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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Trimmed Lamp, 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: The Trimmed Lamp
+       And Other Stories of the Four Million
+
+Author: O. Henry
+
+Release Date: July 30, 2001 [eBook #3707]
+[Most recently updated: October 24, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Charles Franks, Greg Weeks, the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRIMMED LAMP ***
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+“Wooed her across the counter
+with a King Cophetua air.”]
+
+
+
+
+THE
+TRIMMED LAMP
+
+AND OTHER STORIES OF
+THE FOUR MILLION
+
+BY
+O. HENRY
+
+_Author of “The Four Million,” “The Voice of the
+City,” “Strictly Business,” “Whirligigs,”
+“Sixes and Sevens,” Etc._
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+THE TRIMMED LAMP
+A MADISON SQUARE ARABIAN NIGHT
+THE RUBAIYAT OF A SCOTCH HIGHBALL
+THE PENDULUM
+TWO THANKSGIVING DAY GENTLEMEN
+THE ASSESSOR OF SUCCESS
+THE BUYER FROM CACTUS CITY
+THE BADGE OF POLICEMAN O’ROON
+BRICKDUST ROW
+THE MAKING OF A NEW YORKER
+VANITY AND SOME SABLES
+THE SOCIAL TRIANGLE
+THE PURPLE DRESS
+THE FOREIGN POLICY OF COMPANY 99
+THE LOST BLEND
+A HARLEM TRAGEDY
+“THE GUILTY PARTY”—AN EAST SIDE TRAGEDY
+ACCORDING TO THEIR LIGHTS
+A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM
+THE LAST LEAF
+THE COUNT AND THE WEDDING GUEST
+THE COUNTRY OF ELUSION
+THE FERRY OF UNFULFILMENT
+THE TALE OF A TAINTED TENNER
+ELSIE IN NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+THE TRIMMED LAMP
+
+
+Of course there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the
+other. We often hear “shop-girls” spoken of. No such persons exist.
+There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But
+why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not
+refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as “marriage-girls.”
+
+Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big city to find work
+because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around. Nancy
+was nineteen; Lou was twenty. Both were pretty, active, country girls
+who had no ambition to go on the stage.
+
+The little cherub that sits up aloft guided them to a cheap and
+respectable boarding-house. Both found positions and became
+wage-earners. They remained chums. It is at the end of six months that
+I would beg you to step forward and be introduced to them. Meddlesome
+Reader: My Lady friends, Miss Nancy and Miss Lou. While you are shaking
+hands please take notice—cautiously—of their attire. Yes, cautiously;
+for they are as quick to resent a stare as a lady in a box at the horse
+show is.
+
+Lou is a piece-work ironer in a hand laundry. She is clothed in a
+badly-fitting purple dress, and her hat plume is four inches too long;
+but her ermine muff and scarf cost $25, and its fellow beasts will be
+ticketed in the windows at $7.98 before the season is over. Her cheeks
+are pink, and her light blue eyes bright. Contentment radiates from
+her.
+
+Nancy you would call a shop-girl—because you have the habit. There is
+no type; but a perverse generation is always seeking a type; so this is
+what the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompadour, and the
+exaggerated straight-front. Her skirt is shoddy, but has the correct
+flare. No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears
+her short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were Persian lamb!
+On her face and in her eyes, remorseless type-seeker, is the typical
+shop-girl expression. It is a look of silent but contemptuous revolt
+against cheated womanhood; of sad prophecy of the vengeance to come.
+When she laughs her loudest the look is still there. The same look can
+be seen in the eyes of Russian peasants; and those of us left will see
+it some day on Gabriel’s face when he comes to blow us up. It is a look
+that should wither and abash man; but he has been known to smirk at it
+and offer flowers—with a string tied to them.
+
+Now lift your hat and come away, while you receive Lou’s cheery “See
+you again,” and the sardonic, sweet smile of Nancy that seems, somehow,
+to miss you and go fluttering like a white moth up over the housetops
+to the stars.
+
+The two waited on the corner for Dan. Dan was Lou’s steady company.
+Faithful? Well, he was on hand when Mary would have had to hire a dozen
+subpoena servers to find her lamb.
