiling
+of the occupant of the room beneath mine. “Nothing of the life here
+that gives color and variety to the cities in the East and West. Just a
+good, ordinary, humdrum, business town.”
+
+Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing centres of
+the country.  It is the fifth boot and shoe market in the United
+States, the largest candy and cracker manufacturing city in the South,
+and does an enormous wholesale drygoods, grocery, and drug business.
+
+
+I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and I assure you the
+digression brings as much tedium to me as it does to you. I was
+traveling elsewhere on my own business, but I had a commission from a
+Northern literary magazine to stop over there and establish a personal
+connection between the publication and one of its contributors, Azalea
+Adair.
+
+Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the handwriting) had
+sent in some essays (lost art!) and poems that had made the editors
+swear approvingly over their one o’clock luncheon. So they had
+commissioned me to round up said Adair and corner by contract his or
+her output at two cents a word before some other publisher offered her
+ten or twenty.
+
+At nine o’clock the next morning, after my chicken livers _en
+brochette_ (try them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into
+the drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first
+corner I came upon Uncle Cæsar. He was a stalwart Negro, older than the
+pyramids, with gray wool and a face that reminded me of Brutus, and a
+second afterwards of the late King Cettiwayo. He wore the most
+remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to see. It reached to
+his ankles and had once been a Confederate gray in colors. But rain and
+sun and age had so variegated it that Joseph’s coat, beside it, would
+have faded to a pale monochrome. I must linger with that coat, for it
+has to do with the story—the story that is so long in coming, because
+you can hardly expect anything to happen in Nashville.
+
+Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape of it
+had vanished, but all adown its front it had been frogged and tasseled
+magnificently. But now the frogs and tassles were gone. In their stead
+had been patiently stitched (I surmised by some surviving “black
+mammy”) new frogs made of cunningly twisted common hempen twine. This
+twine was frayed and disheveled. It must have been added to the coat as
+a substitute for vanished splendors, with tasteless but painstaking
+devotion, for it followed faithfully the curves of the long-missing
+frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its
+buttons were gone save one. The second button from the top alone
+remained. The coat was fastened by other twine strings tied through the
+buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in the opposite side. There
+was never such a weird garment so fantastically bedecked and of so many
+mottled hues. The lone button was the size of a half-dollar, made of
+yellow horn and sewed on with coarse twine.
+
+This Negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might have
+started a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two animals
+hitched to it. As I approached he threw open the door, drew out a
+feather duster, waved it without using it, and said in deep, rumbling
+tones:
+
+“Step right in, suh; ain’t a speck of dust in it—jus’ got back from a
+funeral, suh.”
+
+I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages were given an extra
+cleaning. I looked up and down the street and perceived that there was
+little choice among the vehicles for hire that lined the curb. I looked
+in my memorandum book for the address of Azalea Adair.
+
+“I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street,” I said, and was about to step
+into the hack. But for an instant the thick, long, gorilla-like arm of
+the old Negro barred me. On his massive and saturnine face a look of
+sudden suspicion and enmity flashed for a moment. Then, with quickly
+returning conviction, he asked blandishingly: “What are you gwine there
+for, boss?”
+
+“What is it to you?” I asked, a little sharply.
+
+“Nothin’, suh, jus’ nothin’. Only it’s a lonesome kind of part of town
+and few folks ever has business out there. Step right in. The seats is
+clean—jes’ got back from a funeral, suh.”
+
+A mile and a half it must have been to our journey’s end. I could hear
+nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient hack over the uneven
+brick paving; I could smell nothing but the drizzle, now further
+flavored with coal smoke and something like a mixture of tar and
+oleander blossoms. All I could see through the streaming windows were
+two rows of dim houses.
+
+The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets, of which
+137 miles are paved; a system of water-works that cost $2,000,000, with
+77 miles of mains.
+
+
+Eight-sixty-one Jessamine Street was a decayed mansion. Thirty yards
+back from the street it stood, outmerged in a splendid grove of trees
+and untrimmed shrubbery. A row of box bushes overflowed and almost hid
+the paling fence from sight; the gate was kept closed by a rope noose
+that encircled the gate post and the first paling of the gate. But when
+you got inside you saw that 861 was a shell, a shadow, a ghost of
+former grandeur and excellence. But in the story, I have not yet got
+inside.
+
+When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary quadrupeds came to
+a rest I handed my jehu his fifty cents with an additional quarter,
+feeling a glow of conscious generosity, as I did so. He refused it.
+
+“It’s two dollars, suh,” he said.
+
+“How’s that?” I asked. “I plainly heard you call out at the hotel:
+‘Fifty cents to any part of the town.’”
+
+“It’s two dollars, suh,” he repeated obstinately. “It’s a long ways
+from the hotel.”
+
+“It is within the city limits and well within them.” I argued. “Don’t
+think that you have picked up a greenhorn Yankee. Do you see those
+hills over there?” I went on, pointing toward the east (I could not see
+them, myself, for the drizzle); “well, I was born and raised on their
+other side. You old fool nigger, can’t you tell people from other
+people when you see ’em?”
+
+The grim face of King Cettiwayo softened. “Is you from the South, suh?
+I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. They is somethin’ sharp
+in the toes for a Southern gen’l’man to wear.”
+
+“Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?” said I inexorably.
+
+His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility, returned,
+remained ten seconds, and vanished.
+
+“Boss,” he said, “fifty cents is right; but I _needs_ two dollars, suh;
+I’m _obleeged_ to have two dollars. I ain’t _demandin’_ it now, suh;
+after I know whar you’s from; I’m jus’ sayin’ that I _has_ to have two
+dollars to-night, and business is mighty po’.”
+
+Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had been
+luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a greenhorn,
+ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance.
+
+“You confounded old rascal,” I said, reaching down to my pocket, “you
+ought to be turned over to the police.”
+
+For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; _he knew_. HE KNEW.
+
+I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed that
+one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand corner was
+missing, and it had been torn through the middle, but joined again. A
+strip of blue tissue paper, pasted over the split, preserved its
+negotiability.
+
+Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy, lifted
+the rope and opened a creaky gate.
+
+The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint brush had not touched it in
+twenty years. I could not see why a strong wind should not have bowled
+it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the trees that
+hugged it close—the trees that saw the battle of Nashville and still
+drew their protecting branches around it against storm and enemy and
+cold.
+
+Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descendant of the
+cavaliers, as thin and frail as the house she lived in, robed in the
+cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw, with an air as simple as a
+queen’s, received me.
+
+The reception room seemed a mile square, because there was nothing in
+it except some rows of books, on unpainted white-pine bookshelves, a
+cracked marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless horsehair sofa and two
+or three chairs. Yes, there was a picture on the wall, a colored crayon
+drawing of a cluster of pansies. I looked around for the portrait of
+Andrew Jackson and the pinecone hanging basket but they were not there.
+
+Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which will be repeated
+to you. She was a product of the old South, gently nurtured in the
+sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was deep and of
+splendid originality in its somewhat narrow scope. She had been
+educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived from
+inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of
+essayists made. While she talked to me I kept brushing my fingers,
+trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the
+half-calf backs of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne
+and Hood. She was exquisite, she was a valuable discovery. Nearly
+everybody nowadays knows too much—oh, so much too much—of real life.
+
+I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A house and a
+dress she had, not much else, I fancied. So, divided between my duty to
+the magazine and my loyalty to the poets and essayists who fought
+Thomas in the valley of the Cumberland, I listened to her voice, which
+was like a harpsichord’s, and found that I could not speak of
+contracts. In the presence of the nine Muses and the three Graces one
+hesitated to lower the topic to two cents. There would have to be
+another colloquy after I had regained my commercialism. But I spoke of
+my mission, and three o’clock of the next afternoon was set for the
+discussion of the business proposition.
+
+“Your town,” I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is the
+time for smooth generalities), “seems to be a quiet, sedate place. A
+home town, I should say, where few things out of the ordinary ever
+happen.”
+
+It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with the
+West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more
+than 2,000 barrels.
+
+
+Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.
+
+“I have never thought of it that way,” she said, with a kind of sincere
+intensity that seemed to belong to her. “Isn’t it in the still, quiet
+places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began to create the
+earth on the first Monday morning one could have leaned out one’s
+window and heard the drops of mud splashing from His trowel as He built
+up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world—I
+mean the building of the Tower of Babel—result in finally? A page and a
+half of Esperanto in the _North American Review_.”
+
+“Of course,” said I platitudinously, “human nature is the same
+everywhere; but there is more color—er—more drama and movement
+and—er—romance in some cities than in others.”
+
+“On the surface,” said Azalea Adair. “I have traveled many times around
+the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings—print and dreams. I
+have seen (on one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of Turkey bowstring
+with his own hands one of his wives who had uncovered her face in
+public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear up his theatre tickets
+because his wife was going out with her face covered—with rice powder.
+In San Francisco’s Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing Yee dipped
+slowly, inch by inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she would
+never see her American lover again. She gave in when the boiling oil
+had reached three inches above her knee. At a euchre party in East
+Nashville the other night I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her
+schoolmates and lifelong friends because she had married a house
+painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as her heart; but I wish
+you could have seen the fine little smile that she carried from table
+to table. Oh, yes, it is a humdrum town. Just a few miles of red brick
+houses and mud and lumber yards.”
+
+Some one knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea Adair
+breathed a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. She came
+back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush on her
+cheeks, and ten years lifted from her shoulders.
+
+“You must have a cup of tea before you go,” she said, “and a sugar
+cake.”
+
+She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small Negro
+girl about twelve, barefoot, not very tidy, glowering at me with thumb
+in mouth and bulging eyes.
+
+Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar bill, a
+dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn in two
+pieces, and pasted together again with a strip of blue tissue paper. It
+was one of the bills I had given the piratical Negro—there was no doubt
+about it.
+
+“Go up to Mr. Baker’s store on the corner, Impy,” she said, handing the
+girl the dollar bill, “and get a quarter of a pound of tea—the kind he
+always sends me—and ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry. The
+supply of tea in the house happens to be exhausted,” she explained to
+me.
+
+Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet had
+died away on the back porch, a wild shriek—I was sure it was
+hers—filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry
+man’s voice mingled with the girl’s further squeals and unintelligible
+words.
+
+Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared. For two
+minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man’s voice; then something
+like an oath and a slight scuffle, and she returned calmly to her
+chair.
+
+“This is a roomy house,” she said, “and I have a tenant for part of it.
+I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible
+to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow, Mr. Baker
+will be able to supply me.”
+
+I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I inquired
+concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After I was well on my
+way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair’s name. But
+to-morrow would do.
+
+That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this
+uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, but in
+that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an
+accomplice—after the fact, if that is the correct legal term—to a
+murder.
+
+As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of the
+polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the dungeony door
+of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster and began
+his ritual: “Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean—jus’ got back from
+a funeral. Fifty cents to any—”
+
+And then he knew me and grinned broadly. “’Scuse me, boss; you is de
+gen’l’man what rid out with me dis mawnin’. Thank you kindly, suh.”
+
+“I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at three,” said I,
+“and if you will be here, I’ll let you drive me. So you know Miss
+Adair?” I concluded, thinking of my dollar bill.
+
+“I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh,” he replied.
+
+“I judge that she is pretty poor,” I said. “She hasn’t much money to
+speak of, has she?”
+
+For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King
+Cettiwayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old Negro hack
+driver.
+
+“She ain’t gwine to starve, suh,” he said slowly. “She has reso’ces,
+suh; she has reso’ces.”
+
+“I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,” said I.
+
+“Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,” he answered humbly. “I jus’ _had_ to
+have dat two dollars dis mawnin’, boss.”
+
+I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: “A.
+Adair holds out for eight cents a word.”
+
+The answer that came back was: “Give it to her quick you duffer.”
+
+Just before dinner “Major” Wentworth Caswell bore down upon me with the
+greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men whom I have so
+instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was
+standing at the bar when he invaded me; therefore I could not wave the
+white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly for the drinks,
+hoping, thereby, to escape another; but he was one of those despicable,
+roaring, advertising bibbers who must have brass bands and fireworks
+attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.
+
+With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills from a
+pocket and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once more at the
+dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn through the
+middle, and patched with a strip of blue tissue paper. It was my dollar
+bill again. It could have been no other.
+
+I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary,
+eventless Southern town had made me tired and listless. I remember that
+just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of the mysterious dollar
+bill (which might have formed the clew to a tremendously fine detective
+story of San Francisco) by saying to myself sleepily: “Seems as if a
+lot of people here own stock in the Hack-Driver’s Trust. Pays dividends
+promptly, too. Wonder if—” Then I fell asleep.
+
+King Cettiwayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones over
+the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back again when I
+was ready.
+
+Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had looked
+on the day before. After she had signed the contract at eight cents per
+word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair. Without
+much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian horsehair sofa
+and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the coffee-colored
+Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not expected in him,
+he abandoned his team and struck off up the street afoot, realizing the
+value of speed. In ten minutes he returned with a grave, gray-haired
+and capable man of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight
+cents each) I explained to him my presence in the hollow house of
+mystery. He bowed with stately understanding, and turned to the old
+Negro.
+
+“Uncle Cæsar,” he said calmly, “Run up to my house and ask Miss Lucy to
+give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler of port
+wine. And hurry back. Don’t drive—run. I want you to get back sometime
+this week.”
+
+It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the
+speeding powers of the land-pirate’s steeds. After Uncle Cæsar was
+gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me
+over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he had
+decided that I might do.
+
+“It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,” he said. “In other
+words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell has
+many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she will accept
+nothing except from that old Negro, Uncle Cæsar, who was once owned by
+her family.”
+
+“Mrs. Caswell!” said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract
+and saw that she had signed it “Azalea Adair Caswell.”
+
+“I thought she was Miss Adair,” I said.
+
+“Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,” said the doctor. “It is
+said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant
+contributes toward her support.”
+
+When the milk and wine had been brought the doctor soon revived Azalea
+Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the autumn leaves that
+were then in season, and their height of color. She referred lightly to
+her fainting seizure as the outcome of an old palpitation of the heart.
+Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa. The doctor was due elsewhere,
+and I followed him to the door. I told him that it was within my power
+and intentions to make a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on
+future contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased.
+
+“By the way,” he said, “perhaps you would like to know that you have
+had royalty for a coachman. Old Cæsar’s grandfather was a king in
+Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you may have observed.”
+
+As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar’s voice inside: “Did
+he get bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis’ Zalea?”
+
+“Yes, Cæsar,” I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I went in
+and concluded business negotiations with our contributor. I assumed the
+responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a necessary
+formality in binding our bargain. And then Uncle Cæsar drove me back to
+the hotel.
+
+Here ends all of the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The
+rest must be only bare statements of facts.
+
+At about six o’clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Cæsar was at his
+corner. He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his duster
+and began his depressing formula: “Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to
+anywhere in the city—hack’s puffickly clean, suh—jus’ got back from a
+funeral—”
+
+And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad. His
+coat had taken on a few more faded shades of color, the twine strings
+were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button—the button of
+yellow horn—was gone. A motley descendant of kings was Uncle Cæsar!
+
+About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front of a
+drug store. In a desert where nothing happens this was manna; so I
+wedged my way inside. On an extemporized couch of empty boxes and
+chairs was stretched the mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth
+Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the immortal ingredient. His
+decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence.
+
+The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by
+curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The late human being
+had been engaged in terrific battle—the details showed that. Loafer and
+reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior. But he had
+lost. His hands were yet clinched so tightly that his fingers would not
+be opened. The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and
+searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were
+possible, to speak of him. One kind-looking man said, after much
+thought: “When ‘Cas’ was about fo’teen he was one of the best spellers
+in school.”
+
+While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of “the man that was”
+which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and dropped
+something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little
+later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last
+struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held it
+in a death grip.
+
+At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the
+possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of
+Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:
+
+“In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these
+no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this afternoon
+which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found
+the money was not on his person.”
+
+I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing
+the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow
+horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends
+of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the
+slow, muddy waters below.
+
+_I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo!_
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER
+
+
+If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can go to the top
+of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet below, and
+despise them as insects. Like the irresponsible black waterbugs on
+summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically
+without aim or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable
+intelligence of ants, for ants always know when they are going home.
+The ant is of a lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his
+slippers on while you are left at your elevated station.
+
+Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a
+creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires,
+bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black
+specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than your thumb.
+
+From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to an
+unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives;
+the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth itself a lost golf ball.
+All the minutiae of life are gone. The philosopher gazes into the
+infinite heavens above him, and allows his soul to expand to the
+influence of his new view. He feels that he is the heir to Eternity and
+the child of Time. Space, too, should be his by the right of his
+immortal heritage, and he thrills at the thought that some day his kind
+shall traverse those mysterious aerial roads between planet and planet.
+The tiny world beneath his feet upon which this towering structure of
+steel rests as a speck of dust upon a Himalayan mountain—it is but one
+of a countless number of such whirling atoms. What are the ambitions,
+the achievements, the paltry conquests and loves of those restless
+black insects below compared with the serene and awful immensity of the
+universe that lies above and around their insignificant city?
+
+It is guaranteed that the philosopher will have these thoughts. They
+have been expressly compiled from the philosophies of the world and set
+down with the proper interrogation point at the end of them to
+represent the invariable musings of deep thinkers on high places. And
+when the philosopher takes the elevator down his mind is broader, his
+heart is at peace, and his conception of the cosmogony of creation is
+as wide as the buckle of Orion’s summer belt.
+
+But if your name happened to be Daisy, and you worked in an Eighth
+Avenue candy store and lived in a little cold hall bedroom, five feet
+by eight, and earned $6 per week, and ate ten-cent lunches and were
+nineteen years old, and got up at 6.30 and worked till 9, and never had
+studied philosophy, maybe things wouldn’t look that way to you from the
+top of a skyscraper.
+
+Two sighed for the hand of Daisy, the unphilosophical. One was Joe, who
+kept the smallest store in New York. It was about the size of a
+tool-box of the D. P. W., and was stuck like a swallow’s nest against a
+corner of a down-town skyscraper. Its stock consisted of fruit,
+candies, newspapers, song books, cigarettes, and lemonade in season.
+When stern winter shook his congealed locks and Joe had to move himself
+and the fruit inside, there was exactly room in the store for the
+proprietor, his wares, a stove the size of a vinegar cruet, and one
+customer.
+
+Joe was not of the nation that keeps us forever in a furore with fugues
+and fruit. He was a capable American youth who was laying by money, and
+wanted Daisy to help him spend it. Three times he had asked her.
+
+“I got money saved up, Daisy,” was his love song; “and you know how bad
+I want you. That store of mine ain’t very big, but—”
+
+“Oh, ain’t it?” would be the antiphony of the unphilosophical one.
+“Why, I heard Wanamaker’s was trying to get you to sublet part of your
+floor space to them for next year.”
+
+Daisy passed Joe’s corner every morning and evening.
+
+“Hello, Two-by-Four!” was her usual greeting. “Seems to me your store
+looks emptier. You must have sold a pack of chewing gum.”
+
+“Ain’t much room in here, sure,” Joe would answer, with his slow grin,
+“except for you, Daise. Me and the store are waitin’ for you whenever
+you’ll take us. Don’t you think you might before long?”
+
+“Store!”—a fine scorn was expressed by Daisy’s uptilted nose—“sardine
+box! Waitin’ for me, you say? Gee! you’d have to throw out about a
+hundred pounds of candy before I could get inside of it, Joe.”
+
+“I wouldn’t mind an even swap like that,” said Joe, complimentary.
+
+Daisy’s existence was limited in every way. She had to walk sideways
+between the counter and the shelves in the candy store. In her own hall
+bedroom coziness had been carried close to cohesiveness. The walls were
+so near to one another that the paper on them made a perfect Babel of
+noise. She could light the gas with one hand and close the door with
+the other without taking her eyes off the reflection of her brown
+pompadour in the mirror. She had Joe’s picture in a gilt frame on the
+dresser, and sometimes—but her next thought would always be of Joe’s
+funny little store tacked like a soap box to the corner of that great
+building, and away would go her sentiment in a breeze of laughter.
+
+Daisy’s other suitor followed Joe by several months. He came to board
+in the house where she lived. His name was Dabster, and he was a
+philosopher. Though young, attainments stood out upon him like
+continental labels on a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case. Knowledge he had
+kidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of useful information; but as
+for wisdom, when she passed he was left sniffling in the road without
+so much as the number of her motor car. He could and would tell you the
+proportion of water and muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the
+shortest verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails
+required to fasten 256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the
+population of Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of Mr.
+H. McKay Twombly’s second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac
+Tunnel, the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway
+post-office messenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and
+the number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.
+
+The weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster. His statistics were
+the sprigs of parsley with which he garnished the feast of small talk
+that he would set before you if he conceived that to be your taste. And
+again he used them as breastworks in foraging at the boardinghouse.
+Firing at you a volley of figures concerning the weight of a lineal
+foot of bar-iron 5 × 2¾ inches, and the average annual rainfall at Fort
+Snelling, Minn., he would transfix with his fork the best piece of
+chicken on the dish while you were trying to rally sufficiently to ask
+him weakly why does a hen cross the road.
+
+Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a measure of good
+looks, of a hair-oily, shopping-district-at-three-in-the-afternoon
+kind, it seems that Joe, of the Lilliputian emporium, had a rival
+worthy of his steel. But Joe carried no steel. There wouldn’t have been
+room in his store to draw it if he had.
+
+One Saturday afternoon, about four o’clock, Daisy and Mr. Dabster
+stopped before Joe’s booth. Dabster wore a silk hat, and—well, Daisy
+was a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its box until
+Joe had seen it. A stick of pineapple chewing gum was the ostensible
+object of the call. Joe supplied it through the open side of his store.
+He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.
+
+“Mr. Dabster’s going to take me on top of the building to observe the
+view,” said Daisy, after she had introduced her admirers. “I never was
+on a skyscraper. I guess it must be awfully nice and funny up there.”
+
+“H’m!” said Joe.
+
+“The panorama,” said Mr. Dabster, “exposed to the gaze from the top of
+a lofty building is not only sublime, but instructive. Miss Daisy has a
+decided pleasure in store for her.”
+
+“It’s windy up there, too, as well as here,” said Joe. “Are you dressed
+warm enough, Daise?”
+
+“Sure thing! I’m all lined,” said Daisy, smiling slyly at his clouded
+brow. “You look just like a mummy in a case, Joe. Ain’t you just put in
+an invoice of a pint of peanuts or another apple? Your stock looks
+awful over-stocked.”