+
+“Ain’t you cold, Nance?” said Lou. “Say, what a chump you are for
+working in that old store for $8 a week! I made $18.50 last week. Of
+course ironing ain’t as swell work as selling lace behind a counter,
+but it pays. None of us ironers make less than $10. And I don’t know
+that it’s any less respectful work, either.”
+
+“You can have it,” said Nancy, with uplifted nose. “I’ll take my eight
+a week and hall bedroom. I like to be among nice things and swell
+people. And look what a chance I’ve got! Why, one of our glove girls
+married a Pittsburg—steel maker, or blacksmith or something—the other
+day worth a million dollars. I’ll catch a swell myself some time. I
+ain’t bragging on my looks or anything; but I’ll take my chances where
+there’s big prizes offered. What show would a girl have in a laundry?”
+
+“Why, that’s where I met Dan,” said Lou, triumphantly. “He came in for
+his Sunday shirt and collars and saw me at the first board, ironing. We
+all try to get to work at the first board. Ella Maginnis was sick that
+day, and I had her place. He said he noticed my arms first, how round
+and white they was. I had my sleeves rolled up. Some nice fellows come
+into laundries. You can tell ’em by their bringing their clothes in
+suit cases; and turning in the door sharp and sudden.”
+
+“How can you wear a waist like that, Lou?” said Nancy, gazing down at
+the offending article with sweet scorn in her heavy-lidded eyes. “It
+shows fierce taste.”
+
+“This waist?” cried Lou, with wide-eyed indignation. “Why, I paid $16
+for this waist. It’s worth twenty-five. A woman left it to be
+laundered, and never called for it. The boss sold it to me. It’s got
+yards and yards of hand embroidery on it. Better talk about that ugly,
+plain thing you’ve got on.”
+
+“This ugly, plain thing,” said Nancy, calmly, “was copied from one that
+Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher was wearing. The girls say her bill in the
+store last year was $12,000. I made mine, myself. It cost me $1.50. Ten
+feet away you couldn’t tell it from hers.”
+
+“Oh, well,” said Lou, good-naturedly, “if you want to starve and put on
+airs, go ahead. But I’ll take my job and good wages; and after hours
+give me something as fancy and attractive to wear as I am able to buy.”
+
+But just then Dan came—a serious young man with a ready-made necktie,
+who had escaped the city’s brand of frivolity—an electrician earning 30
+dollars per week who looked upon Lou with the sad eyes of Romeo, and
+thought her embroidered waist a web in which any fly should delight to
+be caught.
+
+“My friend, Mr. Owens—shake hands with Miss Danforth,” said Lou.
+
+“I’m mighty glad to know you, Miss Danforth,” said Dan, with
+outstretched hand. “I’ve heard Lou speak of you so often.”
+
+“Thanks,” said Nancy, touching his fingers with the tips of her cool
+ones, “I’ve heard her mention you—a few times.”
+
+Lou giggled.
+
+“Did you get that handshake from Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher, Nance?” she
+asked.
+
+“If I did, you can feel safe in copying it,” said Nancy.
+
+“Oh, I couldn’t use it, at all. It’s too stylish for me. It’s intended
+to set off diamond rings, that high shake is. Wait till I get a few and
+then I’ll try it.”
+
+“Learn it first,” said Nancy wisely, “and you’ll be more likely to get
+the rings.”
+
+“Now, to settle this argument,” said Dan, with his ready, cheerful
+smile, “let me make a proposition. As I can’t take both of you up to
+Tiffany’s and do the right thing, what do you say to a little
+vaudeville? I’ve got the tickets. How about looking at stage diamonds
+since we can’t shake hands with the real sparklers?”
+
+The faithful squire took his place close to the curb; Lou next, a
+little peacocky in her bright and pretty clothes; Nancy on the inside,
+slender, and soberly clothed as the sparrow, but with the true Van
+Alstyne Fisher walk—thus they set out for their evening’s moderate
+diversion.
+
+I do not suppose that many look upon a great department store as an
+educational institution. But the one in which Nancy worked was
+something like that to her. She was surrounded by beautiful things that
+breathed of taste and refinement. If you live in an atmosphere of
+luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another’s.