+
+Daisy giggled at her favorite joke; and Joe had to smile with her.
+
+“Your quarters are somewhat limited, Mr.—er—er,” remarked Dabster, “in
+comparison with the size of this building. I understand the area of its
+side to be about 340 by 100 feet. That would make you occupy a
+proportionate space as if half of Beloochistan were placed upon a
+territory as large as the United States east of the Rocky Mountains,
+with the Province of Ontario and Belgium added.”
+
+“Is that so, sport?” said Joe, genially. “You are Weisenheimer on
+figures, all right. How many square pounds of baled hay do you think a
+jackass could eat if he stopped brayin’ long enough to keep still a
+minute and five eighths?”
+
+A few minutes later Daisy and Mr. Dabster stepped from an elevator to
+the top floor of the skyscraper. Then up a short, steep stairway and
+out upon the roof. Dabster led her to the parapet so she could look
+down at the black dots moving in the street below.
+
+“What are they?” she asked, trembling. She had never been on a height
+like this before.
+
+And then Dabster must needs play the philosopher on the tower, and
+conduct her soul forth to meet the immensity of space.
+
+“Bipeds,” he said, solemnly. “See what they become even at the small
+elevation of 340 feet—mere crawling insects going to and fro at
+random.”
+
+“Oh, they ain’t anything of the kind,” exclaimed Daisy,
+suddenly—“they’re folks! I saw an automobile. Oh, gee! are we that high
+up?”
+
+“Walk over this way,” said Dabster.
+
+He showed her the great city lying like an orderly array of toys far
+below, starred here and there, early as it was, by the first beacon
+lights of the winter afternoon. And then the bay and sea to the south
+and east vanishing mysteriously into the sky.
+
+“I don’t like it,” declared Daisy, with troubled blue eyes. “Say we go
+down.”
+
+But the philosopher was not to be denied his opportunity. He would let
+her behold the grandeur of his mind, the half-nelson he had on the
+infinite, and the memory he had for statistics. And then she would
+nevermore be content to buy chewing gum at the smallest store in New
+York. And so he began to prate of the smallness of human affairs, and
+how that even so slight a removal from earth made man and his works
+look like one tenth part of a dollar thrice computed. And that one
+should consider the sidereal system and the maxims of Epictetus and be
+comforted.
+
+“You don’t carry me with you,” said Daisy. “Say, I think it’s awful to
+be up so high that folks look like fleas. One of them we saw might have
+been Joe. Why, Jiminy! we might as well be in New Jersey! Say, I’m
+afraid up here!”
+
+The philosopher smiled fatuously.
+
+“The earth,” said he, “is itself only as a grain of wheat in space.
+Look up there.”
+
+Daisy gazed upward apprehensively. The short day was spent and the
+stars were coming out above.
+
+“Yonder star,” said Dabster, “is Venus, the evening star. She is
+66,000,000 miles from the sun.”
+
+“Fudge!” said Daisy, with a brief flash of spirit, “where do you think
+I come from—Brooklyn? Susie Price, in our store—her brother sent her a
+ticket to go to San Francisco—that’s only three thousand miles.”
+
+The philosopher smiled indulgently.
+
+“Our world,” he said, “is 91,000,000 miles from the sun. There are
+eighteen stars of the first magnitude that are 211,000 times further
+from us than the sun is. If one of them should be extinguished it would
+be three years before we would see its light go out. There are six
+thousand stars of the sixth magnitude. It takes thirty-six years for
+the light of one of them to reach the earth. With an eighteen-foot
+telescope we can see 43,000,000 stars, including those of the
+thirteenth magnitude, whose light takes 2,700 years to reach us. Each
+of these stars—”
+
+“You’re lyin’,” cried Daisy, angrily. “You’re tryin’ to scare me. And
+you have; I want to go down!”
+
+She stamped her foot.
+
+“Arcturus—” began the philosopher, soothingly, but he was interrupted
+by a demonstration out of the vastness of the nature that he was
+endeavoring to portray with his memory instead of his heart. For to the
+heart-expounder of nature the stars were set in the firmament expressly
+to give soft light to lovers wandering happily beneath them; and if you
+stand tiptoe some September night with your sweetheart on your arm you
+can almost touch them with your hand. Three years for their light to
+reach us, indeed!
+
+Out of the west leaped a meteor, lighting the roof of the skyscraper
+almost to midday. Its fiery parabola was limned against the sky toward
+the east. It hissed as it went, and Daisy screamed.
+
+“Take me down,” she cried, vehemently, “you—you mental arithmetic!”
+
+Dabster got her to the elevator, and inside of it. She was wild-eyed,
+and she shuddered when the express made its debilitating drop.
+
+Outside the revolving door of the skyscraper the philosopher lost her.
+She vanished; and he stood, bewildered, without figures or statistics
+to aid him.
+
+Joe had a lull in trade, and by squirming among his stock succeeded in
+lighting a cigarette and getting one cold foot against the attenuated
+stove.
+
+The door was burst open, and Daisy, laughing, crying, scattering fruit
+and candies, tumbled into his arms.
+
+“Oh, Joe, I’ve been up on the skyscraper. Ain’t it cozy and warm and
+homelike in here! I’m ready for you, Joe, whenever you want me.”
+
+
+
+
+XV
+A BIRD OF BAGDAD
+
+
+Without a doubt much of the spirit and genius of the Caliph Harun Al
+Rashid descended to the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg.
+
+Quigg’s restaurant is in Fourth Avenue—that street that the city seems
+to have forgotten in its growth. Fourth Avenue—born and bred in the
+Bowery—staggers northward full of good resolutions.
+
+Where it crosses Fourteenth Street it struts for a brief moment proudly
+in the glare of the museums and cheap theatres. It may yet become a fit
+mate for its high-born sister boulevard to the west, or its roaring,
+polyglot, broad-waisted cousin to the east. It passes Union Square; and
+here the hoofs of the dray horses seem to thunder in unison, recalling
+the tread of marching hosts—Hooray! But now come the silent and
+terrible mountains—buildings square as forts, high as the clouds,
+shutting out the sky, where thousands of slaves bend over desks all
+day. On the ground floors are only little fruit shops and laundries and
+book shops, where you see copies of “Littell’s Living Age” and G. W. M.
+Reynold’s novels in the windows. And next—poor Fourth Avenue!—the
+street glides into a mediaeval solitude. On each side are shops devoted
+to “Antiques.”
+
+Let us say it is night. Men in rusty armor stand in the windows and
+menace the hurrying cars with raised, rusty iron gauntlets. Hauberks
+and helms, blunderbusses, Cromwellian breastplates, matchlocks,
+creeses, and the swords and daggers of an army of dead-and-gone
+gallants gleam dully in the ghostly light. Here and there from a corner
+saloon (lit with Jack-o’-lanterns or phosphorus), stagger forth
+shuddering, home-bound citizens, nerved by the tankards within to their
+fearsome journey adown that eldrich avenue lined with the bloodstained
+weapons of the fighting dead. What street could live inclosed by these
+mortuary relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken
+hearts scarce one good whoop or tra-la-la remained?
+
+Not Fourth Avenue. Not after the tinsel but enlivening glories of the
+Little Rialto—not after the echoing drum-beats of Union Square. There
+need be no tears, ladies and gentlemen; ’tis but the suicide of a
+street. With a shriek and a crash Fourth Avenue dives headlong into the
+tunnel at Thirty-fourth and is never seen again.
+
+Near the sad scene of the thoroughfare’s dissolution stood the modest
+restaurant of Quigg. It stands there yet if you care to view its
+crumbling red-brick front, its show window heaped with oranges,
+tomatoes, layer cakes, pies, canned asparagus—its papier-mâché lobster
+and two Maltese kittens asleep on a bunch of lettuce—if you care to sit
+at one of the little tables upon whose cloth has been traced in the
+yellowest of coffee stains the trail of the Japanese advance—to sit
+there with one eye on your umbrella and the other upon the bogus bottle
+from which you drop the counterfeit sauce foisted upon us by the cursed
+charlatan who assumes to be our dear old lord and friend, the “Nobleman
+in India.”
+
+Quigg’s title came through his mother. One of her ancestors was a
+Margravine of Saxony. His father was a Tammany brave. On account of the
+dilution of his heredity he found that he could neither become a
+reigning potentate nor get a job in the City Hall. So he opened a
+restaurant. He was a man full of thought and reading. The business gave
+him a living, though he gave it little attention. One side of his house
+bequeathed to him a poetic and romantic adventure. The other gave him
+the restless spirit that made him seek adventure. By day he was Quigg,
+the restaurateur. By night he was the Margrave—the Caliph—the Prince of
+Bohemia—going about the city in search of the odd, the mysterious, the
+inexplicable, the recondite.
+
+One night at 9, at which hour the restaurant closed, Quigg set forth
+upon his quest. There was a mingling of the foreign, the military and
+the artistic in his appearance as he buttoned his coat high up under
+his short-trimmed brown and gray beard and turned westward toward the
+more central life conduits of the city. In his pocket he had stored an
+assortment of cards, written upon, without which he never stirred out
+of doors. Each of those cards was good at his own restaurant for its
+face value. Some called simply for a bowl of soup or sandwiches and
+coffee; others entitled their bearer to one, two, three or more days of
+full meals; a few were for single regular meals; a very few were, in
+effect, meal tickets good for a week.
+
+Of riches and power Margrave Quigg had none; but he had a Caliph’s
+heart—it may be forgiven him if his head fell short of the measure of
+Harun Al Rashid’s. Perhaps some of the gold pieces in Bagdad had put
+less warmth and hope into the complainants among the bazaars than had
+Quigg’s beef stew among the fishermen and one-eyed calenders of
+Manhattan.
+
+Continuing his progress in search of romance to divert him, or of
+distress that he might aid, Quigg became aware of a fast-gathering
+crowd that whooped and fought and eddied at a corner of Broadway and
+the crosstown street that he was traversing. Hurrying to the spot he
+beheld a young man of an exceedingly melancholy and preoccupied
+demeanor engaged in the pastime of casting silver money from his
+pockets in the middle of the street. With each motion of the generous
+one’s hand the crowd huddled upon the falling largesse with yells of
+joy. Traffic was suspended. A policeman in the centre of the mob
+stooped often to the ground as he urged the blockaders to move on.
+
+The Margrave saw at a glance that here was food for his hunger after
+knowledge concerning abnormal working of the human heart. He made his
+way swiftly to the young man’s side and took his arm. “Come with me at
+once,” he said, in the low but commanding voice that his waiters had
+learned to fear.
+
+“Pinched,” remarked the young man, looking up at him with
+expressionless eyes. “Pinched by a painless dentist. Take me away,
+flatty, and give me gas. Some lay eggs and some lay none. When is a
+hen?”
+
+Still deeply seized by some inward grief, but tractable, he allowed
+Quigg to lead him away and down the street to a little park.
+
+There, seated on a bench, he upon whom a corner of the great Caliph’s
+mantle has descended, spake with kindness and discretion, seeking to
+know what evil had come upon the other, disturbing his soul and driving
+him to such ill-considered and ruinous waste of his substance and
+stores.
+
+“I was doing the Monte Cristo act as adapted by Pompton, N. J., wasn’t
+I?” asked the young man.
+
+“You were throwing small coins into the street for the people to
+scramble after,” said the Margrave.
+
+“That’s it. You buy all the beer you can hold, and then you throw
+chicken feed to— Oh, curse that word chicken, and hens, feathers,
+roosters, eggs, and everything connected with it!”
+
+“Young sir,” said the Margrave kindly, but with dignity, “though I do
+not ask your confidence, I invite it. I know the world and I know
+humanity. Man is my study, though I do not eye him as the scientist
+eyes a beetle or as the philanthropist gazes at the objects of his
+bounty—through a veil of theory and ignorance. It is my pleasure and
+distraction to interest myself in the peculiar and complicated
+misfortunes that life in a great city visits upon my fellow-men. You
+may be familiar with the history of that glorious and immortal ruler,
+the Caliph Harun Al Rashid, whose wise and beneficent excursions among
+his people in the city of Bagdad secured him the privilege of relieving
+so much of their distress. In my humble way I walk in his footsteps. I
+seek for romance and adventure in city streets—not in ruined castles or
+in crumbling palaces. To me the greatest marvels of magic are those
+that take place in men’s hearts when acted upon by the furious and
+diverse forces of a crowded population. In your strange behavior this
+evening I fancy a story lurks. I read in your act something deeper than
+the wanton wastefulness of a spendthrift. I observe in your countenance
+the certain traces of consuming grief or despair. I repeat—I invite
+your confidence. I am not without some power to alleviate and advise.
+Will you not trust me?”
+
+“Gee, how you talk!” exclaimed the young man, a gleam of admiration
+supplanting for a moment the dull sadness of his eyes. “You’ve got the
+Astor Library skinned to a synopsis of preceding chapters. I mind that
+old Turk you speak of. I read ‘The Arabian Nights’ when I was a kid. He
+was a kind of Bill Devery and Charlie Schwab rolled into one. But, say,
+you might wave enchanted dishrags and make copper bottles smoke up coon
+giants all night without ever touching me. My case won’t yield to that
+kind of treatment.”
+
+“If I could hear your story,” said the Margrave, with his lofty,
+serious smile.
+
+“I’ll spiel it in about nine words,” said the young man, with a deep
+sigh, “but I don’t think you can help me any. Unless you’re a peach at
+guessing it’s back to the Bosphorus for you on your magic linoleum.”
+
+THE STORY OF THE YOUNG MAN AND THE HARNESS MAKER’S RIDDLE
+
+
+“I work in Hildebrant’s saddle and harness shop down in Grant Street.
+I’ve worked there five years. I get $18 a week. That’s enough to marry
+on, ain’t it? Well, I’m not going to get married. Old Hildebrant is one
+of these funny Dutchmen—you know the kind—always getting off bum jokes.
+He’s got about a million riddles and things that he faked from Rogers
+Brothers’ great-grandfather. Bill Watson works there, too. Me and Bill
+have to stand for them chestnuts day after day. Why do we do it? Well,
+jobs ain’t to be picked off every Anheuser bush— And then there’s
+Laura.
+
+“What? The old man’s daughter. Comes in the shop every day. About
+nineteen, and the picture of the blonde that sits on the palisades of
+the Rhine and charms the clam-diggers into the surf. Hair the color of
+straw matting, and eyes as black and shiny as the best harness
+blacking—think of that!
+
+“Me? well, it’s either me or Bill Watson. She treats us both equal.
+Bill is all to the psychopathic about her; and me?—well, you saw me
+plating the roadbed of the Great Maroon Way with silver to-night. That
+was on account of Laura. I was spiflicated, Your Highness, and I wot
+not of what I wouldst.
+
+“How? Why, old Hildebrandt says to me and Bill this afternoon: ‘Boys,
+one riddle have I for you gehabt haben. A young man who cannot riddles
+antworten, he is not so good by business for ein family to provide—is
+not that—hein?’ And he hands us a riddle—a conundrum, some calls it—and
+he chuckles interiorly and gives both of us till to-morrow morning to
+work out the answer to it. And he says whichever of us guesses the
+repartee end of it goes to his house o’ Wednesday night to his
+daughter’s birthday party. And it means Laura for whichever of us goes,
+for she’s naturally aching for a husband, and it’s either me or Bill
+Watson, for old Hildebrant likes us both, and wants her to marry
+somebody that’ll carry on the business after he’s stitched his last
+pair of traces.
+
+“The riddle? Why, it was this: ‘What kind of a hen lays the longest?
+Think of that! What kind of a hen lays the longest? Ain’t it like a
+Dutchman to risk a man’s happiness on a fool proposition like that?
+Now, what’s the use? What I don’t know about hens would fill several
+incubators. You say you’re giving imitations of the old Arab guy that
+gave away—libraries in Bagdad. Well, now, can you whistle up a fairy
+that’ll solve this hen query, or not?”
+
+When the young man ceased the Margrave arose and paced to and fro by
+the park bench for several minutes. Finally he sat again, and said, in
+grave and impressive tones:
+
+“I must confess, sir, that during the eight years that I have spent in
+search of adventure and in relieving distress I have never encountered
+a more interesting or a more perplexing case. I fear that I have
+overlooked hens in my researches and observations. As to their habits,
+their times and manner of laying, their many varieties and
+cross-breedings, their span of life, their—”
+
+“Oh, don’t make an Ibsen drama of it!” interrupted the young man,
+flippantly. “Riddles—especially old Hildebrant’s riddles—don’t have to
+be worked out seriously. They are light themes such as Sim Ford and
+Harry Thurston Peck like to handle. But, somehow, I can’t strike just
+the answer. Bill Watson may, and he may not. To-morrow will tell. Well,
+Your Majesty, I’m glad anyhow that you butted in and whiled the time
+away. I guess Mr. Al Rashid himself would have bounced back if one of
+his constituents had conducted him up against this riddle. I’ll say
+good night. Peace fo’ yours, and what-you-may-call-its of Allah.”
+
+The Margrave, still with a gloomy air, held out his hand.
+
+“I cannot express my regret,” he said, sadly. “Never before have I
+found myself unable to assist in some way. ‘What kind of a hen lays the
+longest? It is a baffling problem. There is a hen, I believe, called
+the Plymouth Rock that—”
+
+“Cut it out,” said the young man. “The Caliph trade is a mighty serious
+one. I don’t suppose you’d even see anything funny in a preacher’s
+defense of John D. Rockefeller. Well, good night, Your Nibs.”
+
+From habit the Margrave began to fumble in his pockets. He drew forth a
+card and handed it to the young man.
+
+“Do me the favor to accept this, anyhow,” he said. “The time may come
+when it might be of use to you.”
+
+“Thanks!” said the young man, pocketing it carelessly. “My name is
+Simmons.”
+
+
+Shame to him who would hint that the reader’s interest shall altogether
+pursue the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg. I am indeed
+astray if my hand fail in keeping the way where my peruser’s heart
+would follow. Then let us, on the morrow, peep quickly in at the door
+of Hildebrant, harness maker.
+
+Hildebrant’s 200 pounds reposed on a bench, silver-buckling a raw
+leather martingale.
+
+Bill Watson came in first.
+
+“Vell,” said Hildebrant, shaking all over with the vile conceit of the
+joke-maker, “haf you guessed him? ‘Vat kind of a hen lays der
+longest?’”
+
+“Er—why, I think so,” said Bill, rubbing a servile chin. “I think so,
+Mr. Hildebrant—the one that lives the longest— Is that right?”
+
+“Nein!” said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently. “You haf not
+guessed der answer.”
+
+Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and bachelorhood.
+
+In came the young man of the Arabian Night’s fiasco—pale, melancholy,
+hopeless.
+
+“Vell,” said Hildebrant, “haf you guessed him? ‘Vat kind of a hen lays
+der longest?’”
+
+Simmons regarded him with dull savagery in his eye. Should he curse
+this mountain of pernicious humor—curse him and die? Why should— But
+there was Laura.
+
+Dogged, speechless, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and
+stood. His hand encountered the strange touch of the Margrave’s card.
+He drew it out and looked at it, as men about to be hanged look at a
+crawling fly. There was written on it in Quigg’s bold, round hand:
+“Good for one roast chicken to bearer.”
+
+Simmons looked up with a flashing eye.
+
+“A dead one!” said he.
+
+“Goot!” roared Hildebrant, rocking the table with giant glee. “Dot is
+right! You gome at mine house at 8 o’clock to der party.”
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON
+
+
+There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and
+newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young
+journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic
+view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to
+very questionable sources—facts and philosophy. We will begin
+with—whichever you choose to call it.
+
+Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope
+under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish
+sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits’ end. We exhaust our
+paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep.
+Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we
+call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands them
+except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.
+
+Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion,
+and the Twenty-fifth of December.
+
+On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her
+rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire’s palace on the
+Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without finding
+the lost treasure. The child was a girl of five, and one of those
+perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthy
+parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar, inexpensive toy
+instead of upon diamond-studded automobiles and pony phaetons.
+
+The Child grieved sorely and truly, a thing inexplicable to the
+Millionaire, to whom the rag-doll market was about as interesting as
+Bay State Gas; and to the Lady, the Child’s mother, who was all
+form—that is, nearly all, as you shall see.
+
+The Child cried inconsolably, and grew hollow-eyed, knock-kneed,
+spindling, and corykilverty in many other respects. The Millionaire
+smiled and tapped his coffers confidently. The pick of the output of
+the French and German toymakers was rushed by special delivery to the
+mansion; but Rachel refused to be comforted. She was weeping for her
+rag child, and was for a high protective tariff against all foreign
+foolishness. Then doctors with the finest bedside manners and
+stop-watches were called in. One by one they chattered futilely about
+peptomanganate of iron and sea voyages and hypophosphites until their
+stop-watches showed that Bill Rendered was under the wire for show or
+place. Then, as men, they advised that the rag-doll be found as soon as
+possible and restored to its mourning parent. The Child sniffed at
+therapeutics, chewed a thumb, and wailed for her Betsy. And all this
+time cablegrams were coming from Santa Claus saying that he would soon
+be here and enjoining us to show a true Christian spirit and let up on
+the pool-rooms and tontine policies and platoon systems long enough to
+give him a welcome. Everywhere the spirit of Christmas was diffusing
+itself. The banks were refusing loans, the pawn-brokers had doubled
+their gang of helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with red
+sleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on the bars while you
+waited on one foot, holly-wreaths of hospitality were hung in windows
+of the stores, they who had ’em were getting their furs. You hardly
+knew which was the best bet in balls—three, high, moth, or snow. It was
+no time at which to lose the rag-doll or your heart.
+
+If Doctor Watson’s investigating friend had been called in to solve
+this mysterious disappearance he might have observed on the
+Millionaire’s wall a copy of “The Vampire.” That would have quickly
+suggested, by induction, “A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” “Flip,”
+a Scotch terrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child’s heart, frisked
+through the halls. The hank of hair! Aha! X, the unfound quantity,
+represented the rag-doll. But, the bone? Well, when dogs find bones
+they—Done! It were an easy and a fruitful task to examine Flip’s
+forefeet. Look, Watson! Earth—dried earth between the toes. Of course,
+the dog—but Sherlock was not there. Therefore it devolves. But
+topography and architecture must intervene.
+
+The Millionaire’s palace occupied a lordly space. In front of it was a
+lawn close-mowed as a South Ireland man’s face two days after a shave.
+At one side of it, and fronting on another street was a pleasaunce
+trimmed to a leaf, and the garage and stables. The Scotch pup had
+ravished the rag-doll from the nursery, dragged it to a corner of the
+lawn, dug a hole, and buried it after the manner of careless
+undertakers. There you have the mystery solved, and no checks to write
+for the hypodermical wizard or fi’-pun notes to toss to the sergeant.