+
+The people she served were mostly women whose dress, manners, and
+position in the social world were quoted as criterions. From them Nancy
+began to take toll—the best from each according to her view.
+
+From one she would copy and practice a gesture, from another an
+eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others, a manner of walking, of
+carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing
+“inferiors in station.” From her best beloved model, Mrs. Van Alstyne
+Fisher, she made requisition for that excellent thing, a soft, low
+voice as clear as silver and as perfect in articulation as the notes of
+a thrush. Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good
+breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it. As
+good habits are said to be better than good principles, so, perhaps,
+good manners are better than good habits. The teachings of your parents
+may not keep alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a
+straight-back chair and repeat the words “prisms and pilgrims” forty
+times the devil will flee from you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van
+Alstyne Fisher tones she felt the thrill of _noblesse oblige_ to her
+very bones.
+
+There was another source of learning in the great departmental school.
+Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch and jingle
+their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently frivolous
+conversation, do not think that they are there for the purpose of
+criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting may lack the
+dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it has all the
+importance of the occasion on which Eve and her first daughter first
+put their heads together to make Adam understand his proper place in
+the household. It is Woman’s Conference for Common Defense and Exchange
+of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse upon and against the
+World, which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience who Persists in Throwing
+Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most helpless of the young of any
+animal—with the fawn’s grace but without its fleetness; with the bird’s
+beauty but without its power of flight; with the honey-bee’s burden of
+sweetness but without its—Oh, let’s drop that simile—some of us may
+have been stung.
+
+During this council of war they pass weapons one to another, and
+exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the
+tactics of life.
+
+“I says to ’im,” says Sadie, “ain’t you the fresh thing! Who do you
+suppose I am, to be addressing such a remark to me? And what do you
+think he says back to me?”
+
+The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red, and yellow bob together; the
+answer is given; and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be
+used by each thereafter in passages-at-arms with the common enemy, man.
+
+Thus Nancy learned the art of defense; and to women successful defense
+means victory.
+
+The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other
+college could have fitted her as well for her life’s ambition—the
+drawing of a matrimonial prize.
+
+Her station in the store was a favored one. The music room was near
+enough for her to hear and become familiar with the works of the best
+composers—at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for
+appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying to set
+a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating influence of
+art wares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments that are almost
+culture to women.
+
+The other girls soon became aware of Nancy’s ambition. “Here comes your
+millionaire, Nancy,” they would call to her whenever any man who looked
+the rôle approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men, who were
+hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to stroll over to
+the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric squares. Nancy’s
+imitation high-bred air and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted.
+Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may
+have been millionaires; others were certainly no more than their
+sedulous apes. Nancy learned to discriminate. There was a window at the
+end of the handkerchief counter; and she could see the rows of vehicles
+waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She looked and perceived
+that automobiles differ as well as do their owners.
+
+Once a fascinating gentleman bought four dozen handkerchiefs, and wooed
+her across the counter with a King Cophetua air. When he had gone one
+of the girls said:
+
+“What’s wrong, Nance, that you didn’t warm up to that fellow. He looks
+the swell article, all right, to me.”
+
+“Him?” said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van
+Alstyne Fisher smile; “not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12
+H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of
+handkerchiefs he bought—silk! And he’s got dactylis on him. Give me the
+real thing or nothing, if you please.”
+
+Two of the most “refined” women in the store—a forelady and a
+cashier—had a few “swell gentlemen friends” with whom they now and then
+dined. Once they included Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place
+in a spectacular café whose tables are engaged for New Year’s eve a
+year in advance. There were two “gentlemen friends”—one without any
+hair on his head—high living ungrew it; and we can prove it—the other a
+young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two
+convincing ways—he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore
+diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible
+excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; and here was one
+that added the voice and manners of his high social world to the
+franker charms of her own caste. So, on the following day, he appeared
+in the store and made her a serious proposal of marriage over a box of
+hem-stitched, grass-bleached Irish linens. Nancy declined. A brown
+pompadour ten feet away had been using her eyes and ears. When the
+rejected suitor had gone she heaped carboys of upbraidings and horror
+upon Nancy’s head.