+Then let’s get down to the heart of the thing, tiresome readers—the
+Christmas heart of the thing.
+
+Fuzzy was drunk—not riotously or helplessly or loquaciously, as you or
+I might get, but decently, appropriately, and inoffensively, as becomes
+a gentleman down on his luck.
+
+Fuzzy was a soldier of misfortune. The road, the haystack, the park
+bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynary
+beds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignobly
+garnered largesse of great cities—these formed the chapters of his
+history.
+
+Fuzzy walked toward the river, down the street that bounded one side of
+the Millionaire’s house and grounds. He saw a leg of Betsy, the lost
+rag-doll, protruding, like the clue to a Lilliputian murder mystery,
+from its untimely grave in a corner of the fence. He dragged forth the
+maltreated infant, tucked it under his arm, and went on his way
+crooning a road song of his brethren that no doll that has been brought
+up to the sheltered life should hear. Well for Betsy that she had no
+ears. And well that she had no eyes save unseeing circles of black; for
+the faces of Fuzzy and the Scotch terrier were those of brothers, and
+the heart of no rag-doll could withstand twice to become the prey of
+such fearsome monsters.
+
+Though you may not know it, Grogan’s saloon stands near the river and
+near the foot of the street down which Fuzzy traveled. In Grogan’s,
+Christmas cheer was already rampant.
+
+Fuzzy entered with his doll. He fancied that as a mummer at the feast
+of Saturn he might earn a few drops from the wassail cup.
+
+He set Betsy on the bar and addressed her loudly and humorously,
+seasoning his speech with exaggerated compliments and endearments, as
+one entertaining his lady friend. The loafers and bibbers around caught
+the farce of it, and roared. The bartender gave Fuzzy a drink. Oh, many
+of us carry rag-dolls.
+
+“One for the lady?” suggested Fuzzy impudently, and tucked another
+contribution to Art beneath his waistcoat.
+
+He began to see possibilities in Betsy. His first-night had been a
+success. Visions of a vaudeville circuit about town dawned upon him.
+
+In a group near the stove sat “Pigeon” McCarthy, Black Riley, and
+“One-ear” Mike, well and unfavorably known in the tough shoestring
+district that blackened the left bank of the river. They passed a
+newspaper back and forth among themselves. The item that each solid and
+blunt forefinger pointed out was an advertisement headed “One Hundred
+Dollars Reward.” To earn it one must return the rag-doll lost, strayed,
+or stolen from the Millionaire’s mansion. It seemed that grief still
+ravaged, unchecked, in the bosom of the too faithful Child. Flip, the
+terrier, capered and shook his absurd whisker before her, powerless to
+distract. She wailed for her Betsy in the faces of walking, talking,
+mama-ing, and eye-closing French Mabelles and Violettes. The
+advertisement was a last resort.
+
+Black Riley came from behind the stove and approached Fuzzy in his
+one-sided parabolic way.
+
+The Christmas mummer, flushed with success, had tucked Betsy under his
+arm, and was about to depart to the filling of impromptu dates
+elsewhere.
+
+“Say, ‘Bo,” said Black Riley to him, “where did you cop out dat doll?”
+
+“This doll?” asked Fuzzy, touching Betsy with his forefinger to be sure
+that she was the one referred to. Why, this doll was presented to me by
+the Emperor of Beloochistan. I have seven hundred others in my country
+home in Newport. This doll—”
+
+“Cheese the funny business,” said Riley. “You swiped it or picked it up
+at de house on de hill where—but never mind dat. You want to take fifty
+cents for de rags, and take it quick. Me brother’s kid at home might be
+wantin’ to play wid it. Hey—what?”
+
+He produced the coin.
+
+Fuzzy laughed a gurgling, insolent, alcoholic laugh in his face. Go to
+the office of Sarah Bernhardt’s manager and propose to him that she be
+released from a night’s performance to entertain the Tackytown Lyceum
+and Literary Coterie. You will hear the duplicate of Fuzzy’s laugh.
+
+Black Riley gauged Fuzzy quickly with his blueberry eye as a wrestler
+does. His hand was itching to play the Roman and wrest the rag Sabine
+from the extemporaneous merry-andrew who was entertaining an angel
+unaware. But he refrained. Fuzzy was fat and solid and big. Three
+inches of well-nourished corporeity, defended from the winter winds by
+dingy linen, intervened between his vest and trousers. Countless small,
+circular wrinkles running around his coat-sleeves and knees guaranteed
+the quality of his bone and muscle. His small, blue eyes, bathed in the
+moisture of altruism and wooziness, looked upon you kindly, yet without
+abashment. He was whiskerly, whiskyly, fleshily formidable. So, Black
+Riley temporized.
+
+“Wot’ll you take for it, den?” he asked.
+
+“Money,” said Fuzzy, with husky firmness, “cannot buy her.”
+
+He was intoxicated with the artist’s first sweet cup of attainment. To
+set a faded-blue, earth-stained rag-doll on a bar, to hold mimic
+converse with it, and to find his heart leaping with the sense of
+plaudits earned and his throat scorching with free libations poured in
+his honor—could base coin buy him from such achievements? You will
+perceive that Fuzzy had the temperament.
+
+Fuzzy walked out with the gait of a trained sea-lion in search of other
+cafés to conquer.
+
+Though the dusk of twilight was hardly yet apparent, lights were
+beginning to spangle the city like pop-corn bursting in a deep skillet.
+Christmas Eve, impatiently expected, was peeping over the brink of the
+hour. Millions had prepared for its celebration. Towns would be painted
+red. You, yourself, have heard the horns and dodged the capers of the
+Saturnalians.
+
+“Pigeon” McCarthy, Black Riley, and “One-ear” Mike held a hasty
+converse outside Grogan’s. They were narrow-chested, pallid striplings,
+not fighters in the open, but more dangerous in their ways of warfare
+than the most terrible of Turks. Fuzzy, in a pitched battle, could have
+eaten the three of them. In a go-as-you-please encounter he was already
+doomed.
+
+They overtook him just as he and Betsy were entering Costigan’s Casino.
+They deflected him, and shoved the newspaper under his nose. Fuzzy
+could read—and more.
+
+“Boys,” said he, “you are certainly damn true friends. Give me a week
+to think it over.”
+
+The soul of a real artist is quenched with difficulty.
+
+The boys carefully pointed out to him that advertisements were
+soulless, and that the deficiencies of the day might not be supplied by
+the morrow.
+
+“A cool hundred,” said Fuzzy thoughtfully and mushily.
+
+“Boys,” said he, “you are true friends. I’ll go up and claim the
+reward. The show business is not what it used to be.”
+
+Night was falling more surely. The three tagged at his sides to the
+foot of the rise on which stood the Millionaire’s house. There Fuzzy
+turned upon them acrimoniously.
+
+“You are a pack of putty-faced beagle-hounds,” he roared. “Go away.”
+
+They went away—a little way.
+
+In “Pigeon” McCarthy’s pocket was a section of one-inch gas-pipe eight
+inches long. In one end of it and in the middle of it was a lead plug.
+One-half of it was packed tight with solder. Black Riley carried a
+slung-shot, being a conventional thug. “One-ear” Mike relied upon a
+pair of brass knucks—an heirloom in the family.
+
+“Why fetch and carry,” said Black Riley, “when some one will do it for
+ye? Let him bring it out to us. Hey—what?”
+
+“We can chuck him in the river,” said “Pigeon” McCarthy, “with a stone
+tied to his feet.”
+
+“Youse guys make me tired,” said “One-ear” Mike sadly. “Ain’t progress
+ever appealed to none of yez? Sprinkle a little gasoline on ’im, and
+drop ’im on the Drive—well?”
+
+Fuzzy entered the Millionaire’s gate and zigzagged toward the softly
+glowing entrance of the mansion. The three goblins came up to the gate
+and lingered—one on each side of it, one beyond the roadway. They
+fingered their cold metal and leather, confident.
+
+Fuzzy rang the door-bell, smiling foolishly and dreamily. An atavistic
+instinct prompted him to reach for the button of his right glove. But
+he wore no gloves; so his left hand dropped, embarrassed.
+
+The particular menial whose duty it was to open doors to silks and
+laces shied at first sight of Fuzzy. But a second glance took in his
+passport, his card of admission, his surety of welcome—the lost
+rag-doll of the daughter of the house dangling under his arm.
+
+Fuzzy was admitted into a great hall, dim with the glow from unseen
+lights. The hireling went away and returned with a maid and the Child.
+The doll was restored to the mourning one. She clasped her lost darling
+to her breast; and then, with the inordinate selfishness and candor of
+childhood, stamped her foot and whined hatred and fear of the odious
+being who had rescued her from the depths of sorrow and despair. Fuzzy
+wriggled himself into an ingratiatory attitude and essayed the idiotic
+smile and blattering small talk that is supposed to charm the budding
+intellect of the young. The Child bawled, and was dragged away, hugging
+her Betsy close.
+
+There came the Secretary, pale, poised, polished, gliding in pumps, and
+worshipping pomp and ceremony. He counted out into Fuzzy’s hand ten
+ten-dollar bills; then dropped his eye upon the door, transferred it to
+James, its custodian, indicated the obnoxious earner of the reward with
+the other, and allowed his pumps to waft him away to secretarial
+regions.
+
+James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic and swept him as far
+as the front door.
+
+When the money touched fuzzy’s dingy palm his first instinct was to
+take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that
+blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It—and, oh,
+what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind’s eye! He had tumbled
+to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged,
+cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the key to a paradise of the
+mud-honey that he craved. The fairy doll had waved a wand with her
+rag-stuffed hand; and now wherever he might go the enchanted palaces
+with shining foot-rests and magic red fluids in gleaming glassware
+would be open to him.
+
+He followed James to the door.
+
+He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal for
+him to pass into the vestibule.
+
+Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his
+two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably
+fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.
+
+Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire’s door and bethought himself. Like
+little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green
+thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was quite
+drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths
+and festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the great hall
+gay—where had he seen such things before? Somewhere he had known
+polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter, and—and some one
+was singing a song in the house that he thought he had heard before.
+Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course, it was Christmas—Fuzzy
+thought he must have been pretty drunk to have overlooked that.
+
+And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of
+some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white,
+transient, forgotten ghost—the spirit of _noblesse oblige_. Upon a
+gentleman certain things devolve.
+
+James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the graveled
+walk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and “One-ear” Mike saw,
+and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer about the gate.
+
+With a more imperious gesture than James’s master had ever used or
+could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door. Upon a
+gentleman certain things devolve. Especially at the Christmas season.
+
+“It is cust—customary,” he said to James, the flustered, “when a
+gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the season
+with the lady of the house. You und’stand? I shall not move shtep till
+I pass compl’ments season with lady the house. Und’stand?”
+
+There was an argument. James lost. Fuzzy raised his voice and sent it
+through the house unpleasantly. I did not say he was a gentleman. He
+was simply a tramp being visited by a ghost.
+
+A sterling silver bell rang. James went back to answer it, leaving
+Fuzzy in the hall. James explained somewhere to some one.
+
+Then he came and conducted Fuzzy into the library.
+
+The lady entered a moment later. She was more beautiful and holy than
+any picture that Fuzzy had seen. She smiled, and said something about a
+doll. Fuzzy didn’t understand that; he remembered nothing about a doll.
+
+A footman brought in two small glasses of sparkling wine on a stamped
+sterling-silver waiter. The Lady took one. The other was handed to
+Fuzzy.
+
+As his fingers closed on the slender glass stem his disabilities
+dropped from him for one brief moment. He straightened himself; and
+Time, so disobliging to most of us, turned backward to accommodate
+Fuzzy.
+
+Forgotten Christmas ghosts whiter than the false beards of the most
+opulent Kris Kringle were rising in the fumes of Grogan’s whisky. What
+had the Millionaire’s mansion to do with a long, wainscoted Virginia
+hall, where the riders were grouped around a silver punch-bowl,
+drinking the ancient toast of the House? And why should the patter of
+the cab horses’ hoofs on the frozen street be in any wise related to
+the sound of the saddled hunters stamping under the shelter of the west
+veranda? And what had Fuzzy to do with any of it?
+
+The Lady, looking at him over her glass, let her condescending smile
+fade away like a false dawn. Her eyes turned serious. She saw something
+beneath the rags and Scotch terrier whiskers that she did not
+understand. But it did not matter.
+
+Fuzzy lifted his glass and smiled vacantly.
+
+“P-pardon, lady,” he said, “but couldn’t leave without exchangin’
+comp’ments sheason with lady th’ house. ’Gainst princ’ples gen’leman do
+sho.”
+
+And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in the
+House when men wore lace ruffles and powder.
+
+“The blessings of another year—”
+
+Fuzzy’s memory failed him. The Lady prompted:
+
+“—Be upon this hearth.”
+
+“—The guest—” stammered Fuzzy.
+
+“—And upon her who—” continued the Lady, with a leading smile.
+
+“Oh, cut it out,” said Fuzzy, ill-manneredly. “I can’t remember. Drink
+hearty.”
+
+Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again the smile
+of her caste. James enveloped and re-conducted him toward the front
+door. The harp music still softly drifted through the house.
+
+Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the gate.
+
+“I wonder,” said the Lady to herself, musing, “who—but there were so
+many who came. I wonder whether memory is a curse or a blessing to them
+after they have fallen so low.”
+
+Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called: “James!”
+
+James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting unsteadily, with
+his brief spark of the divine fire gone.
+
+Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip on his
+section of gas-pipe.
+
+“You will conduct this gentleman,” said the lady, “Downstairs. Then
+tell Louis to get out the Mercedes and take him to whatever place he
+wishes to go.”
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+A NIGHT IN NEW ARABIA
+
+
+The great city of Bagdad-on-the-Subway is caliph-ridden. Its palaces,
+bazaars, khans, and byways are thronged with Al Rashids in divers
+disguises, seeking diversion and victims for their unbridled
+generosity. You can scarcely find a poor beggar whom they are willing
+to let enjoy his spoils unsuccored, nor a wrecked unfortunate upon whom
+they will not reshower the means of fresh misfortune. You will hardly
+find anywhere a hungry one who has not had the opportunity to tighten
+his belt in gift libraries, nor a poor pundit who has not blushed at
+the holiday basket of celery-crowned turkey forced resoundingly through
+his door by the eleemosynary press.
+
+So then, fearfully through the Harun-haunted streets creep the one-eyed
+calenders, the Little Hunchback and the Barber’s Sixth Brother, hoping
+to escape the ministrations of the roving horde of caliphoid sultans.
+
+Entertainment for many Arabian nights might be had from the histories
+of those who have escaped the largesse of the army of Commanders of the
+Faithful. Until dawn you might sit on the enchanted rug and listen to
+such stories as are told of the powerful genie Roc-Ef-El-Er who sent
+the Forty Thieves to soak up the oil plant of Ali Baba; of the good
+Caliph Kar-Neg-Ghe, who gave away palaces; of the Seven Voyages of
+Sailbad, the Sinner, who frequented wooden excursion steamers among the
+islands; of the Fisherman and the Bottle; of the Barmecides’ Boarding
+house; of Aladdin’s rise to wealth by means of his Wonderful Gas-meter.
+
+But now, there being ten sultans to one Sheherazade, she is held too
+valuable to be in fear of the bowstring. In consequence the art of
+narrative languishes. And, as the lesser caliphs are hunting the happy
+poor and the resigned unfortunate from cover to cover in order to heap
+upon them strange mercies and mysterious benefits, too often comes the
+report from Arabian headquarters that the captive refused “to talk.”
+
+This reticence, then, in the actors who perform the sad comedies of
+their philanthropy-scourged world, must, in a degree, account for the
+shortcomings of this painfully gleaned tale, which shall be called
+
+THE STORY OF THE CALIPH WHO ALLEVIATED HIS CONSCIENCE
+
+
+Old Jacob Spraggins mixed for himself some Scotch and lithia water at
+his $1,200 oak sideboard. Inspiration must have resulted from its
+imbibition, for immediately afterward he struck the quartered oak
+soundly with his fist and shouted to the empty dining room:
+
+“By the coke ovens of hell, it must be that ten thousand dollars! If I
+can get that squared, it’ll do the trick.”
+
+Thus, by the commonest artifice of the trade, having gained your
+interest, the action of the story will now be suspended, leaving you
+grumpily to consider a sort of dull biography beginning fifteen years
+before.
+
+When old Jacob was young Jacob he was a breaker boy in a Pennsylvania
+coal mine. I don’t know what a breaker boy is; but his occupation seems
+to be standing by a coal dump with a wan look and a dinner-pail to have
+his picture taken for magazine articles. Anyhow, Jacob was one. But,
+instead of dying of overwork at nine, and leaving his helpless parents
+and brothers at the mercy of the union strikers’ reserve fund, he
+hitched up his galluses, put a dollar or two in a side proposition now
+and then, and at forty-five was worth $20,000,000.
+
+There now! it’s over. Hardly had time to yawn, did you? I’ve seen
+biographies that—but let us dissemble.
+
+I want you to consider Jacob Spraggins, Esq., after he had arrived at
+the seventh stage of his career. The stages meant are, first, humble
+origin; second, deserved promotion; third, stockholder; fourth,
+capitalist; fifth, trust magnate; sixth, rich malefactor; seventh,
+caliph; eighth, _x_. The eighth stage shall be left to the higher
+mathematics.
+
+At fifty-five Jacob retired from active business. The income of a czar
+was still rolling in on him from coal, iron, real estate, oil,
+railroads, manufactories, and corporations, but none of it touched
+Jacob’s hands in a raw state. It was a sterilized increment, carefully
+cleaned and dusted and fumigated until it arrived at its ultimate stage
+of untainted, spotless checks in the white fingers of his private
+secretary. Jacob built a three-million-dollar palace on a corner lot
+fronting on Nabob Avenue, city of New Bagdad, and began to feel the
+mantle of the late H. A. Rashid descending upon him. Eventually Jacob
+slipped the mantle under his collar, tied it in a neat four-in-hand,
+and became a licensed harrier of our Mesopotamian proletariat.
+
+When a man’s income becomes so large that the butcher actually sends
+him the kind of steak he orders, he begins to think about his soul’s
+salvation. Now, the various stages or classes of rich men must not be
+forgotten. The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his
+wealth. The trust magnate “estimates” it. The rich malefactor hands you
+a cigar and denies that he has bought the P. D. & Q. The caliph merely
+smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses. There is a
+record of tremendous altercation at breakfast in a “Where-to-Dine-Well”
+tavern between a magnate and his wife, the rift within the loot being
+that the wife calculated their fortune at a figure $3,000,000 higher
+than did her future _divorcé_. Oh, well, I, myself, heard a similar
+quarrel between a man and his wife because he found fifty cents less in
+his pockets than he thought he had. After all, we are all human—Count
+Tolstoi, R. Fitzsimmons, Peter Pan, and the rest of us.
+
+Don’t lose heart because the story seems to be degenerating into a sort
+of moral essay for intellectual readers.
+
+There will be dialogue and stage business pretty soon.
+
+When Jacob first began to compare the eyes of needles with the camels
+in the Zoo he decided upon organized charity. He had his secretary send
+a check for one million to the Universal Benevolent Association of the
+Globe. You may have looked down through a grating in front of a decayed
+warehouse for a nickel that you had dropped through. But that is
+neither here nor there. The Association acknowledged receipt of his
+favor of the 24th ult. with enclosure as stated. Separated by a double
+line, but still mighty close to the matter under the caption of
+“Oddities of the Day’s News” in an evening paper, Jacob Spraggins read
+that one “Jasper Spargyous” had “donated $100,000 to the U. B. A. of
+G.” A camel may have a stomach for each day in the week; but I dare not
+venture to accord him whiskers, for fear of the Great Displeasure at
+Washington; but if he have whiskers, surely not one of them will seem
+to have been inserted in the eye of a needle by that effort of that
+rich man to enter the K. of H. The right is reserved to reject any and
+all bids; signed, S. Peter, secretary and gatekeeper.
+
+Next, Jacob selected the best endowed college he could scare up and
+presented it with a $200,000 laboratory. The college did not maintain a
+scientific course, but it accepted the money and built an elaborate
+lavatory instead, which was no diversion of funds so far as Jacob ever
+discovered.
+
+The faculty met and invited Jacob to come over and take his A B C
+degree. Before sending the invitation they smiled, cut out the C, added
+the proper punctuation marks, and all was well.
+
+While walking on the campus before being capped and gowned, Jacob saw
+two professors strolling nearby. Their voices, long adapted to indoor
+acoustics, undesignedly reached his ear.
+
+“There goes the latest _chevalier d’industrie_,” said one of them, “to
+buy a sleeping powder from us. He gets his degree to-morrow.”
+
+“_In foro conscientiæ_,” said the other. “Let’s ’eave ’arf a brick at
+’im.”
+
+Jacob ignored the Latin, but the brick pleasantry was not too hard for
+him. There was no mandragora in the honorary draught of learning that
+he had bought. That was before the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs
+Act.
+
+Jacob wearied of philanthropy on a large scale.
+
+“If I could see folks made happier,” he said to himself—“If I could see
+’em myself and hear ’em express their gratitude for what I done for ’em
+it would make me feel better. This donatin’ funds to institutions and
+societies is about as satisfactory as dropping money into a broken slot
+machine.”
+
+So Jacob followed his nose, which led him through unswept streets to
+the homes of the poorest.
+
+“The very thing!” said Jacob. “I will charter two river steamboats,
+pack them full of these unfortunate children and—say ten thousand dolls
+and drums and a thousand freezers of ice cream, and give them a
+delightful outing up the Sound. The sea breezes on that trip ought to
+blow the taint off some of this money that keeps coming in faster than
+I can work it off my mind.”
+
+Jacob must have leaked some of his benevolent intentions, for an
+immense person with a bald face and a mouth that looked as if it ought
+to have a “Drop Letters Here” sign over it hooked a finger around him
+and set him in a space between a barber’s pole and a stack of ash cans.
+Words came out of the post-office slit—smooth, husky words with gloves
+on ’em, but sounding as if they might turn to bare knuckles any moment.
+
+“Say, Sport, do you know where you are at? Well, dis is Mike O’Grady’s
+district you’re buttin’ into—see? Mike’s got de stomach-ache privilege
+for every kid in dis neighborhood—see? And if dere’s any picnics or red
+balloons to be dealt out here, Mike’s money pays for ’em—see? Don’t you
+butt in, or something’ll be handed to you. Youse d–––– settlers and
+reformers with your social ologies and your millionaire detectives have
+got dis district in a hell of a fix, anyhow. With your college students
+and professors rough-housing de soda-water stands and dem rubber-neck
+coaches fillin’ de streets, de folks down here are ’fraid to go out of
+de houses. Now, you leave ’em to Mike. Dey belongs to him, and he knows
+how to handle ’em. Keep on your own side of de town. Are you some wiser
+now, uncle, or do you want to scrap wit’ Mike O’Grady for de Santa
+Claus belt in dis district?”
+
+Clearly, that spot in the moral vineyard was preempted. So Caliph
+Spraggins menaced no more the people in the bazaars of the East Side.
+To keep down his growing surplus he doubled his donations to organized
+charity, presented the Y. M. C. A. of his native town with a $10,000
+collection of butterflies, and sent a check to the famine sufferers in
+China big enough to buy new emerald eyes and diamond-filled teeth for
+all their gods. But none of these charitable acts seemed to bring peace
+to the caliph’s heart. He tried to get a personal note into his
+benefactions by tipping bellboys and waiters $10 and $20 bills. He got
+well snickered at and derided for that by the minions who accept with
+respect gratuities commensurate to the service performed. He sought out
+an ambitious and talented but poor young woman, and bought for her the
+star part in a new comedy. He might have gotten rid of $50,000 more of
+his cumbersome money in this philanthropy if he had not neglected to
+write letters to her. But she lost the suit for lack of evidence, while
+his capital still kept piling up, and his _optikos needleorum
+camelibus_—or rich man’s disease—was unrelieved.
+
+In Caliph Spraggins’s $3,000,000 home lived his sister Henrietta, who
+used to cook for the coal miners in a twenty-five-cent eating house in
+Coketown, Pa., and who now would have offered John Mitchell only two
+fingers of her hand to shake. And his daughter Celia, nineteen, back
+from boarding-school and from being polished off by private instructors
+in the restaurant languages and those études and things.
+
+Celia is the heroine. Lest the artist’s delineation of her charms on
+this very page humbug your fancy, take from me her authorized
+description. She was a nice-looking, awkward, loud, rather bashful,
+brown-haired girl, with a sallow complexion, bright eyes, and a
+perpetual smile. She had a wholesome, Spraggins-inherited love for
+plain food, loose clothing, and the society of the lower classes. She
+had too much health and youth to feel the burden of wealth. She had a
+wide mouth that kept the peppermint-pepsin tablets rattling like hail
+from the slot-machine wherever she went, and she could whistle
+hornpipes. Keep this picture in mind; and let the artist do his worst.
+
+Celia looked out of her window one day and gave her heart to the
+grocer’s young man. The receiver thereof was at that moment engaged in
+conceding immortality to his horse and calling down upon him the
+ultimate fate of the wicked; so he did not notice the transfer. A horse
+should stand still when you are lifting a crate of strictly new-laid
+eggs out of the wagon.
+
+Young lady reader, you would have liked that grocer’s young man
+yourself. But you wouldn’t have given him your heart, because you are
+saving it for a riding-master, or a shoe-manufacturer with a torpid
+liver, or something quiet but rich in gray tweeds at Palm Beach. Oh, I
+know about it. So I am glad the grocer’s young man was for Celia, and
+not for you.
+
+The grocer’s young man was slim and straight and as confident and easy
+in his movements as the man in the back of the magazines who wears the
+new frictionless roller suspenders. He wore a gray bicycle cap on the
+back of his head, and his hair was straw-colored and curly, and his
+sunburned face looked like one that smiled a good deal when he was not
+preaching the doctrine of everlasting punishment to delivery-wagon
+horses. He slung imported A1 fancy groceries about as though they were
+only the stuff he delivered at boarding-houses; and when he picked up
+his whip, your mind instantly recalled Mr. Tackett and his air with the
+buttonless foils.
+
+Tradesmen delivered their goods at a side gate at the rear of the
+house. The grocer’s wagon came about ten in the morning. For three days
+Celia watched the driver when he came, finding something new each time
+to admire in the lofty and almost contemptuous way he had of tossing
+around the choicest gifts of Pomona, Ceres, and the canning factories.
+Then she consulted Annette.
+
+To be explicit, Annette McCorkle, the second housemaid who deserves a
+paragraph herself. Annette Fletcherized large numbers of romantic
+novels which she obtained at a free public library branch (donated by
+one of the biggest caliphs in the business). She was Celia’s
+side-kicker and chum, though Aunt Henrietta didn’t know it, you may
+hazard a bean or two.
+
+“Oh, canary-bird seed!” exclaimed Annette. “Ain’t it a corkin’
+situation? You a heiress, and fallin’ in love with him on sight! He’s a
+sweet boy, too, and above his business. But he ain’t susceptible like
+the common run of grocer’s assistants. He never pays no attention to
+me.”
+
+“He will to me,” said Celia.
+
+“Riches—” began Annette, unsheathing the not unjustifiable feminine
+sting.
+
+“Oh, you’re not so beautiful,” said Celia, with her wide, disarming
+smile. “Neither am I; but he sha’n’t know that there’s any money mixed
+up with my looks, such as they are. That’s fair. Now, I want you to
+lend me one of your caps and an apron, Annette.”
+
+“Oh, marshmallows!” cried Annette. “I see. Ain’t it lovely? It’s just
+like ‘Lurline, the Left-Handed; or, A Buttonhole Maker’s Wrongs.’ I’ll
+bet he’ll turn out to be a count.”
+
+There was a long hallway (or “passageway,” as they call it in the land
+of the Colonels) with one side latticed, running along the rear of the
+house. The grocer’s young man went through this to deliver his goods.
+One morning he passed a girl in there with shining eyes, sallow
+complexion, and wide, smiling mouth, wearing a maid’s cap and apron.
+But as he was cumbered with a basket of Early Drumhead lettuce and
+Trophy tomatoes and three bunches of asparagus and six bottles of the
+most expensive Queen olives, he saw no more than that she was one of
+the maids.
+
+But on his way out he came up behind her, and she was whistling
+“Fisher’s Hornpipe” so loudly and clearly that all the piccolos in the
+world should have disjointed themselves and crept into their cases for
+shame.
+
+The grocer’s young man stopped and pushed back his cap until it hung on
+his collar button behind.
+
+“That’s out o’ sight, Kid,” said he.
+
+“My name is Celia, if you please,” said the whistler, dazzling him with
+a three-inch smile.
+
+“That’s all right. I’m Thomas McLeod. What part of the house do you
+work in?”
+
+“I’m the—the second parlor maid.”
+
+“Do you know the ‘Falling Waters’?”
+
+“No,” said Celia, “we don’t know anybody. We got rich too quick—that
+is, Mr. Spraggins did.”
+
+“I’ll make you acquainted,” said Thomas McLeod. “It’s a strathspey—the
+first cousin to a hornpipe.”
+
+If Celia’s whistling put the piccolos out of commission, Thomas
+McLeod’s surely made the biggest flutes hunt their holes. He could
+actually whistle _bass_.
+
+When he stopped Celia was ready to jump into his delivery wagon and
+ride with him clear to the end of the pier and on to the ferry-boat of
+the Charon line.
+
+“I’ll be around to-morrow at 10:15,” said Thomas, “with some spinach
+and a case of carbonic.”
+
+“I’ll practice that what-you-may-call-it,” said Celia. “I can whistle a
+fine second.”
+
+The processes of courtship are personal, and do not belong to general
+literature. They should be chronicled in detail only in advertisements
+of iron tonics and in the secret by-laws of the Woman’s Auxiliary of
+the Ancient Order of the Rat Trap. But genteel writing may contain a
+description of certain stages of its progress without intruding upon
+the province of the X-ray or of park policemen.
+
+A day came when Thomas McLeod and Celia lingered at the end of the
+latticed “passage.”
+
+“Sixteen a week isn’t much,” said Thomas, letting his cap rest on his
+shoulder blades.
+
+Celia looked through the lattice-work and whistled a dead march.
+Shopping with Aunt Henrietta the day before, she had paid that much for
+a dozen handkerchiefs.
+
+“Maybe I’ll get a raise next month,” said Thomas. “I’ll be around
+to-morrow at the same time with a bag of flour and the laundry soap.”
+
+“All right,” said Celia. “Annette’s married cousin pays only $20 a
+month for a flat in the Bronx.”
+
+Never for a moment did she count on the Spraggins money. She knew Aunt
+Henrietta’s invincible pride of caste and pa’s mightiness as a Colossus
+of cash, and she understood that if she chose Thomas she and her
+grocer’s young man might go whistle for a living.
+
+Another day came, Thomas violating the dignity of Nabob Avenue with
+“The Devil’s Dream,” whistled keenly between his teeth.
+
+“Raised to eighteen a week yesterday,” he said. “Been pricing flats
+around Morningside. You want to start untying those apron strings and
+unpinning that cap, old girl.”
+
+“Oh, Tommy!” said Celia, with her broadest smile. “Won’t that be
+enough? I got Betty to show me how to make a cottage pudding. I guess
+we could call it a flat pudding if we wanted to.”
+
+“And tell no lie,” said Thomas.
+
+“And I can sweep and polish and dust—of course, a parlor maid learns
+that. And we could whistle duets of evenings.”
+
+“The old man said he’d raise me to twenty at Christmas if Bryan
+couldn’t think of any harder name to call a Republican than a
+‘postponer,’” said the grocer’s young man.
+
+“I can sew,” said Celia; “and I know that you must make the gas
+company’s man show his badge when he comes to look at the meter; and I
+know how to put up quince jam and window curtains.”
+
+“Bully! you’re all right, Cele. Yes, I believe we can pull it off on
+eighteen.”
+
+As he was jumping into the wagon the second parlor maid braved
+discovery by running swiftly to the gate.
+
+“And, oh, Tommy, I forgot,” she called, softly. “I believe I could make
+your neckties.”
+
+“Forget it,” said Thomas decisively.
+
+“And another thing,” she continued. “Sliced cucumbers at night will
+drive away cockroaches.”
+
+“And sleep, too, you bet,” said Mr. McLeod. “Yes, I believe if I have a
+delivery to make on the West Side this afternoon I’ll look in at a
+furniture store I know over there.”
+
+It was just as the wagon dashed away that old Jacob Spraggins struck
+the sideboard with his fist and made the mysterious remark about ten
+thousand dollars that you perhaps remember. Which justifies the
+reflection that some stories, as well as life, and puppies thrown into
+wells, move around in circles. Painfully but briefly we must shed light
+on Jacob’s words.
+
+The foundation of his fortune was made when he was twenty. A poor
+coal-digger (ever hear of a rich one?) had saved a dollar or two and
+bought a small tract of land on a hillside on which he tried to raise
+corn. Not a nubbin. Jacob, whose nose was a divining-rod, told him
+there was a vein of coal beneath. He bought the land from the miner for
+$125 and sold it a month afterward for $10,000. Luckily the miner had
+enough left of his sale money to drink himself into a black coat
+opening in the back, as soon as he heard the news.
+
+And so, for forty years afterward, we find Jacob illuminated with the
+sudden thought that if he could make restitution of this sum of money
+to the heirs or assigns of the unlucky miner, respite and Nepenthe
+might be his.
+
+And now must come swift action, for we have here some four thousand
+words and not a tear shed and never a pistol, joke, safe, nor bottle
+cracked.
+
+Old Jacob hired a dozen private detectives to find the heirs, if any
+existed, of the old miner, Hugh McLeod.
+
+Get the point? Of course I know as well as you do that Thomas is going
+to be the heir. I might have concealed the name; but why always hold
+back your mystery till the end? I say, let it come near the middle so
+people can stop reading there if they want to.
+
+After the detectives had trailed false clues about three thousand
+dollars—I mean miles—they cornered Thomas at the grocery and got his
+confession that Hugh McLeod had been his grandfather, and that there
+were no other heirs. They arranged a meeting for him and old Jacob one
+morning in one of their offices.
+
+Jacob liked the young man very much. He liked the way he looked
+straight at him when he talked, and the way he threw his bicycle cap
+over the top of a rose-colored vase on the centre-table.
+
+There was a slight flaw in Jacob’s system of restitution. He did not
+consider that the act, to be perfect, should include confession. So he
+represented himself to be the agent of the purchaser of the land who
+had sent him to refund the sale price for the ease of his conscience.
+
+“Well, sir,” said Thomas, “this sounds to me like an illustrated
+post-card from South Boston with ‘We’re having a good time here’
+written on it. I don’t know the game. Is this ten thousand dollars
+money, or do I have to save so many coupons to get it?”
+
+Old Jacob counted out to him twenty five-hundred-dollar bills.
+
+That was better, he thought, than a check. Thomas put them thoughtfully
+into his pocket.
+
+“Grandfather’s best thanks,” he said, “to the party who sends it.”
+
+Jacob talked on, asking him about his work, how he spent his leisure
+time, and what his ambitions were. The more he saw and heard of Thomas,
+the better he liked him. He had not met many young men in Bagdad so
+frank and wholesome.
+
+“I would like to have you visit my house,” he said. “I might help you
+in investing or laying out your money. I am a very wealthy man. I have
+a daughter about grown, and I would like for you to know her. There are
+not many young men I would care to have call on her.”
+
+“I’m obliged,” said Thomas. “I’m not much at making calls. It’s
+generally the side entrance for mine. And, besides, I’m engaged to a
+girl that has the Delaware peach crop killed in the blossom. She’s a
+parlor maid in a house where I deliver goods. She won’t be working
+there much longer, though. Say, don’t forget to give your friend my
+grandfather’s best regards. You’ll excuse me now; my wagon’s outside
+with a lot of green stuff that’s got to be delivered. See you again,
+sir.”
+
+At eleven Thomas delivered some bunches of parsley and lettuce at the
+Spraggins mansion. Thomas was only twenty-two; so, as he came back, he
+took out the handful of five-hundred-dollar bills and waved them
+carelessly. Annette took a pair of eyes as big as creamed onion to the
+cook.
+
+“I told you he was a count,” she said, after relating. “He never would
+carry on with me.”
+
+“But you say he showed money,” said the cook.
+
+“Hundreds of thousands,” said Annette. “Carried around loose in his
+pockets. And he never would look at me.”
+
+“It was paid to me to-day,” Thomas was explaining to Celia outside. “It
+came from my grandfather’s estate. Say, Cele, what’s the use of waiting
+now? I’m going to quit the job to-night. Why can’t we get married next
+week?”
+
+“Tommy,” said Celia. “I’m no parlor maid. I’ve been fooling you. I’m
+Miss Spraggins—Celia Spraggins. The newspapers say I’ll be worth forty
+million dollars some day.”
+
+Thomas pulled his cap down straight on his head for the first time
+since we have known him.
+
+“I suppose then,” said he, “I suppose then you’ll not be marrying me
+next week. But you _can_ whistle.”
+
+“No,” said Celia, “I’ll not be marrying you next week. My father would
+never let me marry a grocer’s clerk. But I’ll marry you to-night,
+Tommy, if you say so.”
+
+Old Jacob Spraggins came home at 9:30 P. M., in his motor car. The make
+of it you will have to surmise sorrowfully; I am giving you
+unsubsidized fiction; had it been a street car I could have told you
+its voltage and the number of wheels it had. Jacob called for his
+daughter; he had bought a ruby necklace for her, and wanted to hear her
+say what a kind, thoughtful, dear old dad he was.
+
+There was a brief search in the house for her, and then came Annette,
+glowing with the pure flame of truth and loyalty well mixed with envy
+and histrionics.
+
+“Oh, sir,” said she, wondering if she should kneel, “Miss Celia’s just
+this minute running away out of the side gate with a young man to be
+married. I couldn’t stop her, sir. They went in a cab.”
+
+“What young man?” roared old Jacob.
+
+“A millionaire, if you please, sir—a rich nobleman in disguise. He
+carries his money with him, and the red peppers and the onions was only
+to blind us, sir. He never did seem to take to me.”
+
+Jacob rushed out in time to catch his car. The chauffeur had been
+delayed by trying to light a cigarette in the wind.
+
+“Here, Gaston, or Mike, or whatever you call yourself, scoot around the
+corner quicker than blazes and see if you can see a cab. If you do, run
+it down.”
+
+There was a cab in sight a block away. Gaston, or Mike, with his eyes
+half shut and his mind on his cigarette, picked up the trail, neatly
+crowded the cab to the curb and pocketed it.
+
+“What t’ell you doin’?” yelled the cabman.
+
+“Pa!” shrieked Celia.
+
+“Grandfather’s remorseful friend’s agent!” said Thomas. “Wonder what’s
+on his conscience now.”
+
+“A thousand thunders,” said Gaston, or Mike. “I have no other match.”
+
+“Young man,” said old Jacob, severely, “how about that parlor maid you
+were engaged to?”
+
+A couple of years afterward old Jacob went into the office of his
+private secretary.
+
+“The Amalgamated Missionary Society solicits a contribution of $30,000
+toward the conversion of the Koreans,” said the secretary.
+
+“Pass ’em up,” said Jacob.
+
+“The University of Plumville writes that its yearly endowment fund of
+$50,000 that you bestowed upon it is past due.”
+
+“Tell ’em it’s been cut out.”
+
+“The Scientific Society of Clam Cove, Long Island, asks for $10,000 to
+buy alcohol to preserve specimens.”
+
+“Waste basket.”
+
+“The Society for Providing Healthful Recreation for Working Girls wants
+$20,000 from you to lay out a golf course.”
+
+“Tell ’em to see an undertaker.”
+
+“Cut ’em all out,” went on Jacob. “I’ve quit being a good thing. I need
+every dollar I can scrape or save. I want you to write to the directors
+of every company that I’m interested in and recommend a 10 per cent.
+cut in salaries. And say—I noticed half a cake of soap lying in a
+corner of the hall as I came in. I want you to speak to the scrubwoman
+about waste. I’ve got no money to throw away. And say—we’ve got vinegar
+pretty well in hand, haven’t we?’
+
+“The Globe Spice & Seasons Company,” said secretary, “controls the
+market at present.”
+
+“Raise vinegar two cents a gallon. Notify all our branches.”
+
+Suddenly Jacob Spraggins’s plump red face relaxed into a pulpy grin. He
+walked over to the secretary’s desk and showed a small red mark on his
+thick forefinger.
+
+“Bit it,” he said, “darned if he didn’t, and he ain’t had the tooth
+three weeks—Jaky McLeod, my Celia’s kid. He’ll be worth a hundred
+millions by the time he’s twenty-one if I can pile it up for him.”
+
+As he was leaving, old Jacob turned at the door, and said:
+
+“Better make that vinegar raise three cents instead of two. I’ll be
+back in an hour and sign the letters.”
+
+The true history of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid relates that toward the
+end of his reign he wearied of philanthropy, and caused to be beheaded
+all his former favorites and companions of his “Arabian Nights”
+rambles. Happy are we in these days of enlightenment, when the only
+death warrant the caliphs can serve on us is in the form of a
+tradesman’s bill.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+THE GIRL AND THE HABIT
+
+
+HABIT—a tendency or aptitude acquired by custom or frequent repetition.
+
+
+The critics have assailed every source of inspiration save one. To that
+one we are driven for our moral theme. When we levied upon the masters
+of old they gleefully dug up the parallels to our columns. When we
+strove to set forth real life they reproached us for trying to imitate
+Henry George, George Washington, Washington Irving, and Irving
+Bacheller. We wrote of the West and the East, and they accused us of
+both Jesse and Henry James. We wrote from our heart—and they said
+something about a disordered liver. We took a text from Matthew
+or—er—yes, Deuteronomy, but the preachers were hammering away at the
+inspiration idea before we could get into type. So, driven to the wall,
+we go for our subject-matter to the reliable, old, moral, unassailable
+vade mecum—the unabridged dictionary.
+
+Miss Merriam was cashier at Hinkle’s. Hinkle’s is one of the big
+downtown restaurants. It is in what the papers call the “financial
+district.” Each day from 12 o’clock to 2 Hinkle’s was full of hungry
+customers—messenger boys, stenographers, brokers, owners of mining
+stock, promoters, inventors with patents pending—and also people with
+money.
+
+The cashiership at Hinkle’s was no sinecure. Hinkle egged and toasted
+and griddle-caked and coffeed a good many customers; and he lunched (as
+good a word as “dined”) many more. It might be said that Hinkle’s
+breakfast crowd was a contingent, but his luncheon patronage amounted
+to a horde.
+
+Miss Merriam sat on a stool at a desk inclosed on three sides by a
+strong, high fencing of woven brass wire. Through an arched opening at
+the bottom you thrust your waiter’s check and the money, while your
+heart went pit-a-pat.
+
+For Miss Merriam was lovely and capable. She could take 45 cents out of
+a $2 bill and refuse an offer of marriage before you could—Next!—lost
+your chance—please don’t shove. She could keep cool and collected while
+she collected your check, give you the correct change, win your heart,
+indicate the toothpick stand, and rate you to a quarter of a cent
+better than Bradstreet could to a thousand in less time than it takes
+to pepper an egg with one of Hinkle’s casters.
+
+There is an old and dignified allusion to the “fierce light that beats
+upon a throne.” The light that beats upon the young lady cashier’s cage
+is also something fierce. The other fellow is responsible for the
+slang.
+
+Every male patron of Hinkle’s, from the A. D. T. boys up to the
+curbstone brokers, adored Miss Merriam. When they paid their checks
+they wooed her with every wile known to Cupid’s art. Between the meshes
+of the brass railing went smiles, winks, compliments, tender vows,
+invitations to dinner, sighs, languishing looks and merry banter that
+was wafted pointedly back by the gifted Miss Merriam.
+
+There is no coign of vantage more effective than the position of young
+lady cashier. She sits there, easily queen of the court of commerce;
+she is duchess of dollars and devoirs, countess of compliments and
+coin, leading lady of love and luncheon. You take from her a smile and
+a Canadian dime, and you go your way uncomplaining. You count the
+cheery word or two that she tosses you as misers count their treasures;
+and you pocket the change for a five uncomputed. Perhaps the
+brass-bound inaccessibility multiplies her charms—anyhow, she is a
+shirt-waisted angel, immaculate, trim, manicured, seductive,
+bright-eyed, ready, alert—Psyche, Circe, and Ate in one, separating you
+from your circulating medium after your sirloin medium.
+
+The young men who broke bread at Hinkle’s never settled with the
+cashier without an exchange of badinage and open compliment. Many of
+them went to greater lengths and dropped promissory hints of theatre
+tickets and chocolates. The older men spoke plainly of orange blossoms,
+generally withering the tentative petals by after-allusions to Harlem
+flats. One broker, who had been squeezed by copper proposed to Miss
+Merriam more regularly than he ate.