+
+“What a terrible little fool you are! That fellow’s a millionaire—he’s
+a nephew of old Van Skittles himself. And he was talking on the level,
+too. Have you gone crazy, Nance?”
+
+“Have I?” said Nancy. “I didn’t take him, did I? He isn’t a millionaire
+so hard that you could notice it, anyhow. His family only allows him
+$20,000 a year to spend. The bald-headed fellow was guying him about it
+the other night at supper.”
+
+The brown pompadour came nearer and narrowed her eyes.
+
+“Say, what do you want?” she inquired, in a voice hoarse for lack of
+chewing-gum. “Ain’t that enough for you? Do you want to be a Mormon,
+and marry Rockefeller and Gladstone Dowie and the King of Spain and the
+whole bunch? Ain’t $20,000 a year good enough for you?”
+
+Nancy flushed a little under the level gaze of the black, shallow eyes.
+
+“It wasn’t altogether the money, Carrie,” she explained. “His friend
+caught him in a rank lie the other night at dinner. It was about some
+girl he said he hadn’t been to the theater with. Well, I can’t stand a
+liar. Put everything together—I don’t like him; and that settles it.
+When I sell out it’s not going to be on any bargain day. I’ve got to
+have something that sits up in a chair like a man, anyhow. Yes, I’m
+looking out for a catch; but it’s got to be able to do something more
+than make a noise like a toy bank.”
+
+“The physiopathic ward for yours!” said the brown pompadour, walking
+away.
+
+These high ideas, if not ideals—Nancy continued to cultivate on $8. per
+week. She bivouacked on the trail of the great unknown “catch,” eating
+her dry bread and tightening her belt day by day. On her face was the
+faint, soldierly, sweet, grim smile of the preordained man-hunter. The
+store was her forest; and many times she raised her rifle at game that
+seemed broad-antlered and big; but always some deep unerring
+instinct—perhaps of the huntress, perhaps of the woman—made her hold
+her fire and take up the trail again.
+
+Lou flourished in the laundry. Out of her $18.50 per week she paid $6.
+for her room and board. The rest went mainly for clothes. Her
+opportunities for bettering her taste and manners were few compared
+with Nancy’s. In the steaming laundry there was nothing but work, work
+and her thoughts of the evening pleasures to come. Many costly and
+showy fabrics passed under her iron; and it may be that her growing
+fondness for dress was thus transmitted to her through the conducting
+metal.
+
+When the day’s work was over Dan awaited her outside, her faithful
+shadow in whatever light she stood.
+
+Sometimes he cast an honest and troubled glance at Lou’s clothes that
+increased in conspicuity rather than in style; but this was no
+disloyalty; he deprecated the attention they called to her in the
+streets.
+
+And Lou was no less faithful to her chum. There was a law that Nancy
+should go with them on whatsoever outings they might take. Dan bore the
+extra burden heartily and in good cheer. It might be said that Lou
+furnished the color, Nancy the tone, and Dan the weight of the
+distraction-seeking trio. The escort, in his neat but obviously
+ready-made suit, his ready-made tie and unfailing, genial, ready-made
+wit never startled or clashed. He was of that good kind that you are
+likely to forget while they are present, but remember distinctly after
+they are gone.
+
+To Nancy’s superior taste the flavor of these ready-made pleasures was
+sometimes a little bitter: but she was young; and youth is a gourmand,
+when it cannot be a gourmet.
+
+“Dan is always wanting me to marry him right away,” Lou told her once.
+“But why should I? I’m independent. I can do as I please with the money
+I earn; and he never would agree for me to keep on working afterward.
+And say, Nance, what do you want to stick to that old store for, and
+half starve and half dress yourself? I could get you a place in the
+laundry right now if you’d come. It seems to me that you could afford
+to be a little less stuck-up if you could make a good deal more money.”
+
+“I don’t think I’m stuck-up, Lou,” said Nancy, “but I’d rather live on
+half rations and stay where I am. I suppose I’ve got the habit. It’s
+the chance that I want. I don’t expect to be always behind a counter.