+
+During a brisk luncheon hour Miss Merriam’s conversation, while she
+took money for checks, would run something like this:
+
+“Good morning, Mr. Haskins—sir?—it’s natural, thank you—don’t be quite
+so fresh . . . Hello, Johnny—ten, fifteen, twenty—chase along now or
+they’ll take the letters off your cap . . . Beg pardon—count it again,
+please—Oh, don’t mention it . . . Vaudeville?—thanks; not on your
+moving picture—I was to see Carter in Hedda Gabler on Wednesday night
+with Mr. Simmons . . . ’Scuse me, I thought that was a quarter . . .
+Twenty-five and seventy-five’s a dollar—got that ham-and-cabbage habit
+yet. I see, Billy . . . Who are you addressing?—say—you’ll get all
+that’s coming to you in a minute . . . Oh, fudge! Mr. Bassett—you’re
+always fooling—no—? Well, maybe I’ll marry you some day—three, four and
+sixty-five is five . . . Kindly keep them remarks to yourself, if you
+please . . . Ten cents?—’scuse me; the check calls for seventy—well,
+maybe it is a one instead of a seven . . . Oh, do you like it that way,
+Mr. Saunders?—some prefer a pomp; but they say this Cleo de Merody does
+suit refined features . . . and ten is fifty . . . Hike along there,
+buddy; don’t take this for a Coney Island ticket booth . . . Huh?—why,
+Macy’s—don’t it fit nice? Oh, no, it isn’t too cool—these light-weight
+fabrics is all the go this season . . . Come again, please—that’s the
+third time you’ve tried to—what?—forget it—that lead quarter is an old
+friend of mine . . . Sixty-five?—must have had your salary raised, Mr.
+Wilson . . . I seen you on Sixth Avenue Tuesday afternoon, Mr. De
+Forest—swell?—oh, my!—who is she? . . . What’s the matter with it?—why,
+it ain’t money—what?—Columbian half?—well, this ain’t South America . .
+. Yes, I like the mixed best—Friday?—awfully sorry, but I take my
+jiu-jitsu lesson on Friday—Thursday, then . . . Thanks—that’s sixteen
+times I’ve been told that this morning—I guess I must be beautiful . .
+. Cut that out, please—who do you think I am? . . . Why, Mr.
+Westbrook—do you really think so?—the idea!—one—eighty and twenty’s a
+dollar—thank you ever so much, but I don’t ever go automobile riding
+with gentlemen—your aunt?—well, that’s different—perhaps . . . Please
+don’t get fresh—your check was fifteen cents, I believe—kindly step
+aside and let . . . Hello, Ben—coming around Thursday evening?—there’s
+a gentleman going to send around a box of chocolates, and . . . forty
+and sixty is a dollar, and one is two . . .”
+
+About the middle of one afternoon the dizzy goddess Vertigo—whose other
+name is Fortune—suddenly smote an old, wealthy and eccentric banker
+while he was walking past Hinkle’s, on his way to a street car. A
+wealthy and eccentric banker who rides in street cars is—move up,
+please; there are others.
+
+A Samaritan, a Pharisee, a man and a policeman who were first on the
+spot lifted Banker McRamsey and carried him into Hinkle’s restaurant.
+When the aged but indestructible banker opened his eyes he saw a
+beautiful vision bending over him with a pitiful, tender smile, bathing
+his forehead with beef tea and chafing his hands with something frappé
+out of a chafing-dish. Mr. McRamsey sighed, lost a vest button, gazed
+with deep gratitude upon his fair preserveress, and then recovered
+consciousness.
+
+To the Seaside Library all who are anticipating a romance! Banker
+McRamsey had an aged and respected wife, and his sentiments toward Miss
+Merriam were fatherly. He talked to her for half an hour with
+interest—not the kind that went with his talks during business hours.
+The next day he brought Mrs. McRamsey down to see her. The old couple
+were childless—they had only a married daughter living in Brooklyn.
+
+To make a short story shorter, the beautiful cashier won the hearts of
+the good old couple. They came to Hinkle’s again and again; they
+invited her to their old-fashioned but splendid home in one of the East
+Seventies. Miss Merriam’s winning loveliness, her sweet frankness and
+impulsive heart took them by storm. They said a hundred times that Miss
+Merriam reminded them so much of their lost daughter. The Brooklyn
+matron, née Ramsey, had the figure of Buddha and a face like the ideal
+of an art photographer. Miss Merriam was a combination of curves,
+smiles, rose leaves, pearls, satin and hair-tonic posters. Enough of
+the fatuity of parents.
+
+A month after the worthy couple became acquainted with Miss Merriam,
+she stood before Hinkle one afternoon and resigned her cashiership.
+
+“They’re going to adopt me,” she told the bereft restaurateur. “They’re
+funny old people, but regular dears. And the swell home they have got!
+Say, Hinkle, there isn’t any use of talking—I’m on the à la carte to
+wear brown duds and goggles in a whiz wagon, or marry a duke at least.
+Still, I somehow hate to break out of the old cage. I’ve been
+cashiering so long I feel funny doing anything else. I’ll miss joshing
+the fellows awfully when they line up to pay for the buckwheats and.
+But I can’t let this chance slide. And they’re awfully good, Hinkle; I
+know I’ll have a swell time. You owe me nine-sixty-two and a half for
+the week. Cut out the half if it hurts you, Hinkle.”
+
+And they did. Miss Merriam became Miss Rosa McRamsey. And she graced
+the transition. Beauty is only skin-deep, but the nerves lie very near
+to the skin. Nerve—but just here will you oblige by perusing again the
+quotation with which this story begins?
+
+The McRamseys poured out money like domestic champagne to polish their
+adopted one. Milliners, dancing masters and private tutors got it.
+Miss—er—McRamsey was grateful, loving, and tried to forget Hinkle’s. To
+give ample credit to the adaptability of the American girl, Hinkle’s
+did fade from her memory and speech most of the time.
+
+Not every one will remember when the Earl of Hitesbury came to East
+Seventy–––– Street, America. He was only a fair-to-medium earl, without
+debts, and he created little excitement. But you will surely remember
+the evening when the Daughters of Benevolence held their bazaar in the
+W––––f-A––––a Hotel. For you were there, and you wrote a note to Fannie
+on the hotel paper, and mailed it, just to show her that—you did not?
+Very well; that was the evening the baby was sick, of course.
+
+At the bazaar the McRamseys were prominent. Miss Mer—er—McRamsey was
+exquisitely beautiful. The Earl of Hitesbury had been very attentive to
+her since he dropped in to have a look at America. At the charity
+bazaar the affair was supposed to be going to be pulled off to a
+finish. An earl is as good as a duke. Better. His standing may be
+lower, but his outstanding accounts are also lower.
+
+Our ex-young-lady-cashier was assigned to a booth. She was expected to
+sell worthless articles to nobs and snobs at exorbitant prices. The
+proceeds of the bazaar were to be used for giving the poor children of
+the slums a Christmas din––––Say! did you ever wonder where they get
+the other 364?
+
+Miss McRamsey—beautiful, palpitating, excited, charming,
+radiant—fluttered about in her booth. An imitation brass network, with
+a little arched opening, fenced her in.
+
+Along came the Earl, assured, delicate, accurate, admiring—admiring
+greatly, and faced the open wicket.
+
+“You look chawming, you know—’pon my word you do—my deah,” he said,
+beguilingly.
+
+Miss McRamsey whirled around.
+
+“Cut that joshing out,” she said, coolly and briskly. “Who do you think
+you are talking to? Your check, please. Oh, Lordy!—”
+
+Patrons of the bazaar became aware of a commotion and pressed around a
+certain booth. The Earl of Hitesbury stood near by pulling a pale blond
+and puzzled whisker.
+
+“Miss McRamsey has fainted,” some one explained.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+PROOF OF THE PUDDING
+
+
+Spring winked a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook of the _Minerva
+Magazine_, and deflected him from his course. He had lunched in his
+favorite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was returning to his office
+when his feet became entangled in the lure of the vernal coquette.
+Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward in Twenty-sixth
+Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles in Fifth Avenue,
+and meandered along the walks of budding Madison Square.
+
+The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed a
+pastoral; the color motif was green—the presiding shade at the creation
+of man and vegetation.
+
+The callow grass between the walks was the color of verdigris, a
+poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of derelict humans that had
+breathed upon the soil during the summer and autumn. The bursting tree
+buds looked strangely familiar to those who had botanized among the
+garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent dinner. The sky above
+was of that pale aquamarine tint that ballroom poets rhyme with “true”
+and “Sue” and “coo.” The one natural and frank color visible was the
+ostensible green of the newly painted benches—a shade between the color
+of a pickled cucumber and that of a last year’s fast-black cravenette
+raincoat. But, to the city-bred eye of Editor Westbrook, the landscape
+appeared a masterpiece.
+
+And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the gentle
+concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in a brief invasion of
+the editor’s mind.
+
+Editor Westbrook’s spirit was contented and serene. The April number of
+the _Minerva_ had sold its entire edition before the tenth day of the
+month—a newsdealer in Keokuk had written that he could have sold fifty
+copies more if he had ’em. The owners of the magazine had raised his
+(the editor’s) salary; he had just installed in his home a jewel of a
+recently imported cook who was afraid of policemen; and the morning
+papers had published in full a speech he had made at a publishers’
+banquet. Also there were echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a
+splendid song that his charming young wife had sung to him before he
+left his up-town apartment that morning. She was taking enthusiastic
+interest in her music of late, practising early and diligently. When he
+had complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly
+hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign, tonic
+medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly adown the
+wards of the convalescent city.
+
+While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between the rows of park benches
+(already filling with vagrants and the guardians of lawless childhood)
+he felt his sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he was about to be
+panhandled, he turned a cold and unprofitable face, and saw that his
+captor was—Dawe—Shackleford Dawe, dingy, almost ragged, the genteel
+scarcely visible in him through the deeper lines of the shabby.
+
+While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight
+biography of Dawe is offered.
+
+He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook’s old acquaintances. At
+one time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe had some
+money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment house near
+Westbrook’s. The two families often went to theatres and dinners
+together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became “dearest” friends. Then
+one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself,
+ingurgitated Dawe’s capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park
+neighborhood where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one’s
+trunk under eight-branched chandeliers and opposite Carrara marble
+mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor. Dawe thought to live by
+writing fiction. Now and then he sold a story. He submitted many to
+Westbrook. The _Minerva_ printed one or two of them; the rest were
+returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious personal letter
+with each rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for
+considering it unavailable. Editor Westbrook had his own clear
+conception of what constituted good fiction. So had Dawe. Mrs. Dawe was
+mainly concerned about the constituents of the scanty dishes of food
+that she managed to scrape together. One day Dawe had been spouting to
+her about the excellencies of certain French writers. At dinner they
+sat down to a dish that a hungry schoolboy could have encompassed at a
+gulp. Dawe commented.
+
+“It’s Maupassant hash,” said Mrs. Dawe. “It may not be art, but I do
+wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella
+Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I’m hungry.”
+
+As far as this from success was Shackleford Dawe when he plucked Editor
+Westbrook’s sleeve in Madison Square. That was the first time the
+editor had seen Dawe in several months.
+
+“Why, Shack, is this you?” said Westbrook, somewhat awkwardly, for the
+form of his phrase seemed to touch upon the other’s changed appearance.
+
+“Sit down for a minute,” said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve. “This is my
+office. I can’t come to yours, looking as I do. Oh, sit down—you won’t
+be disgraced. Those half-plucked birds on the other benches will take
+you for a swell porch-climber. They won’t know you are only an editor.”
+
+“Smoke, Shack?” said Editor Westbrook, sinking cautiously upon the
+virulent green bench. He always yielded gracefully when he did yield.
+
+Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a sunperch, or a
+girl pecks at a chocolate cream.
+
+“I have just—” began the editor.
+
+“Oh, I know; don’t finish,” said Dawe. “Give me a match. You have just
+ten minutes to spare. How did you manage to get past my office-boy and
+invade my sanctum? There he goes now, throwing his club at a dog that
+couldn’t read the ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs.”
+
+“How goes the writing?” asked the editor.
+“Look at me,” said Dawe, “for your answer. Now don’t put on that
+embarrassed, friendly-but-honest look and ask me why I don’t get a job
+as a wine agent or a cab driver. I’m in the fight to a finish. I know I
+can write good fiction and I’ll force you fellows to admit it yet. I’ll
+make you change the spelling of ‘regrets’ to ‘c-h-e-q-u-e’ before I’m
+done with you.”
+
+Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with a sweetly
+sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, skeptical expression—the
+copyrighted expression of the editor beleagured by the unavailable
+contributor.
+
+“Have you read the last story I sent you—‘The Alarum of the Soul’?”
+asked Dawe.
+
+“Carefully. I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did. It had
+some good points. I was writing you a letter to send with it when it
+goes back to you. I regret—”
+
+“Never mind the regrets,” said Dawe, grimly. “There’s neither salve nor
+sting in ’em any more. What I want to know is _why_. Come now; out with
+the good points first.”
+
+“The story,” said Westbrook, deliberately, after a suppressed sigh, “is
+written around an almost original plot. Characterization—the best you
+have done. Construction—almost as good, except for a few weak joints
+which might be strengthened by a few changes and touches. It was a good
+story, except—”
+
+“I can write English, can’t I?” interrupted Dawe.
+
+“I have always told you,” said the editor, “that you had a style.”
+
+“Then the trouble is—”
+
+“Same old thing,” said Editor Westbrook. “You work up to your climax
+like an artist. And then you turn yourself into a photographer. I don’t
+know what form of obstinate madness possesses you, but that is what you
+do with everything that you write. No, I will retract the comparison
+with the photographer. Now and then photography, in spite of its
+impossible perspective, manages to record a fleeting glimpse of truth.
+But you spoil every dénouement by those flat, drab, obliterating
+strokes of your brush that I have so often complained of. If you would
+rise to the literary pinnacle of your dramatic senses, and paint them
+in the high colors that art requires, the postman would leave fewer
+bulky, self-addressed envelopes at your door.”
+
+“Oh, fiddles and footlights!” cried Dawe, derisively. “You’ve got that
+old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet. When the man with the black
+mustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie you are bound to have the mother
+kneel and raise her hands in the spotlight and say: ‘May high heaven
+witness that I will rest neither night nor day till the heartless
+villain that has stolen me child feels the weight of another’s
+vengeance!’”
+
+Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency.
+
+“I think,” said he, “that in real life the woman would express herself
+in those words or in very similar ones.”
+
+“Not in a six hundred nights’ run anywhere but on the stage,” said Dawe
+hotly. “I’ll tell you what she’d say in real life. She’d say: ‘What!
+Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! It’s one trouble after
+another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to the police-station.
+Why wasn’t somebody looking after her, I’d like to know? For God’s
+sake, get out of my way or I’ll never get ready. Not that hat—the brown
+one with the velvet bows. Bessie must have been crazy; she’s usually
+shy of strangers. Is that too much powder? Lordy! How I’m upset!’
+
+“That’s the way she’d talk,” continued Dawe. “People in real life don’t
+fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They simply can’t
+do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the same
+vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up their words and ideas
+a little more, that’s all.”
+
+“Shack,” said Editor Westbrook impressively, “did you ever pick up the
+mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of a street
+car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the distracted
+mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of grief and
+despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?”
+
+“I never did,” said Dawe. “Did you?”
+
+“Well, no,” said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. “But I can well
+imagine what she would say.”
+
+“So can I,” said Dawe.
+
+And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play the
+oracle and silence his opinionated contributor. It was not for an
+unarrived fictionist to dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and
+heroines of the _Minerva Magazine_, contrary to the theories of the
+editor thereof.
+
+“My dear Shack,” said he, “if I know anything of life I know that every
+sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls forth an
+apposite, concordant, conformable and proportionate expression of
+feeling. How much of this inevitable accord between expression and
+feeling should be attributed to nature, and how much to the influence
+of art, it would be difficult to say. The sublimely terrible roar of
+the lioness that has been deprived of her cubs is dramatically as far
+above her customary whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent
+utterances of Lear are above the level of his senile vaporings. But it
+is also true that all men and women have what may be called a
+sub-conscious dramatic sense that is awakened by a sufficiently deep
+and powerful emotion—a sense unconsciously acquired from literature and
+the stage that prompts them to express those emotions in language
+befitting their importance and histrionic value.”
+
+“And in the name of the seven sacred saddle-blankets of Sagittarius,
+where did the stage and literature get the stunt?” asked Dawe.
+
+“From life,” answered the editor, triumphantly.
+
+The story writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently but
+dumbly. He was beggared for words with which to formulate adequately
+his dissent.
+
+On a bench nearby a frowzy loafer opened his red eyes and perceived
+that his moral support was due a downtrodden brother.
+
+“Punch him one, Jack,” he called hoarsely to Dawe. “W’at’s he come
+makin’ a noise like a penny arcade for amongst gen’lemen that comes in
+the square to set and think?”
+
+Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of leisure.
+
+“Tell me,” asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, “what especial faults in
+‘The Alarum of the Soul’ caused you to throw it down?”
+
+“When Gabriel Murray,” said Westbrook, “goes to his telephone and is
+told that his fiancée has been shot by a burglar, he says—I do not
+recall the exact words, but—”
+
+“I do,” said Dawe. “He says: ‘Damn Central; she always cuts me off.’
+(And then to his friend) ‘Say, Tommy, does a thirty-two bullet make a
+big hole? It’s kind of hard luck, ain’t it? Could you get me a drink
+from the sideboard, Tommy? No; straight; nothing on the side.’”
+
+“And again,” continued the editor, without pausing for argument, “when
+Berenice opens the letter from her husband informing her that he has
+fled with the manicure girl, her words are—let me see—”
+
+“She says,” interposed the author: “‘Well, what do you think of that!’”
+
+“Absurdly inappropriate words,” said Westbrook, “presenting an
+anti-climax—plunging the story into hopeless bathos. Worse yet; they
+mirror life falsely. No human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms
+when confronted by sudden tragedy.”
+
+“Wrong,” said Dawe, closing his unshaven jaws doggedly. “I say no man
+or woman ever spouts ‘high-falutin’ talk when they go up against a real
+climax. They talk naturally and a little worse.”
+
+The editor rose from the bench with his air of indulgence and inside
+information.
+
+“Say, Westbrook,” said Dawe, pinning him by the lapel, “would you have
+accepted ‘The Alarum of the Soul’ if you had believed that the actions
+and words of the characters were true to life in the parts of the story
+that we discussed?”
+
+“It is very likely that I would, if I believed that way,” said the
+editor. “But I have explained to you that I do not.”
+
+“If I could prove to you that I am right?”
+
+“I’m sorry, Shack, but I’m afraid I haven’t time to argue any further
+just now.”
+
+“I don’t want to argue,” said Dawe. “I want to demonstrate to you from
+life itself that my view is the correct one.”
+
+“How could you do that?” asked Westbrook, in a surprised tone.
+
+“Listen,” said the writer, seriously. “I have thought of a way. It is
+important to me that my theory of true-to-life fiction be recognized as
+correct by the magazines. I’ve fought for it for three years, and I’m
+down to my last dollar, with two months’ rent due.”
+
+“I have applied the opposite of your theory,” said the editor, “in
+selecting the fiction for the _Minerva Magazine_. The circulation has
+gone up from ninety thousand to—”
+
+“Four hundred thousand,” said Dawe. “Whereas it should have been
+boosted to a million.”
+
+“You said something to me just now about demonstrating your pet
+theory.”
+
+“I will. If you’ll give me about half an hour of your time I’ll prove
+to you that I am right. I’ll prove it by Louise.”
+
+“Your wife!” exclaimed Westbrook. “How?”
+
+“Well, not exactly by her, but _with_ her,” said Dawe. “Now, you know
+how devoted and loving Louise has always been. She thinks I’m the only
+genuine preparation on the market that bears the old doctor’s
+signature. She’s been fonder and more faithful than ever, since I’ve
+been cast for the neglected genius part.”
+
+“Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion,” agreed the
+editor. “I remember what inseparable friends she and Mrs. Westbrook
+once were. We are both lucky chaps, Shack, to have such wives. You must
+bring Mrs. Dawe up some evening soon, and we’ll have one of those
+informal chafing-dish suppers that we used to enjoy so much.”
+
+“Later,” said Dawe. “When I get another shirt. And now I’ll tell you my
+scheme. When I was about to leave home after breakfast—if you can call
+tea and oatmeal breakfast—Louise told me she was going to visit her
+aunt in Eighty-ninth Street. She said she would return at three
+o’clock. She is always on time to a minute. It is now—”
+
+Dawe glanced toward the editor’s watch pocket.
+
+“Twenty-seven minutes to three,” said Westbrook, scanning his
+time-piece.
+
+“We have just enough time,” said Dawe. “We will go to my flat at once.
+I will write a note, address it to her and leave it on the table where
+she will see it as she enters the door. You and I will be in the
+dining-room concealed by the portières. In that note I’ll say that I
+have fled from her forever with an affinity who understands the needs
+of my artistic soul as she never did. When she reads it we will observe
+her actions and hear her words. Then we will know which theory is the
+correct one—yours or mine.”
+
+“Oh, never!” exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. “That would be
+inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have Mrs. Dawe’s feelings
+played upon in such a manner.”
+
+“Brace up,” said the writer. “I guess I think as much of her as you do.
+It’s for her benefit as well as mine. I’ve got to get a market for my
+stories in some way. It won’t hurt Louise. She’s healthy and sound. Her
+heart goes as strong as a ninety-eight-cent watch. It’ll last for only
+a minute, and then I’ll step out and explain to her. You really owe it
+to me to give me the chance, Westbrook.”
+
+Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half willingly. And in
+the half of him that consented lurked the vivisectionist that is in all
+of us. Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his
+place. Pity ’tis that there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs to
+go around.
+
+The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried eastward and
+then to the south until they arrived in the Gramercy neighborhood.
+Within its high iron railings the little park had put on its smart coat
+of vernal green, and was admiring itself in its fountain mirror.
+Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling houses, shells of a
+bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the forgotten doings
+of the vanished quality. _Sic transit gloria urbis_.
+
+A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor again
+eastward, then, after covering a short distance, into a lofty but
+narrow flathouse burdened with a floridly over-decorated façade. To the
+fifth story they toiled, and Dawe, panting, pushed his latch-key into
+the door of one of the front flats.
+
+When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feelings of pity, how
+meanly and meagerly the rooms were furnished.
+
+“Get a chair, if you can find one,” said Dawe, “while I hunt up pen and
+ink. Hello, what’s this? Here’s a note from Louise. She must have left
+it there when she went out this morning.”
+
+He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre-table and tore it open.
+He began to read the letter that he drew out of it; and once having
+begun it aloud he so read it through to the end. These are the words
+that Editor Westbrook heard:
+
+“DEAR SHACKLEFORD:
+
+    By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles away and
+    still a-going. I’ve got a place in the chorus of the Occidental
+    Opera Co., and we start on the road to-day at twelve o’clock. I
+    didn’t want to starve to death, and so I decided to make my own
+    living. I’m not coming back. Mrs. Westbrook is going with me. She
+    said she was tired of living with a combination phonograph, iceberg
+    and dictionary, and she’s not coming back, either. We’ve been
+    practising the songs and dances for two months on the quiet. I hope
+    you will be successful, and get along all right! Good-bye.
+
+“LOUISE.”
+
+
+Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his trembling hands, and
+cried out in a deep, vibrating voice:
+
+_“My God, why hast thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is false,
+then let Thy Heaven’s fairest gifts, faith and love, become the jesting
+by-words of traitors and fiends!”_
+
+Editor Westbrook’s glasses fell to the floor. The fingers of one hand
+fumbled with a button on his coat as he blurted between his pale lips:
+
+_“Say, Shack, ain’t that a hell of a note? Wouldn’t that knock you off
+your perch, Shack? Ain’t it hell, now, Shack—ain’t it?”_
+
+
+
+
+XX
+PAST ONE AT ROONEY’S
+
+
+Only on the lower East Side of New York do the houses of Capulet and
+Montagu survive. There they do not fight by the book of arithmetic. If
+you but bite your thumb at an upholder of your opposing house you have
+work cut out for your steel. On Broadway you may drag your man along a
+dozen blocks by his nose, and he will only bawl for the watch; but in
+the domain of the East Side Tybalts and Mercutios you must observe the
+niceties of deportment to the wink of any eyelash and to an inch of
+elbow room at the bar when its patrons include foes of your house and
+kin.
+
+So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork McManus, drifted
+into Dutch Mike’s for a stein of beer, and came upon a bunch of
+Montagus making merry with the suds, he began to observe the strictest
+parliamentary rules. Courtesy forbade his leaving the saloon with his
+thirst unslaked; caution steered him to a place at the bar where the
+mirror supplied the cognizance of the enemy’s movements that his
+indifferent gaze seemed to disdain; experience whispered to him that
+the finger of trouble would be busy among the chattering steins at
+Dutch Mike’s that night. Close by his side drew Brick Cleary, his
+Mercutio, companion of his perambulations. Thus they stood, four of the
+Mulberry Hill Gang and two of the Dry Dock Gang, minding their P’s and
+Q’s so solicitously that Dutch Mike kept one eye on his customers and
+the other on an open space beneath his bar in which it was his custom
+to seek safety whenever the ominous politeness of the rival
+associations congealed into the shapes of bullets and cold steel.
+
+But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry Hills and the Dry
+Docks. We must to Rooney’s, where, on the most blighted dead branch of
+the tree of life, a little pale orchid shall bloom.
+
+Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known who first
+overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the consequences were
+immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a Dewey-like
+swiftness, got an eight-inch gun swung round from his hurricane deck.
+But McManus’s simile must be the torpedo. He glided in under the guns
+and slipped a scant three inches of knife blade between the ribs of the
+Mulberry Hill cruiser. Meanwhile Brick Cleary, a devotee to strategy,
+had skimmed across the lunch counter and thrown the switch of the
+electrics, leaving the combat to be waged by the light of gunfire
+alone. Dutch Mike crawled from his haven and ran into the street crying
+for the watch instead of for a Shakespeare to immortalize the Cimmerian
+shindy.
+
+The cop came, and found a prostrate, bleeding Montagu supported by
+three distrait and reticent followers of the House. Faithful to the
+ethics of the gangs, no one knew whence the hurt came. There was no
+Capulet to be seen.
+
+“Raus mit der interrogatories,” said Buck Malone to the officer. “Sure
+I know who done it. I always manages to get a bird’s eye view of any
+guy that comes up an’ makes a show case for a hardware store out of me.
+No. I’m not telling you his name. I’ll settle with um meself. Wow—ouch!
+Easy, boys! Yes, I’ll attend to his case meself. I’m not making any
+complaint.”
+
+At midnight McManus strolled around a pile of lumber near an East Side
+dock, and lingered in the vicinity of a certain water plug. Brick
+Cleary drifted casually to the trysting place ten minutes later. “He’ll
+maybe not croak,” said Brick; “and he won’t tell, of course. But Dutch
+Mike did. He told the police he was tired of having his place shot up.
+It’s unhandy just now, because Tim Corrigan’s in Europe for a week’s
+end with Kings. He’ll be back on the _Kaiser Williams_ next Friday.
+You’ll have to duck out of sight till then. Tim’ll fix it up all right
+for us when he comes back.”
+
+This goes to explain why Cork McManus went into Rooney’s one night and
+there looked upon the bright, stranger face of Romance for the first
+time in his precarious career.
+
+Until Tim Corrigan should return from his jaunt among Kings and Princes
+and hold up his big white finger in private offices, it was unsafe for
+Cork in any of the old haunts of his gang. So he lay, perdu, in the
+high rear room of a Capulet, reading pink sporting sheets and cursing
+the slow paddle wheels of the _Kaiser Wilhelm_.
+
+It was on Thursday evening that Cork’s seclusion became intolerable to
+him. Never a hart panted for water fountain as he did for the cool
+touch of a drifting stein, for the firm security of a foot-rail in the
+hollow of his shoe and the quiet, hearty challenges of friendship and
+repartee along and across the shining bars. But he must avoid the
+district where he was known. The cops were looking for him everywhere,
+for news was scarce, and the newspapers were harping again on the
+failure of the police to suppress the gangs. If they got him before
+Corrigan came back, the big white finger could not be uplifted; it
+would be too late then. But Corrigan would be home the next day, so he
+felt sure there would be small danger in a little excursion that night
+among the crass pleasures that represented life to him.
+
+At half-past twelve McManus stood in a darkish cross-town street
+looking up at the name “Rooney’s,” picked out by incandescent lights
+against a signboard over a second-story window. He had heard of the
+place as a tough “hang-out”; with its frequenters and its locality he
+was unfamiliar. Guided by certain unerring indications common to all
+such resorts, he ascended the stairs and entered the large room over
+the café.
+
+Here were some twenty or thirty tables, at this time about half-filled
+with Rooney’s guests. Waiters served drinks. At one end a human pianola
+with drugged eyes hammered the keys with automatic and furious
+unprecision. At merciful intervals a waiter would roar or squeak a
+song—songs full of “Mr. Johnsons” and “babes” and “coons”—historical
+word guaranties of the genuineness of African melodies composed by red
+waistcoated young gentlemen, natives of the cotton fields and rice
+swamps of West Twenty-eighth Street.
+
+For one brief moment you must admire Rooney with me as he receives,
+seats, manipulates, and chaffs his guests. He is twenty-nine. He has
+Wellington’s nose, Dante’s chin, the cheek-bones of an Iroquois, the
+smile of Talleyrand, Corbett’s foot work, and the poise of an
+eleven-year-old East Side Central Park Queen of the May. He is assisted
+by a lieutenant known as Frank, a pudgy, easy chap, swell-dressed, who
+goes among the tables seeing that dull care does not intrude. Now, what
+is there about Rooney’s to inspire all this pother? It is more
+respectable by daylight; stout ladies with children and mittens and
+bundles and unpedigreed dogs drop up of afternoons for a stein and a
+chat. Even by gaslight the diversions are melancholy i’ the mouth—drink
+and rag-time, and an occasional surprise when the waiter swabs the suds
+from under your sticky glass. There is an answer. Transmigration! The
+soul of Sir Walter Raleigh has traveled from beneath his slashed
+doublet to a kindred home under Rooney’s visible plaid waistcoat.
+Rooney’s is twenty years ahead of the times. Rooney has removed the
+embargo. Rooney has spread his cloak upon the soggy crossing of public
+opinion, and any Elizabeth who treads upon it is as much a queen as
+another. Attend to the revelation of the secret. In Rooney’s ladies may
+smoke!
+
+McManus sat down at a vacant table. He paid for the glass of beer that
+he ordered, tilted his narrow-brimmed derby to the back of his
+brick-dust head, twined his feet among the rungs of his chair, and
+heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost
+soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste. The sham
+gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious,
+joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the
+hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence
+of well-clothed and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney’s removal of the
+restrictions laid upon the weed, the familiar blended odors of soaked
+lemon peel, flat beer, and _peau d’Espagne_—all these were manna to
+Cork McManus, hungry for his week in the desert of the Capulet’s high
+rear room.
+
+A girl, alone, entered Rooney’s, glanced around with leisurely
+swiftness, and sat opposite McManus at his table. Her eyes rested upon
+him for two seconds in the look with which woman reconnoitres all men
+whom she for the first time confronts. In that space of time she will
+decide upon one of two things—either to scream for the police, or that
+she may marry him later on.
+
+Her brief inspection concluded, the girl laid on the table a worn red
+morocco shopping bag with the inevitable top-gallant sail of frayed
+lace handkerchief flying from a corner of it. After she had ordered a
+small beer from the immediate waiter she took from her bag a box of
+cigarettes and lighted one with slightly exaggerated ease of manner.
+Then she looked again in the eyes of Cork McManus and smiled.
+
+Instantly the doom of each was sealed.
+
+The unqualified desire of a man to buy clothes and build fires for a
+woman for a whole lifetime at first sight of her is not uncommon among
+that humble portion of humanity that does not care for Bradstreet or
+coats-of-arms or Shaw’s plays. Love at first sight has occurred a time
+or two in high life; but, as a rule, the extempore mania is to be found
+among unsophisticated creatures such as the dove, the blue-tailed
+dingbat, and the ten-dollar-a-week clerk. Poets, subscribers to all
+fiction magazines, and schatchens, take notice.
+
+With the exchange of the mysterious magnetic current came to each of
+them the instant desire to lie, pretend, dazzle and deceive, which is
+the worst thing about the hypocritical disorder known as love.
+
+“Have another beer?” suggested Cork. In his circle the phrase was
+considered to be a card, accompanied by a letter of introduction and
+references.
+
+“No, thanks,” said the girl, raising her eyebrows and choosing her
+conventional words carefully. “I—merely dropped in for—a slight
+refreshment.” The cigarette between her fingers seemed to require
+explanation. “My aunt is a Russian lady,” she concluded, “and we often
+have a post perannual cigarette after dinner at home.”
+
+“Cheese it!” said Cork, whom society airs oppressed. “Your fingers are
+as yellow as mine.”
+
+“Say,” said the girl, blazing upon him with low-voiced indignation,
+“what do you think I am? Say, who do you think you are talking to?
+What?”
+
+She was pretty to look at. Her eyes were big, brown, intrepid and
+bright. Under her flat sailor hat, planted jauntily on one side, her
+crinkly, tawny hair parted and was drawn back, low and massy, in a
+thick, pendant knot behind. The roundness of girlhood still lingered in
+her chin and neck, but her cheeks and fingers were thinning slightly.
+She looked upon the world with defiance, suspicion, and sullen wonder.
+Her smart, short tan coat was soiled and expensive. Two inches below
+her black dress dropped the lowest flounce of a heliotrope silk
+underskirt.
+
+“Beg your pardon,” said Cork, looking at her admiringly. “I didn’t mean
+anything. Sure, it’s no harm to smoke, Maudy.”
+
+“Rooney’s,” said the girl, softened at once by his amends, “is the only
+place I know where a lady can smoke. Maybe it ain’t a nice habit, but
+aunty lets us at home. And my name ain’t Maudy, if you please; it’s
+Ruby Delamere.”
+
+“That’s a swell handle,” said Cork approvingly. “Mine’s
+McManus—Cor—er—Eddie McManus.”
+
+“Oh, you can’t help that,” laughed Ruby. “Don’t apologize.”
+
+Cork looked seriously at the big clock on Rooney’s wall. The girl’s
+ubiquitous eyes took in the movement.
+
+“I know it’s late,” she said, reaching for her bag; “but you know how
+you want a smoke when you want one. Ain’t Rooney’s all right? I never
+saw anything wrong here. This is twice I’ve been in. I work in a
+bookbindery on Third Avenue. A lot of us girls have been working
+overtime three nights a week. They won’t let you smoke there, of
+course. I just dropped in here on my way home for a puff. Ain’t it all
+right in here? If it ain’t, I won’t come any more.”
+
+“It’s a little bit late for you to be out alone anywhere,” said Cork.
+“I’m not wise to this particular joint; but anyhow you don’t want to
+have your picture taken in it for a present to your Sunday School
+teacher. Have one more beer, and then say I take you home.”
+
+“But I don’t know you,” said the girl, with fine scrupulosity. “I don’t
+accept the company of gentlemen I ain’t acquainted with. My aunt never
+would allow that.”
+
+“Why,” said Cork McManus, pulling his ear, “I’m the latest thing in
+suitings with side vents and bell skirt when it comes to escortin’ a
+lady. You bet you’ll find me all right, Ruby. And I’ll give you a tip
+as to who I am. My governor is one of the hottest cross-buns of the
+Wall Street push. Morgan’s cab horse casts a shoe every time the old
+man sticks his head out the window. Me! Well, I’m in trainin’ down the
+Street. The old man’s goin’ to put a seat on the Stock Exchange in my
+stockin’ my next birthday. But it all sounds like a lemon to me. What I
+like is golf and yachtin’ and—er—well, say a corkin’ fast ten-round
+bout between welter-weights with walkin’ gloves.”
+
+“I guess you can walk to the door with me,” said the girl hesitatingly,
+but with a certain pleased flutter. “Still I never heard anything extra
+good about Wall Street brokers, or sports who go to prize fights,
+either. Ain’t you got any other recommendations?”
+
+“I think you’re the swellest looker I’ve had my lamps on in little old
+New York,” said Cork impressively.
+
+“That’ll be about enough of that, now. Ain’t you the kidder!” She
+modified her chiding words by a deep, long, beaming, smile-embellished
+look at her cavalier. “We’ll drink our beer before we go, ha?”
+
+A waiter sang. The tobacco smoke grew denser, drifting and rising in
+spirals, waves, tilted layers, cumulus clouds, cataracts and suspended
+fogs like some fifth element created from the ribs of the ancient four.
+Laughter and chat grew louder, stimulated by Rooney’s liquids and
+Rooney’s gallant hospitality to Lady Nicotine.
+
+One o’clock struck. Down-stairs there was a sound of closing and
+locking doors. Frank pulled down the green shades of the front windows
+carefully. Rooney went below in the dark hall and stood at the front
+door, his cigarette cached in the hollow of his hand. Thenceforth
+whoever might seek admittance must present a countenance familiar to
+Rooney’s hawk’s eye—the countenance of a true sport.
+
+Cork McManus and the bookbindery girl conversed absorbedly, with their
+elbows on the table. Their glasses of beer were pushed to one side,
+scarcely touched, with the foam on them sunken to a thin white scum.
+Since the stroke of one the stale pleasures of Rooney’s had become
+renovated and spiced; not by any addition to the list of distractions,
+but because from that moment the sweets became stolen ones. The
+flattest glass of beer acquired the tang of illegality; the mildest
+claret punch struck a knockout blow at law and order; the harmless and
+genial company became outlaws, defying authority and rule. For after
+the stroke of one in such places as Rooney’s, where neither bed nor
+board is to be had, drink may not be set before the thirsty of the city
+of the four million. It is the law.
+
+“Say,” said Cork McManus, almost covering the table with his eloquent
+chest and elbows, “was that dead straight about you workin’ in the
+bookbindery and livin’ at home—and just happenin’ in here—and—and all
+that spiel you gave me?”
+
+“Sure it was,” answered the girl with spirit. “Why, what do you think?
+Do you suppose I’d lie to you? Go down to the shop and ask ’em. I
+handed it to you on the level.”
+
+“On the dead level?” said Cork. “That’s the way I want it; because—”
+
+“Because what?”
+
+“I throw up my hands,” said Cork. “You’ve got me goin’. You’re the girl
+I’ve been lookin’ for. Will you keep company with me, Ruby?”
+
+“Would you like me to—Eddie?”
+
+“Surest thing. But I wanted a straight story about—about yourself, you
+know. When a fellow had a girl—a steady girl—she’s got to be all right,
+you know. She’s got to be straight goods.”
+
+“You’ll find I’ll be straight goods, Eddie.”
+
+“Of course you will. I believe what you told me. But you can’t blame me
+for wantin’ to find out. You don’t see many girls smokin’ cigarettes in
+places like Rooney’s after midnight that are like you.”
+
+The girl flushed a little and lowered her eyes. “I see that now,” she
+said meekly. “I didn’t know how bad it looked. But I won’t do it any
+more. And I’ll go straight home every night and stay there. And I’ll
+give up cigarettes if you say so, Eddie—I’ll cut ’em out from this
+minute on.”
+
+Cork’s air became judicial, proprietary, condemnatory, yet sympathetic.
+“A lady can smoke,” he decided, slowly, “at times and places. Why?
+Because it’s bein’ a lady that helps her pull it off.”
+
+“I’m going to quit. There’s nothing to it,” said the girl. She flicked
+the stub of her cigarette to the floor.
+
+“At times and places,” repeated Cork. “When I call round for you of
+evenin’s we’ll hunt out a dark bench in Stuyvesant Square and have a
+puff or two. But no more Rooney’s at one o’clock—see?”
+
+“Eddie, do you really like me?” The girl searched his hard but frank
+features eagerly with anxious eyes.
+
+“On the dead level.”
+
+“When are you coming to see me—where I live?”
+
+“Thursday—day after to-morrow evenin’. That suit you?”
+
+“Fine. I’ll be ready for you. Come about seven. Walk to the door with
+me to-night and I’ll show you where I live. Don’t forget, now. And
+don’t you go to see any other girls before then, mister! I bet you
+will, though.”
+
+“On the dead level,” said Cork, “you make ’em all look like rag-dolls
+to me. Honest, you do. I know when I’m suited. On the dead level, I
+do.”
+
+Against the front door down-stairs repeated heavy blows were delivered.
+The loud crashes resounded in the room above. Only a trip-hammer or a
+policeman’s foot could have been the author of those sounds. Rooney
+jumped like a bullfrog to a corner of the room, turned off the electric
+lights and hurried swiftly below. The room was left utterly dark except
+for the winking red glow of cigars and cigarettes. A second volley of
+crashes came up from the assaulted door. A little, rustling, murmuring
+panic moved among the besieged guests. Frank, cool, smooth, reassuring,
+could be seen in the rosy glow of the burning tobacco, going from table
+to table.
+
+“All keep still!” was his caution. “Don’t talk or make any noise!
+Everything will be all right. Now, don’t feel the slightest alarm.
+We’ll take care of you all.”
+
+Ruby felt across the table until Cork’s firm hand closed upon hers.
+“Are you afraid, Eddie?” she whispered. “Are you afraid you’ll get a
+free ride?”
+
+“Nothin’ doin’ in the teeth-chatterin’ line,” said Cork. “I guess
+Rooney’s been slow with his envelope. Don’t you worry, girly; I’ll look
+out for you all right.”
+
+Yet Mr. McManus’s ease was only skin- and muscle-deep. With the police
+looking everywhere for Buck Malone’s assailant, and with Corrigan still
+on the ocean wave, he felt that to be caught in a police raid would
+mean an ended career for him. He wished he had remained in the high
+rear room of the true Capulet reading the pink extras.
+
+Rooney seemed to have opened the front door below and engaged the
+police in conference in the dark hall. The wordless low growl of their
+voices came up the stairway. Frank made a wireless news station of
+himself at the upper door. Suddenly he closed the door, hurried to the
+extreme rear of the room and lighted a dim gas jet.
+
+“This way, everybody!” he called sharply. “In a hurry; but no noise,
+please!”
+
+The guests crowded in confusion to the rear. Rooney’s lieutenant swung
+open a panel in the wall, overlooking the back yard, revealing a ladder
+already placed for the escape.
+
+“Down and out, everybody!” he commanded. “Ladies first! Less talking,
+please! Don’t crowd! There’s no danger.”
+
+Among the last, Cork and Ruby waited their turn at the open panel.
+Suddenly she swept him aside and clung to his arm fiercely.
+
+“Before we go out,” she whispered in his ear—“before anything happens,
+tell me again, Eddie, do you l—do you really like me?”
+
+“On the dead level,” said Cork, holding her close with one arm, “when
+it comes to you, I’m all in.”
+
+When they turned they found they were lost and in darkness. The last of
+the fleeing customers had descended. Half way across the yard they bore
+the ladder, stumbling, giggling, hurrying to place it against an
+adjoining low building over the roof of which their only route to
+safety.
+
+“We may as well sit down,” said Cork grimly. “Maybe Rooney will stand
+the cops off, anyhow.”
+
+They sat at a table; and their hands came together again.
+
+A number of men then entered the dark room, feeling their way about.
+One of them, Rooney himself, found the switch and turned on the
+electric light. The other man was a cop of the old régime—a big cop, a
+thick cop, a fuming, abrupt cop—not a pretty cop. He went up to the
+pair at the table and sneered familiarly at the girl.
+
+“What are youse doin’ in here?” he asked.
+
+“Dropped in for a smoke,” said Cork mildly.
+
+“Had any drinks?”
+
+“Not later than one o’clock.”
+
+“Get out—quick!” ordered the cop. Then, “Sit down!” he countermanded.
+
+He took off Cork’s hat roughly and scrutinized him shrewdly. “Your
+name’s McManus.”
+
+“Bad guess,” said Cork. “It’s Peterson.”
+
+“Cork McManus, or something like that,” said the cop. “You put a knife
+into a man in Dutch Mike’s saloon a week ago.”
+
+“Aw, forget it!” said Cork, who perceived a shade of doubt in the
+officer’s tones. “You’ve got my mug mixed with somebody else’s.”
+
+“Have I? Well, you’ll come to the station with me, anyhow, and be
+looked over. The description fits you all right.” The cop twisted his
+fingers under Cork’s collar. “Come on!” he ordered roughly.
+
+Cork glanced at Ruby. She was pale, and her thin nostrils quivered. Her
+quick eye danced from one man’s face to the other as they spoke or
+moved. What hard luck! Cork was thinking—Corrigan on the briny; and
+Ruby met and lost almost within an hour! Somebody at the police station
+would recognize him, without a doubt. Hard luck!