+I’m learning something new every day. I’m right up against refined and
+rich people all the time—even if I do only wait on them; and I’m not
+missing any pointers that I see passing around.”
+
+“Caught your millionaire yet?” asked Lou with her teasing laugh.
+
+“I haven’t selected one yet,” answered Nancy. “I’ve been looking them
+over.”
+
+“Goodness! the idea of picking over ’em! Don’t you ever let one get by
+you Nance—even if he’s a few dollars shy. But of course you’re
+joking—millionaires don’t think about working girls like us.”
+
+“It might be better for them if they did,” said Nancy, with cool
+wisdom. “Some of us could teach them how to take care of their money.”
+
+“If one was to speak to me,” laughed Lou, “I know I’d have a duck-fit.”
+
+“That’s because you don’t know any. The only difference between swells
+and other people is you have to watch ’em closer. Don’t you think that
+red silk lining is just a little bit too bright for that coat, Lou?”
+
+Lou looked at the plain, dull olive jacket of her friend.
+
+“Well, no I don’t—but it may seem so beside that faded-looking thing
+you’ve got on.”
+
+“This jacket,” said Nancy, complacently, “has exactly the cut and fit
+of one that Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher was wearing the other day. The
+material cost me $3.98. I suppose hers cost about $100. more.”
+
+“Oh, well,” said Lou lightly, “it don’t strike me as millionaire bait.
+Shouldn’t wonder if I catch one before you do, anyway.”
+
+Truly it would have taken a philosopher to decide upon the values of
+the theories held by the two friends. Lou, lacking that certain pride
+and fastidiousness that keeps stores and desks filled with girls
+working for the barest living, thumped away gaily with her iron in the
+noisy and stifling laundry. Her wages supported her even beyond the
+point of comfort; so that her dress profited until sometimes she cast a
+sidelong glance of impatience at the neat but inelegant apparel of
+Dan—Dan the constant, the immutable, the undeviating.
+
+As for Nancy, her case was one of tens of thousands. Silk and jewels
+and laces and ornaments and the perfume and music of the fine world of
+good-breeding and taste—these were made for woman; they are her
+equitable portion. Let her keep near them if they are a part of life to
+her, and if she will. She is no traitor to herself, as Esau was; for
+she keeps her birthright and the pottage she earns is often very scant.
+
+In this atmosphere Nancy belonged; and she throve in it and ate her
+frugal meals and schemed over her cheap dresses with a determined and
+contented mind. She already knew woman; and she was studying man, the
+animal, both as to his habits and eligibility. Some day she would bring
+down the game that she wanted; but she promised herself it would be
+what seemed to her the biggest and the best, and nothing smaller.
+
+Thus she kept her lamp trimmed and burning to receive the bridegroom
+when he should come.
+
+But, another lesson she learned, perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of
+values began to shift and change. Sometimes the dollar-mark grew
+blurred in her mind’s eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled
+such words as “truth” and “honor” and now and then just “kindness.” Let
+us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty
+wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill
+trickles, babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear
+of Nimrod himself grows blunt.
+
+So, Nancy wondered sometimes if Persian lamb was always quoted at its
+market value by the hearts that it covered.
+
+One Thursday evening Nancy left the store and turned across Sixth
+Avenue westward to the laundry. She was expected to go with Lou and Dan
+to a musical comedy.
+
+Dan was just coming out of the laundry when she arrived. There was a
+queer, strained look on his face.
+
+“I thought I would drop around to see if they had heard from her,” he
+said.
+
+“Heard from who?” asked Nancy. “Isn’t Lou there?”
+
+“I thought you knew,” said Dan. “She hasn’t been here or at the house
+where she lived since Monday. She moved all her things from there. She
+told one of the girls in the laundry she might be going to Europe.”
+
+“Hasn’t anybody seen her anywhere?” asked Nancy.
+
+Dan looked at her with his jaws set grimly, and a steely gleam in his
+steady gray eyes.
+
+“They told me in the laundry,” he said, harshly, “that they saw her
+pass yesterday—in an automobile. With one of the millionaires, I
+suppose, that you and Lou were forever busying your brains about.”