+
+But suddenly the girl sprang up and hurled herself with both arms
+extended against the cop. His hold on Cork’s collar was loosened and he
+stumbled back two or three paces.
+
+“Don’t go so fast, Maguire!” she cried in shrill fury. “Keep your hands
+off my man! You know me, and you know I’m givin’ you good advice. Don’t
+you touch him again! He’s not the guy you are lookin’ for—I’ll stand
+for that.”
+
+“See here, Fanny,” said the Cop, red and angry, “I’ll take you, too, if
+you don’t look out! How do you know this ain’t the man I want? What are
+you doing in here with him?”
+
+“How do I know?” said the girl, flaming red and white by turns.
+“Because I’ve known him a year. He’s mine. Oughtn’t I to know? And what
+am I doin’ here with him? That’s easy.”
+
+She stooped low and reached down somewhere into a swirl of flirted
+draperies, heliotrope and black. An elastic snapped, she threw on the
+table toward Cork a folded wad of bills. The money slowly straightened
+itself with little leisurely jerks.
+
+“Take that, Jimmy, and let’s go,” said the girl. “I’m declarin’ the
+usual dividends, Maguire,” she said to the officer. “You had your usual
+five-dollar graft at the usual corner at ten.”
+
+“A lie!” said the cop, turning purple. “You go on my beat again and
+I’ll arrest you every time I see you.”
+
+“No, you won’t,” said the girl. “And I’ll tell you why. Witnesses saw
+me give you the money to-night, and last week, too. I’ve been getting
+fixed for you.”
+
+Cork put the wad of money carefully into his pocket, and said: “Come
+on, Fanny; let’s have some chop suey before we go home.”
+
+“Clear out, quick, both of you, or I’ll—”
+
+The cop’s bluster trailed away into inconsequentiality.
+
+At the corner of the street the two halted. Cork handed back the money
+without a word. The girl took it and slipped it slowly into her
+hand-bag. Her expression was the same she had worn when she entered
+Rooney’s that night—she looked upon the world with defiance, suspicion
+and sullen wonder.
+
+“I guess I might as well say good-bye here,” she said dully. “You won’t
+want to see me again, of course. Will you—shake hands—Mr. McManus.”
+
+“I mightn’t have got wise if you hadn’t give the snap away,” said Cork.
+“Why did you do it?”
+
+“You’d have been pinched if I hadn’t. That’s why. Ain’t that reason
+enough?” Then she began to cry. “Honest, Eddie, I was goin’ to be the
+best girl in the world. I hated to be what I am; I hated men; I was
+ready almost to die when I saw you. And you seemed different from
+everybody else. And when I found you liked me, too, why, I thought I’d
+make you believe I was good, and I was goin’ to be good. When you asked
+to come to my house and see me, why, I’d have died rather than do
+anything wrong after that. But what’s the use of talking about it? I’ll
+say good-by, if you will, Mr. McManus.”
+
+Cork was pulling at his ear. “I knifed Malone,” said he. “I was the one
+the cop wanted.”
+
+“Oh, that’s all right,” said the girl listlessly. “It didn’t make any
+difference about that.”
+
+“That was all hot air about Wall Street. I don’t do nothin’ but hang
+out with a tough gang on the East Side.”
+
+“That was all right, too,” repeated the girl. “It didn’t make any
+difference.”
+
+Cork straightened himself, and pulled his hat down low. “I could get a
+job at O’Brien’s,” he said aloud, but to himself.
+
+“Good-by,” said the girl.
+
+“Come on,” said Cork, taking her arm. “I know a place.”
+
+Two blocks away he turned with her up the steps of a red brick house
+facing a little park.
+
+“What house is this?” she asked, drawing back. “Why are you going in
+there?”
+
+A street lamp shone brightly in front. There was a brass nameplate at
+one side of the closed front doors. Cork drew her firmly up the steps.
+“Read that,” said he.
+
+She looked at the name on the plate, and gave a cry between a moan and
+a scream. “No, no, no, Eddie! Oh, my God, no! I won’t let you do
+that—not now! Let me go! You shan’t do that! You can’t—you mus’n’t! Not
+after you know! No, no! Come away quick! Oh, my God! Please, Eddie,
+come!”
+
+Half fainting, she reeled, and was caught in the bend of his arm.
+Cork’s right hand felt for the electric button and pressed it long.
+
+Another cop—how quickly they scent trouble when trouble is on the
+wing!—came along, saw them, and ran up the steps. “Here! What are you
+doing with that girl?” he called gruffly.
+
+“She’ll be all right in a minute,” said Cork. “It’s a straight deal.”
+
+“Reverend Jeremiah Jones,” read the cop from the door-plate with true
+detective cunning.
+
+“Correct,” said Cork. “On the dead level, we’re goin’ to get married.”
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+THE VENTURERS
+
+
+Let the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the _Non Sequitur_
+Limited, if it will; first you must take your seat in the observation
+car “_Raison d’être_” for one moment. It is for no longer than to
+consider a brief essay on the subject—let us call it: “What’s Around
+the Corner.”
+
+_Omne mundus in duas partes divisum est_—men who wear rubbers and pay
+poll-taxes, and men who discover new continents. There are no more
+continents to discover; but by the time overshoes are out of date and
+the poll has developed into an income tax, the other half will be
+paralleling the canals of Mars with radium railways.
+
+Fortune, Chance, and Adventure are given as synonymous in the
+dictionaries. To the knowing each has a different meaning. Fortune is a
+prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk
+in the shadows at the roadside. The face of Fortune is radiant and
+alluring; that of Adventure is flushed and heroic. The face of Chance
+is the beautiful countenance—perfect because vague and dream-born—that
+we see in our tea-cups at breakfast while we growl over our chops and
+toast.
+
+The VENTURER is one who keeps his eye on the hedgerows and wayside
+groves and meadows while he travels the road to Fortune. That is the
+difference between him and the Adventurer. Eating the forbidden fruit
+was the best record ever made by a Venturer. Trying to prove that it
+happened is the highest work of the Adventuresome. To be either is
+disturbing to the cosmogony of creation. So, as bracket-sawed and
+city-directoried citizens, let us light our pipes, chide the children
+and the cat, arrange ourselves in the willow rocker under the
+flickering gas jet at the coolest window and scan this little tale of
+two modern followers of Chance.
+
+“Did you ever hear that story about the man from the West?” asked
+Billinger, in the little dark-oak room to your left as you penetrate
+the interior of the Powhatan Club.
+
+“Doubtless,” said John Reginald Forster, rising and leaving the room.
+
+Forster got his straw hat (straws will be in and maybe out again long
+before this is printed) from the checkroom boy, and walked out of the
+air (as Hamlet says). Billinger was used to having his stories insulted
+and would not mind. Forster was in his favorite mood and wanted to go
+away from anywhere. A man, in order to get on good terms with himself,
+must have his opinions corroborated and his moods matched by some one
+else. (I had written that “somebody”; but an A. D. T. boy who once took
+a telegram for me pointed out that I could save money by using the
+compound word. This is a vice versa case.)
+
+Forster’s favorite mood was that of greatly desiring to be a follower
+of Chance. He was a Venturer by nature, but convention, birth,
+tradition and the narrowing influences of the tribe of Manhattan had
+denied him full privilege. He had trodden all the main-traveled
+thoroughfares and many of the side roads that are supposed to relieve
+the tedium of life. But none had sufficed. The reason was that he knew
+what was to be found at the end of every street. He knew from
+experience and logic almost precisely to what end each digression from
+routine must lead. He found a depressing monotony in all the variations
+that the music of his sphere had grafted upon the tune of life. He had
+not learned that, although the world was made round, the circle has
+been squared, and that it’s true interest is to be in “What’s Around
+the Corner.”
+
+Forster walked abroad aimlessly from the Powhatan, trying not to tax
+either his judgment or his desire as to what streets he traveled. He
+would have been glad to lose his way if it were possible; but he had no
+hope of that. Adventure and Fortune move at your beck and call in the
+Greater City; but Chance is oriental. She is a veiled lady in a sedan
+chair, protected by a special traffic squad of dragonians. Crosstown,
+uptown, and downtown you may move without seeing her.
+
+At the end of an hour’s stroll, Forster stood on a corner of a broad,
+smooth avenue, looking disconsolately across it at a picturesque old
+hotel softly but brilliantly lit. Disconsolately, because he knew that
+he must dine; and dining in that hotel was no venture. It was one of
+his favorite caravansaries, and so silent and swift would be the
+service and so delicately choice the food, that he regretted the hunger
+that must be appeased by the “dead perfection” of the place’s cuisine.
+Even the music there seemed to be always playing _da capo_.
+
+Fancy came to him that he would dine at some cheap, even dubious,
+restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from all
+countries of the world spread their national cookery for the omnivorous
+American. Something might happen there out of the routine—he might come
+upon a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question
+without an answer, a cause without an effect, a gulf stream in life’s
+salt ocean. He had not dressed for evening; he wore a dark business
+suit that would not be questioned even where the waiters served the
+spaghetti in their shirt sleeves.
+
+So John Reginald Forster began to search his clothes for money; because
+the more cheaply you dine, the more surely must you pay. All of the
+thirteen pockets, large and small, of his business suit he explored
+carefully and found not a penny. His bank book showed a balance of five
+figures to his credit in the Old Ironsides Trust Company, but—
+
+Forster became aware of a man nearby at his left hand who was really
+regarding him with some amusement. He looked like any business man of
+thirty or so, neatly dressed and standing in the attitude of one
+waiting for a street car. But there was no car line on that avenue. So
+his proximity and unconcealed curiosity seemed to Forster to partake of
+the nature of a personal intrusion. But, as he was a consistent seeker
+after “What’s Around the Corner,” instead of manifesting resentment he
+only turned a half-embarrassed smile upon the other’s grin of
+amusement.
+
+“All in?” asked the intruder, drawing nearer.
+
+“Seems so,” said Forster. “Now, I thought there was a dollar in—”
+
+“Oh, I know,” said the other man, with a laugh. “But there wasn’t. I’ve
+just been through the same process myself, as I was coming around the
+corner. I found in an upper vest pocket—I don’t know how they got
+there—exactly two pennies. You know what kind of a dinner exactly two
+pennies will buy!”
+
+“You haven’t dined, then?” asked Forster.
+
+“I have not. But I would like to. Now, I’ll make you a proposition. You
+look like a man who would take up one. Your clothes look neat and
+respectable. Excuse personalities. I think mine will pass the scrutiny
+of a head waiter, also. Suppose we go over to that hotel and dine
+together. We will choose from the menu like millionaires—or, if you
+prefer, like gentlemen in moderate circumstances dining extravagantly
+for once. When we have finished we will match with my two pennies to
+see which of us will stand the brunt of the house’s displeasure and
+vengeance. My name is Ives. I think we have lived in the same station
+of life—before our money took wings.”
+
+“You’re on,” said Forster, joyfully.
+
+Here was a venture at least within the borders of the mysterious
+country of Chance—anyhow, it promised something better than the stale
+infestivity of a table d’hôte.
+
+The two were soon seated at a corner table in the hotel dining room.
+Ives chucked one of his pennies across the table to Forster.
+
+“Match for which of us gives the order,” he said.
+
+Forster lost.
+
+Ives laughed and began to name liquids and viands to the waiter with
+the absorbed but calm deliberation of one who was to the menu born.
+Forster, listening, gave his admiring approval of the order.
+
+“I am a man,” said Ives, during the oysters, “Who has made a lifetime
+search after the to-be-continued-in-our-next. I am not like the
+ordinary adventurer who strikes for a coveted prize. Nor yet am I like
+a gambler who knows he is either to win or lose a certain set stake.
+What I want is to encounter an adventure to which I can predict no
+conclusion. It is the breath of existence to me to dare Fate in its
+blindest manifestations. The world has come to run so much by rote and
+gravitation that you can enter upon hardly any footpath of chance in
+which you do not find signboards informing you of what you may expect
+at its end. I am like the clerk in the Circumlocution Office who always
+complained bitterly when any one came in to ask information. ‘He wanted
+to _know_, you know!’ was the kick he made to his fellow-clerks. Well,
+I don’t want to know, I don’t want to reason, I don’t want to guess—I
+want to bet my hand without seeing it.”
+
+“I understand,” said Forster delightedly. “I’ve often wanted the way I
+feel put into words. You’ve done it. I want to take chances on what’s
+coming. Suppose we have a bottle of Moselle with the next course.”
+
+“Agreed,” said Ives. “I’m glad you catch my idea. It will increase the
+animosity of the house toward the loser. If it does not weary you, we
+will pursue the theme. Only a few times have I met a true venturer—one
+who does not ask a schedule and map from Fate when he begins a journey.
+But, as the world becomes more civilized and wiser, the more difficult
+it is to come upon an adventure the end of which you cannot foresee. In
+the Elizabethan days you could assault the watch, wring knockers from
+doors and have a jolly set-to with the blades in any convenient angle
+of a wall and ‘get away with it.’ Nowadays, if you speak
+disrespectfully to a policeman, all that is left to the most romantic
+fancy is to conjecture in what particular police station he will land
+you.”
+
+“I know—I know,” said Forster, nodding approval.
+
+“I returned to New York to-day,” continued Ives, “from a three years’
+ramble around the globe. Things are not much better abroad than they
+are at home. The whole world seems to be overrun by conclusions. The
+only thing that interests me greatly is a premise. I’ve tried shooting
+big game in Africa. I know what an express rifle will do at so many
+yards; and when an elephant or a rhinoceros falls to the bullet, I
+enjoy it about as much as I did when I was kept in after school to do a
+sum in long division on the blackboard.”
+
+“I know—I know,” said Forster.
+
+“There might be something in aeroplanes,” went on Ives, reflectively.
+“I’ve tried ballooning; but it seems to be merely a cut-and-dried
+affair of wind and ballast.”
+
+“Women,” suggested Forster, with a smile.
+
+“Three months ago,” said Ives. “I was pottering around in one of the
+bazaars in Constantinople. I noticed a lady, veiled, of course, but
+with a pair of especially fine eyes visible, who was examining some
+amber and pearl ornaments at one of the booths. With her was an
+attendant—a big Nubian, as black as coal. After a while the attendant
+drew nearer to me by degrees and slipped a scrap of paper into my hand.
+I looked at it when I got a chance. On it was scrawled hastily in
+pencil: ‘The arched gate of the Nightingale Garden at nine to-night.’
+Does that appear to you to be an interesting premise, Mr. Forster?”
+
+“I made inquiries and learned that the Nightingale Garden was the
+property of an old Turk—a grand vizier, or something of the sort. Of
+course I prospected for the arched gate and was there at nine. The same
+Nubian attendant opened the gate promptly on time, and I went inside
+and sat on a bench by a perfumed fountain with the veiled lady. We had
+quite an extended chat. She was Myrtle Thompson, a lady journalist, who
+was writing up the Turkish harems for a Chicago newspaper. She said she
+noticed the New York cut of my clothes in the bazaar and wondered if I
+couldn’t work something into the metropolitan papers about it.”
+
+“I see,” said Forster. “I see.”
+
+“I’ve canoed through Canada,” said Ives, “down many rapids and over
+many falls. But I didn’t seem to get what I wanted out of it because I
+knew there were only two possible outcomes—I would either go to the
+bottom or arrive at the sea level. I’ve played all games at cards; but
+the mathematicians have spoiled that sport by computing the
+percentages. I’ve made acquaintances on trains, I’ve answered
+advertisements, I’ve rung strange door-bells, I’ve taken every chance
+that presented itself; but there has always been the conventional
+ending—the logical conclusion to the premise.”
+
+“I know,” repeated Forster. “I’ve felt it all. But I’ve had few chances
+to take my chance at chances. Is there any life so devoid of
+impossibilities as life in this city? There seems to be a myriad of
+opportunities for testing the undeterminable; but not one in a thousand
+fails to land you where you expected it to stop. I wish the subways and
+street cars disappointed one as seldom.”
+
+“The sun has risen,” said Ives, “on the Arabian nights. There are no
+more caliphs. The fisherman’s vase is turned to a vacuum bottle,
+warranted to keep any genie boiling or frozen for forty-eight hours.
+Life moves by rote. Science has killed adventure. There are no more
+opportunities such as Columbus and the man who ate the first oyster
+had. The only certain thing is that there is nothing uncertain.”
+
+“Well,” said Forster, “my experience has been the limited one of a city
+man. I haven’t seen the world as you have; but it seems that we view it
+with the same opinion. But, I tell you I am grateful for even this
+little venture of ours into the borders of the haphazard. There may be
+at least one breathless moment when the bill for the dinner is
+presented. Perhaps, after all, the pilgrims who traveled without scrip
+or purse found a keener taste to life than did the knights of the Round
+Table who rode abroad with a retinue and King Arthur’s certified checks
+in the lining of their helmets. And now, if you’ve finished your
+coffee, suppose we match one of your insufficient coins for the
+impending blow of Fate. What have I up?”
+
+“Heads,” called Ives.
+
+“Heads it is,” said Forster, lifting his hand. “I lose. We forgot to
+agree upon a plan for the winner to escape. I suggest that when the
+waiter comes you make a remark about telephoning to a friend. I will
+hold the fort and the dinner check long enough for you to get your hat
+and be off. I thank you for an evening out of the ordinary, Mr. Ives,
+and wish we might have others.”
+
+“If my memory is not at fault,” said Ives, laughing, “the nearest
+police station is in MacDougal Street. I have enjoyed the dinner, too,
+let me assure you.”
+
+Forster crooked his finger for the waiter. Victor, with a locomotive
+effort that seemed to owe more to pneumatics than to pedestrianism,
+glided to the table and laid the card, face downward, by the loser’s
+cup. Forster took it up and added the figures with deliberate care.
+Ives leaned back comfortably in his chair.
+
+“Excuse me,” said Forster; “but I thought you were going to ring Grimes
+about that theatre party for Thursday night. Had you forgotten about
+it?”
+
+“Oh,” said Ives, settling himself more comfortably, “I can do that
+later on. Get me a glass of water, waiter.”
+
+“Want to be in at the death, do you?” asked Forster.
+
+“I hope you don’t object,” said Ives, pleadingly. “Never in my life
+have I seen a gentleman arrested in a public restaurant for swindling
+it out of a dinner.”
+
+“All right,” said Forster, calmly. “You are entitled to see a Christian
+die in the arena as your _pousse-café_.”
+
+Victor came with the glass of water and remained, with the disengaged
+air of an inexorable collector.
+
+Forster hesitated for fifteen seconds, and then took a pencil from his
+pocket and scribbled his name on the dinner check. The waiter bowed and
+took it away.
+
+“The fact is,” said Forster, with a little embarrassed laugh, “I doubt
+whether I’m what they call a ‘game sport,’ which means the same as a
+‘soldier of Fortune.’ I’ll have to make a confession. I’ve been dining
+at this hotel two or three times a week for more than a year. I always
+sign my checks.” And then, with a note of appreciation in his voice:
+“It was first-rate of you to stay to see me through with it when you
+knew I had no money, and that you might be scooped in, too.”
+
+“I guess I’ll confess, too,” said Ives, with a grin. “I own the hotel.
+I don’t run it, of course, but I always keep a suite on the third floor
+for my use when I happen to stray into town.”
+
+He called a waiter and said: “Is Mr. Gilmore still behind the desk? All
+right. Tell him that Mr. Ives is here, and ask him to have my rooms
+made ready and aired.”
+
+“Another venture cut short by the inevitable,” said Forster. “Is there
+a conundrum without an answer in the next number? But let’s hold to our
+subject just for a minute or two, if you will. It isn’t often that I
+meet a man who understands the flaws I pick in existence. I am engaged
+to be married a month from to-day.”
+
+“I reserve comment,” said Ives.
+
+“Right; I am going to add to the assertion. I am devotedly fond of the
+lady; but I can’t decide whether to show up at the church or make a
+sneak for Alaska. It’s the same idea, you know, that we were
+discussing—it does for a fellow as far as possibilities are concerned.
+Everybody knows the routine—you get a kiss flavored with Ceylon tea
+after breakfast; you go to the office; you come back home and dress for
+dinner—theatre twice a week—bills—moping around most evenings trying to
+make conversation—a little quarrel occasionally—maybe sometimes a big
+one, and a separation—or else a settling down into a middle-aged
+contentment, which is worst of all.”
+
+“I know,” said Ives, nodding wisely.
+
+“It’s the dead certainty of the thing,” went on Forster, “that keeps me
+in doubt. There’ll nevermore be anything around the corner.”
+
+“Nothing after the ‘Little Church,’” said Ives. “I know.”
+
+“Understand,” said Forster, “that I am in no doubt as to my feelings
+toward the lady. I may say that I love her truly and deeply. But there
+is something in the current that runs through my veins that cries out
+against any form of the calculable. I do not know what I want; but I
+know that I want it. I’m talking like an idiot, I suppose, but I’m sure
+of what I mean.”
+
+“I understand you,” said Ives, with a slow smile. “Well, I think I will
+be going up to my rooms now. If you would dine with me here one evening
+soon, Mr. Forster, I’d be glad.”
+
+“Thursday?” suggested Forster.
+
+“At seven, if it’s convenient,” answered Ives.
+
+“Seven goes,” assented Forster.
+
+At half-past eight Ives got into a cab and was driven to a number in
+one of the correct West Seventies. His card admitted him to the
+reception room of an old-fashioned house into which the spirits of
+Fortune, Chance and Adventure had never dared to enter. On the walls
+were the Whistler etchings, the steel engravings by
+Oh-what’s-his-name?, the still-life paintings of the grapes and garden
+truck with the watermelon seeds spilled on the table as natural as
+life, and the Greuze head. It was a household. There were even brass
+andirons. On a table was an album, half-morocco, with oxidized-silver
+protections on the corners of the lids. A clock on the mantel ticked
+loudly, with a warning click at five minutes to nine. Ives looked at it
+curiously, remembering a time-piece in his grandmother’s home that gave
+such a warning.
+
+And then down the stairs and into the room came Mary Marsden. She was
+twenty-four, and I leave her to your imagination. But I must say this
+much—youth and health and simplicity and courage and greenish-violet
+eyes are beautiful, and she had all these. She gave Ives her hand with
+the sweet cordiality of an old friendship.
+
+“You can’t think what a pleasure it is,” she said, “to have you drop in
+once every three years or so.”
+
+For half an hour they talked. I confess that I cannot repeat the
+conversation. You will find it in books in the circulating library.
+When that part of it was over, Mary said:
+
+“And did you find what you wanted while you were abroad?”
+
+“What I wanted?” said Ives.