+
+For the first time Nancy quailed before a man. She laid her hand that
+trembled slightly on Dan’s sleeve.
+
+“You’ve no right to say such a thing to me, Dan—as if I had anything to
+do with it!”
+
+“I didn’t mean it that way,” said Dan, softening. He fumbled in his
+vest pocket.
+
+“I’ve got the tickets for the show to-night,” he said, with a gallant
+show of lightness. “If you—”
+
+Nancy admired pluck whenever she saw it.
+
+“I’ll go with you, Dan,” she said.
+
+Three months went by before Nancy saw Lou again.
+
+At twilight one evening the shop-girl was hurrying home along the
+border of a little quiet park. She heard her name called, and wheeled
+about in time to catch Lou rushing into her arms.
+
+After the first embrace they drew their heads back as serpents do,
+ready to attack or to charm, with a thousand questions trembling on
+their swift tongues. And then Nancy noticed that prosperity had
+descended upon Lou, manifesting itself in costly furs, flashing gems,
+and creations of the tailors’ art.
+
+“You little fool!” cried Lou, loudly and affectionately. “I see you are
+still working in that store, and as shabby as ever. And how about that
+big catch you were going to make—nothing doing yet, I suppose?”
+
+And then Lou looked, and saw that something better than prosperity had
+descended upon Nancy—something that shone brighter than gems in her
+eyes and redder than a rose in her cheeks, and that danced like
+electricity anxious to be loosed from the tip of her tongue.
+
+“Yes, I’m still in the store,” said Nancy, “but I’m going to leave it
+next week. I’ve made my catch—the biggest catch in the world. You won’t
+mind now Lou, will you?—I’m going to be married to Dan—to Dan!—he’s my
+Dan now—why, Lou!”
+
+Around the corner of the park strolled one of those new-crop,
+smooth-faced young policemen that are making the force more
+endurable—at least to the eye. He saw a woman with an expensive fur
+coat, and diamond-ringed hands crouching down against the iron fence of
+the park sobbing turbulently, while a slender, plainly-dressed working
+girl leaned close, trying to console her. But the Gibsonian cop, being
+of the new order, passed on, pretending not to notice, for he was wise
+enough to know that these matters are beyond help so far as the power
+he represents is concerned, though he rap the pavement with his
+nightstick till the sound goes up to the furthermost stars.
+
+
+
+
+A MADISON SQUARE ARABIAN NIGHT
+
+
+To Carson Chalmers, in his apartment near the square, Phillips brought
+the evening mail. Beside the routine correspondence there were two
+items bearing the same foreign postmark.
+
+One of the incoming parcels contained a photograph of a woman. The
+other contained an interminable letter, over which Chalmers hung,
+absorbed, for a long time. The letter was from another woman; and it
+contained poisoned barbs, sweetly dipped in honey, and feathered with
+innuendoes concerning the photographed woman.
+
+Chalmers tore this letter into a thousand bits and began to wear out
+his expensive rug by striding back and forth upon it. Thus an animal
+from the jungle acts when it is caged, and thus a caged man acts when
+he is housed in a jungle of doubt.
+
+By and by the restless mood was overcome. The rug was not an enchanted
+one. For sixteen feet he could travel along it; three thousand miles
+was beyond its power to aid.
+
+Phillips appeared. He never entered; he invariably appeared, like a
+well-oiled genie.
+
+“Will you dine here, sir, or out?” he asked.
+
+“Here,” said Chalmers, “and in half an hour.” He listened glumly to the
+January blasts making an Aeolian trombone of the empty street.
+
+“Wait,” he said to the disappearing genie. “As I came home across the
+end of the square I saw many men standing there in rows. There was one
+mounted upon something, talking. Why do those men stand in rows, and
+why are they there?”
+
+“They are homeless men, sir,” said Phillips. “The man standing on the
+box tries to get lodging for them for the night. People come around to
+listen and give him money. Then he sends as many as the money will pay
+for to some lodging-house. That is why they stand in rows; they get
+sent to bed in order as they come.”
+
+“By the time dinner is served,” said Chalmers, “have one of those men
+here. He will dine with me.”
+
+“W-w-which—,” began Phillips, stammering for the first time during his
+service.
+
+“Choose one at random,” said Chalmers. “You might see that he is
+reasonably sober—and a certain amount of cleanliness will not be held
+against him. That is all.”
+
+It was an unusual thing for Carson Chalmers to play the Caliph. But on
+that night he felt the inefficacy of conventional antidotes to
+melancholy. Something wanton and egregious, something high-flavored and
+Arabian, he must have to lighten his mood.
+
+On the half hour Phillips had finished his duties as slave of the lamp.
+The waiters from the restaurant below had whisked aloft the delectable
+dinner. The dining table, laid for two, glowed cheerily in the glow of
+the pink-shaded candles.
+
+And now Phillips, as though he ushered a cardinal—or held in charge a
+burglar—wafted in the shivering guest who had been haled from the line
+of mendicant lodgers.
+
+It is a common thing to call such men wrecks; if the comparison be used
+here it is the specific one of a derelict come to grief through fire.
+Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting hulk. His
+face and hands had been recently washed—a rite insisted upon by
+Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In the
+candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the
+apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes with
+a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter’s coat. Phillips’s comb had
+failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and conformed to the
+contour of a constantly worn hat. His eyes were full of a hopeless,
+tricky defiance like that seen in a cur’s that is cornered by his
+tormentors. His shabby coat was buttoned high, but a quarter inch of
+redeeming collar showed above it. His manner was singularly free from
+embarrassment when Chalmers rose from his chair across the round dining
+table.
+
+“If you will oblige me,” said the host, “I will be glad to have your
+company at dinner.”
+
+“My name is Plumer,” said the highway guest, in harsh and aggressive
+tones. “If you’re like me, you like to know the name of the party
+you’re dining with.”
+
+“I was going on to say,” continued Chalmers somewhat hastily, “that
+mine is Chalmers. Will you sit opposite?”
+
+Plumer, of the ruffled plumes, bent his knee for Phillips to slide the
+chair beneath him. He had an air of having sat at attended boards
+before. Phillips set out the anchovies and olives.
+
+“Good!” barked Plumer; “going to be in courses, is it? All right, my
+jovial ruler of Bagdad. I’m your Scheherezade all the way to the
+toothpicks. You’re the first Caliph with a genuine Oriental flavor I’ve
+struck since frost. What luck! And I was forty-third in line. I
+finished counting, just as your welcome emissary arrived to bid me to
+the feast. I had about as much chance of getting a bed to-night as I
+have of being the next President. How will you have the sad story of my
+life, Mr. Al Raschid—a chapter with each course or the whole edition
+with the cigars and coffee?”
+
+“The situation does not seem a novel one to you,” said Chalmers with a
+smile.
+
+“By the chin whiskers of the prophet—no!” answered the guest. “New
+York’s as full of cheap Haroun al Raschids as Bagdad is of fleas. I’ve
+been held up for my story with a loaded meal pointed at my head twenty
+times. Catch anybody in New York giving you something for nothing! They
+spell curiosity and charity with the same set of building blocks. Lots
+of ’em will stake you to a dime and chop-suey; and a few of ’em will
+play Caliph to the tune of a top sirloin; but every one of ’em will
+stand over you till they screw your autobiography out of you with foot
+notes, appendix and unpublished fragments. Oh, I know what to do when I
+see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I
+strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel
+yarns for my supper. I claim descent from the late Tommy Tucker, who
+was forced to hand out vocal harmony for his pre-digested wheaterina
+and spoopju.”
+
+“I do not ask your story,” said Chalmers. “I tell you frankly that it
+was a sudden whim that prompted me to send for some stranger to dine
+with me. I assure you you will not suffer through any curiosity of
+mine.”