+
+“Yes. You know you were always queer. Even as a boy you wouldn’t play
+marbles or baseball or any game with rules. You wanted to dive in water
+where you didn’t know whether it was ten inches or ten feet deep. And
+when you grew up you were just the same. We’ve often talked about your
+peculiar ways.”
+
+“I suppose I am an incorrigible,” said Ives. “I am opposed to the
+doctrine of predestination, to the rule of three, gravitation,
+taxation, and everything of the kind. Life has always seemed to me
+something like a serial story would be if they printed above each
+instalment a synopsis of _succeeding_ chapters.”
+
+Mary laughed merrily.
+
+“Bob Ames told us once,” she said, “of a funny thing you did. It was
+when you and he were on a train in the South, and you got off at a town
+where you hadn’t intended to stop just because the brakeman hung up a
+sign in the end of the car with the name of the next station on it.”
+
+“I remember,” said Ives. “That ‘next station’ has been the thing I’ve
+always tried to get away from.”
+
+“I know it,” said Mary. “And you’ve been very foolish. I hope you
+didn’t find what you wanted not to find, or get off at the station
+where there wasn’t any, or whatever it was you expected wouldn’t happen
+to you during the three years you’ve been away.”
+
+“There was something I wanted before I went away,” said Ives.
+
+Mary looked in his eyes clearly, with a slight, but perfectly sweet
+smile.
+
+“There was,” she said. “You wanted me. And you could have had me, as
+you very well know.”
+
+Without replying, Ives let his gaze wander slowly about the room. There
+had been no change in it since last he had been in it, three years
+before. He vividly recalled the thoughts that had been in his mind
+then. The contents of that room were as fixed, in their way, as the
+everlasting hills. No change would ever come there except the
+inevitable ones wrought by time and decay. That silver-mounted album
+would occupy that corner of that table, those pictures would hang on
+the walls, those chairs be found in their same places every morn and
+noon and night while the household hung together. The brass andirons
+were monuments to order and stability. Here and there were relics of a
+hundred years ago which were still living mementos and would be for
+many years to come. One going from and coming back to that house would
+never need to forecast or doubt. He would find what he left, and leave
+what he found. The veiled lady, Chance, would never lift her hand to
+the knocker on the outer door.
+
+And before him sat the lady who belonged in the room. Cool and sweet
+and unchangeable she was. She offered no surprises. If one should pass
+his life with her, though she might grow white-haired and wrinkled, he
+would never perceive the change. Three years he had been away from her,
+and she was still waiting for him as established and constant as the
+house itself. He was sure that she had once cared for him. It was the
+knowledge that she would always do so that had driven him away. Thus
+his thoughts ran.
+
+“I am going to be married soon,” said Mary.
+
+On the next Thursday afternoon Forster came hurriedly to Ive’s hotel.
+
+“Old man,” said he, “we’ll have to put that dinner off for a year or
+so; I’m going abroad. The steamer sails at four. That was a great talk
+we had the other night, and it decided me. I’m going to knock around
+the world and get rid of that incubus that has been weighing on both
+you and me—the terrible dread of knowing what’s going to happen. I’ve
+done one thing that hurts my conscience a little; but I know it’s best
+for both of us. I’ve written to the lady to whom I was engaged and
+explained everything—told her plainly why I was leaving—that the
+monotony of matrimony would never do for me. Don’t you think I was
+right?”
+
+“It is not for me to say,” answered Ives. “Go ahead and shoot elephants
+if you think it will bring the element of chance into your life. We’ve
+got to decide these things for ourselves. But I tell you one thing,
+Forster, I’ve found the way. I’ve found out the biggest hazard in the
+world—a game of chance that never is concluded, a venture that may end
+in the highest heaven or the blackest pit. It will keep a man on edge
+until the clods fall on his coffin, because he will never know—not
+until his last day, and not then will he know. It is a voyage without a
+rudder or compass, and you must be captain and crew and keep watch,
+every day and night, yourself, with no one to relieve you. I have found
+the VENTURE. Don’t bother yourself about leaving Mary Marsden, Forster.
+I married her yesterday at noon.”
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+THE DUEL
+
+
+The gods, lying beside their nectar on ’Lympus and peeping over the
+edge of the cliff, perceive a difference in cities. Although it would
+seem that to their vision towns must appear as large or small ant-hills
+without special characteristics, yet it is not so. Studying the habits
+of ants from so great a height should be but a mild diversion when
+coupled with the soft drink that mythology tells us is their only
+solace. But doubtless they have amused themselves by the comparison of
+villages and towns; and it will be no news to them (nor, perhaps, to
+many mortals), that in one particularity New York stands unique among
+the cities of the world. This shall be the theme of a little story
+addressed to the man who sits smoking with his Sabbath-slippered feet
+on another chair, and to the woman who snatches the paper for a moment
+while boiling greens or a narcotized baby leaves her free. With these I
+love to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.
+
+New York City is inhabited by 4,000,000 mysterious strangers; thus
+beating Bird Centre by three millions and half a dozen nine’s. They
+came here in various ways and for many reasons—Hendrik Hudson, the art
+schools, green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers’ convention,
+the Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage, cheap excursion
+rates, brains, personal column ads., heavy walking shoes, ambition,
+freight trains—all these have had a hand in making up the population.
+
+But every man Jack when he first sets foot on the stones of Manhattan
+has got to fight. He has got to fight at once until either he or his
+adversary wins. There is no resting between rounds, for there are no
+rounds. It is slugging from the first. It is a fight to a finish.
+
+Your opponent is the City. You must do battle with it from the time the
+ferry-boat lands you on the island until either it is yours or it has
+conquered you. It is the same whether you have a million in your pocket
+or only the price of a week’s lodging.
+
+The battle is to decide whether you shall become a New Yorker or turn
+the rankest outlander and Philistine. You must be one or the other. You
+cannot remain neutral. You must be for or against—lover or enemy—bosom
+friend or outcast. And, oh, the city is a general in the ring. Not only
+by blows does it seek to subdue you. It woos you to its heart with the
+subtlety of a siren. It is a combination of Delilah, green Chartreuse,
+Beethoven, chloral and John L. in his best days.
+
+In other cities you may wander and abide as a stranger man as long as
+you please. You may live in Chicago until your hair whitens, and be a
+citizen and still prate of beans if Boston mothered you, and without
+rebuke. You may become a civic pillar in any other town but
+Knickerbocker’s, and all the time publicly sneering at its buildings,
+comparing them with the architecture of Colonel Telfair’s residence in
+Jackson, Miss., whence you hail, and you will not be set upon. But in
+New York you must be either a New Yorker or an invader of a modern
+Troy, concealed in the wooden horse of your conceited provincialism.
+And this dreary preamble is only to introduce to you the unimportant
+figures of William and Jack.
+
+They came out of the West together, where they had been friends. They
+came to dig their fortunes out of the big city.
+
+Father Knickerbocker met them at the ferry, giving one a right-hander
+on the nose and the other an upper-cut with his left, just to let them
+know that the fight was on.
+
+William was for business; Jack was for Art. Both were young and
+ambitious; so they countered and clinched. I think they were from
+Nebraska or possibly Missouri or Minnesota. Anyhow, they were out for
+success and scraps and scads, and they tackled the city like two
+Lochinvars with brass knucks and a pull at the City Hall.
+
+Four years afterward William and Jack met at luncheon. The business man
+blew in like a March wind, hurled his silk hat at a waiter, dropped
+into the chair that was pushed under him, seized the bill of fare, and
+had ordered as far as cheese before the artist had time to do more than
+nod. After the nod a humorous smile came into his eyes.
+
+“Billy,” he said, “you’re done for. The city has gobbled you up. It has
+taken you and cut you to its pattern and stamped you with its brand.
+You are so nearly like ten thousand men I have seen to-day that you
+couldn’t be picked out from them if it weren’t for your laundry marks.”
+
+“Camembert,” finished William. “What’s that? Oh, you’ve still got your
+hammer out for New York, have you? Well, little old
+Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me. It’s giving me mine.
+And, say, I used to think the West was the whole round world—only
+slightly flattened at the poles whenever Bryan ran. I used to yell
+myself hoarse about the free expense, and hang my hat on the horizon,
+and say cutting things in the grocery to little soap drummers from the
+East. But I’d never seen New York, then, Jack. Me for it from the
+rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West to me now. Have you heard
+this fellow Crusoe sing? The desert isle for him, I say, but my wife
+made me go. Give me May Irwin or E. S. Willard any time.”
+
+“Poor Billy,” said the artist, delicately fingering a cigarette. “You
+remember, when we were on our way to the East how we talked about this
+great, wonderful city, and how we meant to conquer it and never let it
+get the best of us? We were going to be just the same fellows we had
+always been, and never let it master us. It has downed you, old man.
+You have changed from a maverick into a butterick.”
+
+“Don’t see exactly what you are driving at,” said William. “I don’t
+wear an alpaca coat with blue trousers and a seersucker vest on dress
+occasions, like I used to do at home. You talk about being cut to a
+pattern—well, ain’t the pattern all right? When you’re in Rome you’ve
+got to do as the Dagoes do. This town seems to me to have other alleged
+metropolises skinned to flag stations. According to the railroad
+schedule I’ve got in mind, Chicago and Saint Jo and Paris, France, are
+asterisk stops—which means you wave a red flag and get on every other
+Tuesday. I like this little suburb of Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. There’s
+something or somebody doing all the time. I’m clearing $8,000 a year
+selling automatic pumps, and I’m living like kings-up. Why, yesterday,
+I was introduced to John W. Gates. I took an auto ride with a wine
+agent’s sister. I saw two men run over by a street car, and I seen Edna
+May play in the evening. Talk about the West, why, the other night I
+woke everybody up in the hotel hollering. I dreamed I was walking on a
+board sidewalk in Oshkosh. What have you got against this town, Jack?
+There’s only one thing in it that I don’t care for, and that’s a
+ferryboat.”
+
+The artist gazed dreamily at the cartridge paper on the wall. “This
+town,” said he, “is a leech. It drains the blood of the country.
+Whoever comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel. Abandoning the
+figure of the leech, it is a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which
+the innocence, the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay tribute.
+Hand to hand every newcomer must struggle with the leviathan. You’ve
+lost, Billy. It shall never conquer me. I hate it as one hates sin or
+pestilence or—the color work in a ten-cent magazine. I despise its very
+vastness and power. It has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great
+men, the lowest skyscrapers, the dolefulest pleasures of any town I
+ever saw. It has caught you, old man, but I will never run beside its
+chariot wheels. It glosses itself as the Chinaman glosses his collars.
+Give me the domestic finish. I could stand a town ruled by wealth or
+one ruled by an aristocracy; but this is one controlled by its lowest
+ingredients. Claiming culture, it is the crudest; asseverating its
+pre-eminence, it is the basest; denying all outside values and virtue,
+it is the narrowest. Give me the pure and the open heart of the West
+country. I would go back there to-morrow if I could.”
+
+“Don’t you like this _filet mignon_?” said William. “Shucks, now,
+what’s the use to knock the town! It’s the greatest ever. I couldn’t
+sell one automatic pump between Harrisburg and Tommy O’Keefe’s saloon,
+in Sacramento, where I sell twenty here. And have you seen Sara
+Bernhardt in ‘Andrew Mack’ yet?”
+
+“The town’s got you, Billy,” said Jack.
+
+“All right,” said William. “I’m going to buy a cottage on Lake
+Ronkonkoma next summer.”
+
+At midnight Jack raised his window and sat close to it. He caught his
+breath at what he saw, though he had seen and felt it a hundred times.
+
+Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The
+irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep
+gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in long,
+desert cañons. Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel,
+enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this background
+were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles and squares
+through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the violet and
+purple depths ascended like the city’s soul sounds and odors and
+thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety
+unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know.
+There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from
+the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill, enrich,
+despoil, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of it
+came up to him and went into his blood.
+
+There was a knock on his door. A telegram had come for him. It came
+from the West, and these were its words:
+
+“Come back and the answer will be yes.
+
+
+DOLLY.”
+
+
+He kept the boy waiting ten minutes, and then wrote the reply:
+“Impossible to leave here at present.” Then he sat at the window again
+and let the city put its cup of mandragora to his lips again.
+
+After all it isn’t a story; but I wanted to know which one of the
+heroes won the battle against the city. So I went to a very learned
+friend and laid the case before him. What he said was: “Please don’t
+bother me; I have Christmas presents to buy.”
+
+So there it rests; and you will have to decide for yourself.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+“WHAT YOU WANT”
+
+
+Night had fallen on that great and beautiful city known as
+Bagdad-on-the-Subway. And with the night came the enchanted glamour
+that belongs not to Arabia alone. In different masquerade the streets,
+bazaars and walled houses of the occidental city of romance were filled
+with the same kind of folk that so much interested our interesting old
+friend, the late Mr. H. A. Rashid. They wore clothes eleven hundred
+years nearer to the latest styles than H. A. saw in old Bagdad; but
+they were about the same people underneath. With the eye of faith, you
+could have seen the Little Hunchback, Sinbad the Sailor, Fitbad the
+Tailor, the Beautiful Persian, the one-eyed Calenders, Ali Baba and
+Forty Robbers on every block, and the Barber and his Six Brothers, and
+all the old Arabian gang easily.
+
+But let us revenue to our lamb chops.
+
+Old Tom Crowley was a caliph. He had $42,000,000 in preferred stocks
+and bonds with solid gold edges. In these times, to be called a caliph
+you must have money. The old-style caliph business as conducted by Mr.
+Rashid is not safe. If you hold up a person nowadays in a bazaar or a
+Turkish bath or a side street, and inquire into his private and
+personal affairs, the police court’ll get you.
+
+Old Tom was tired of clubs, theatres, dinners, friends, music, money
+and everything. That’s what makes a caliph—you must get to despise
+everything that money can buy, and then go out and try to want
+something that you can’t pay for.
+
+“I’ll take a little trot around town all by myself,” thought old Tom,
+“and try if I can stir up anything new. Let’s see—it seems I’ve read
+about a king or a Cardiff giant or something in old times who used to
+go about with false whiskers on, making Persian dates with folks he
+hadn’t been introduced to. That don’t listen like a bad idea. I
+certainly have got a case of humdrumness and fatigue on for the ones I
+do know. That old Cardiff used to pick up cases of trouble as he ran
+upon ’em and give ’em gold—sequins, I think it was—and make ’em marry
+or got ’em good Government jobs. Now, I’d like something of that sort.
+My money is as good as his was even if the magazines do ask me every
+month where I got it. Yes, I guess I’ll do a little Cardiff business
+to-night, and see how it goes.”
+
+Plainly dressed, old Tom Crowley left his Madison Avenue palace, and
+walked westward and then south. As he stepped to the sidewalk, Fate,
+who holds the ends of the strings in the central offices of all the
+enchanted cities pulled a thread, and a young man twenty blocks away
+looked at a wall clock, and then put on his coat.
+
+James Turner worked in one of those little hat-cleaning establishments
+on Sixth Avenue in which a fire alarm rings when you push the door
+open, and where they clean your hat while you wait—two days. James
+stood all day at an electric machine that turned hats around faster
+than the best brands of champagne ever could have done. Overlooking
+your mild impertinence in feeling a curiosity about the personal
+appearance of a stranger, I will give you a modified description of
+him. Weight, 118; complexion, hair and brain, light; height, five feet
+six; age, about twenty-three; dressed in a $10 suit of greenish-blue
+serge; pockets containing two keys and sixty-three cents in change.
+
+But do not misconjecture because this description sounds like a General
+Alarm that James was either lost or a dead one.
+
+_Allons!_
+
+James stood all day at his work. His feet were tender and extremely
+susceptible to impositions being put upon or below them. All day long
+they burned and smarted, causing him much suffering and inconvenience.
+But he was earning twelve dollars per week, which he needed to support
+his feet whether his feet would support him or not.
+
+James Turner had his own conception of what happiness was, just as you
+and I have ours. Your delight is to gad about the world in yachts and
+motor-cars and to hurl ducats at wild fowl. Mine is to smoke a pipe at
+evenfall and watch a badger, a rattlesnake, and an owl go into their
+common prairie home one by one.
+
+James Turner’s idea of bliss was different; but it was his. He would go
+directly to his boarding-house when his day’s work was done. After his
+supper of small steak, Bessemer potatoes, stooed (not stewed) apples
+and infusion of chicory, he would ascend to his fifth-floor-back hall
+room. Then he would take off his shoes and socks, place the soles of
+his burning feet against the cold bars of his iron bed, and read Clark
+Russell’s sea yarns. The delicious relief of the cool metal applied to
+his smarting soles was his nightly joy. His favorite novels never
+palled upon him; the sea and the adventures of its navigators were his
+sole intellectual passion. No millionaire was ever happier than James
+Turner taking his ease.
+
+When James left the hat-cleaning shop he walked three blocks out of his
+way home to look over the goods of a second-hand bookstall. On the
+sidewalk stands he had more than once picked up a paper-covered volume
+of Clark Russell at half price.
+
+While he was bending with a scholarly stoop over the marked-down
+miscellany of cast-off literature, old Tom the caliph sauntered by. His
+discerning eye, made keen by twenty years’ experience in the
+manufacture of laundry soap (save the wrappers!) recognized instantly
+the poor and discerning scholar, a worthy object of his caliphanous
+mood. He descended the two shallow stone steps that led from the
+sidewalk, and addressed without hesitation the object of his designed
+munificence. His first words were no worse than salutatory and
+tentative.
+
+James Turner looked up coldly, with “Sartor Resartus” in one hand and
+“A Mad Marriage” in the other.
+
+“Beat it,” said he. “I don’t want to buy any coat hangers or town lots
+in Hankipoo, New Jersey. Run along, now, and play with your Teddy
+bear.”
+
+“Young man,” said the caliph, ignoring the flippancy of the hat
+cleaner, “I observe that you are of a studious disposition. Learning is
+one of the finest things in the world. I never had any of it worth
+mentioning, but I admire to see it in others. I come from the West,
+where we imagine nothing but facts. Maybe I couldn’t understand the
+poetry and allusions in them books you are picking over, but I like to
+see somebody else seem to know what they mean. I’m worth about
+$40,000,000, and I’m getting richer every day. I made the height of it
+manufacturing Aunt Patty’s Silver Soap. I invented the art of making
+it. I experimented for three years before I got just the right quantity
+of chloride of sodium solution and caustic potash mixture to curdle
+properly. And after I had taken some $9,000,000 out of the soap
+business I made the rest in corn and wheat futures. Now, you seem to
+have the literary and scholarly turn of character; and I’ll tell you
+what I’ll do. I’ll pay for your education at the finest college in the
+world. I’ll pay the expense of your rummaging over Europe and the art
+galleries, and finally set you up in a good business. You needn’t make
+it soap if you have any objections. I see by your clothes and frazzled
+necktie that you are mighty poor; and you can’t afford to turn down the
+offer. Well, when do you want to begin?”
+
+The hat cleaner turned upon old Tom the eye of the Big City, which is
+an eye expressive of cold and justifiable suspicion, of judgment
+suspended as high as Haman was hung, of self-preservation, of
+challenge, curiosity, defiance, cynicism, and, strange as you may think
+it, of a childlike yearning for friendliness and fellowship that must
+be hidden when one walks among the “stranger bands.” For in New Bagdad
+one, in order to survive, must suspect whosoever sits, dwells, drinks,
+rides, walks or sleeps in the adjacent chair, house, booth, seat, path
+or room.
+
+“Say, Mike,” said James Turner, “what’s your line, anyway—shoe laces?
+I’m not buying anything. You better put an egg in your shoe and beat it
+before incidents occur to you. You can’t work off any fountain pens,
+gold spectacles you found on the street, or trust company certificate
+house clearings on me. Say, do I look like I’d climbed down one of them
+missing fire-escapes at Helicon Hall? What’s vitiating you, anyhow?”
+
+“Son,” said the caliph, in his most Harunish tones, “as I said, I’m
+worth $40,000,000. I don’t want to have it all put in my coffin when I
+die. I want to do some good with it. I seen you handling over these
+here volumes of literature, and I thought I’d keep you. I’ve give the
+missionary societies $2,000,000, but what did I get out of it? Nothing
+but a receipt from the secretary. Now, you are just the kind of young
+man I’d like to take up and see what money could make of him.”
+
+Volumes of Clark Russell were hard to find that evening at the Old Book
+Shop. And James Turner’s smarting and aching feet did not tend to
+improve his temper. Humble hat cleaner though he was, he had a spirit
+equal to any caliph’s.
+
+“Say, you old faker,” he said, angrily, “be on your way. I don’t know
+what your game is, unless you want change for a bogus $40,000,000 bill.
+Well, I don’t carry that much around with me. But I do carry a pretty
+fair left-handed punch that you’ll get if you don’t move on.”
+
+“You are a blamed impudent little gutter pup,” said the caliph.
+
+Then James delivered his self-praised punch; old Tom seized him by the
+collar and kicked him thrice; the hat cleaner rallied and clinched; two
+bookstands were overturned, and the books sent flying. A cop came up,
+took an arm of each, and marched them to the nearest station house.
+“Fighting and disorderly conduct,” said the cop to the sergeant.
+
+“Three hundred dollars bail,” said the sergeant at once, asseveratingly
+and inquiringly.
+
+“Sixty-three cents,” said James Turner with a harsh laugh.
+
+The caliph searched his pockets and collected small bills and change
+amounting to four dollars.
+
+“I am worth,” he said, “forty million dollars, but—”
+
+“Lock ’em up,” ordered the sergeant.
+
+In his cell, James Turner laid himself on his cot, ruminating. “Maybe
+he’s got the money, and maybe he ain’t. But if he has or he ain’t, what
+does he want to go ’round butting into other folks’s business for? When
+a man knows what he wants, and can get it, it’s the same as $40,000,000
+to him.”
+
+Then an idea came to him that brought a pleased look to his face.
+
+He removed his socks, drew his cot close to the door, stretched himself
+out luxuriously, and placed his tortured feet against the cold bars of
+the cell door. Something hard and bulky under the blankets of his cot
+gave one shoulder discomfort. He reached under, and drew out a
+paper-covered volume by Clark Russell called “A Sailor’s Sweetheart.”
+He gave a great sigh of contentment.
+
+Presently, to his cell came the doorman and said:
+
+“Say, kid, that old gazabo that was pinched with you for scrapping
+seems to have been the goods after all. He ’phoned to his friends, and
+he’s out at the desk now with a roll of yellowbacks as big as a Pullman
+car pillow. He wants to bail you, and for you to come out and see him.”
+
+“Tell him I ain’t in,” said James Turner.
+
+
+
+
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