+
+“Oh, fudge!” exclaimed the guest, enthusiastically tackling his soup;
+“I don’t mind it a bit. I’m a regular Oriental magazine with a red
+cover and the leaves cut when the Caliph walks abroad. In fact, we
+fellows in the bed line have a sort of union rate for things of this
+sort. Somebody’s always stopping and wanting to know what brought us
+down so low in the world. For a sandwich and a glass of beer I tell ’em
+that drink did it. For corned beef and cabbage and a cup of coffee I
+give ’em the hard-hearted-landlord—six-months-in-the-hospital-lost-job
+story. A sirloin steak and a quarter for a bed gets the Wall Street
+tragedy of the swept-away fortune and the gradual descent. This is the
+first spread of this kind I’ve stumbled against. I haven’t got a story
+to fit it. I’ll tell you what, Mr. Chalmers, I’m going to tell you the
+truth for this, if you’ll listen to it. It’ll be harder for you to
+believe than the made-up ones.”
+
+An hour later the Arabian guest lay back with a sigh of satisfaction
+while Phillips brought the coffee and cigars and cleared the table.
+
+“Did you ever hear of Sherrard Plumer?” he asked, with a strange smile.
+
+“I remember the name,” said Chalmers. “He was a painter, I think, of a
+good deal of prominence a few years ago.”
+
+“Five years,” said the guest. “Then I went down like a chunk of lead.
+I’m Sherrard Plumer! I sold the last portrait I painted for $2,000.
+After that I couldn’t have found a sitter for a gratis picture.”
+
+“What was the trouble?” Chalmers could not resist asking.
+
+“Funny thing,” answered Plumer, grimly. “Never quite understood it
+myself. For a while I swam like a cork. I broke into the swell crowd
+and got commissions right and left. The newspapers called me a
+fashionable painter. Then the funny things began to happen. Whenever I
+finished a picture people would come to see it, and whisper and look
+queerly at one another.”
+
+“I soon found out what the trouble was. I had a knack of bringing out
+in the face of a portrait the hidden character of the original. I don’t
+know how I did it—I painted what I saw—but I know it did me. Some of my
+sitters were fearfully enraged and refused their pictures. I painted
+the portrait of a very beautiful and popular society dame. When it was
+finished her husband looked at it with a peculiar expression on his
+face, and the next week he sued for divorce.”
+
+“I remember one case of a prominent banker who sat to me. While I had
+his portrait on exhibition in my studio an acquaintance of his came in
+to look at it. ‘Bless me,’ says he, ‘does he really look like that?” I
+told him it was considered a faithful likeness. ‘I never noticed that
+expression about his eyes before,’ said he; ‘I think I’ll drop downtown
+and change my bank account.’ He did drop down, but the bank account was
+gone and so was Mr. Banker.
+
+“It wasn’t long till they put me out of business. People don’t want
+their secret meannesses shown up in a picture. They can smile and twist
+their own faces and deceive you, but the picture can’t. I couldn’t get
+an order for another picture, and I had to give up. I worked as a
+newspaper artist for a while, and then for a lithographer, but my work
+with them got me into the same trouble. If I drew from a photograph my
+drawing showed up characteristics and expressions that you couldn’t
+find in the photo, but I guess they were in the original, all right.
+The customers raised lively rows, especially the women, and I never
+could hold a job long. So I began to rest my weary head upon the breast
+of Old Booze for comfort. And pretty soon I was in the free-bed line
+and doing oral fiction for hand-outs among the food bazaars. Does the
+truthful statement weary thee, O Caliph? I can turn on the Wall Street
+disaster stop if you prefer, but that requires a tear, and I’m afraid I
+can’t hustle one up after that good dinner.”
+
+“No, no,” said Chalmers, earnestly, “you interest me very much. Did all
+of your portraits reveal some unpleasant trait, or were there some that
+did not suffer from the ordeal of your peculiar brush?”
+
+“Some? Yes,” said Plumer. “Children generally, a good many women and a
+sufficient number of men. All people aren’t bad, you know. When they
+were all right the pictures were all right. As I said, I don’t explain
+it, but I’m telling you facts.”
+
+On Chalmers’s writing-table lay the photograph that he had received
+that day in the foreign mail. Ten minutes later he had Plumer at work
+making a sketch from it in pastels. At the end of an hour the artist
+rose and stretched wearily.
+
+“It’s done,” he yawned. “You’ll excuse me for being so long. I got
+interested in the job. Lordy! but I’m tired. No bed last night, you
+know. Guess it’ll have to be good night now, O Commander of the
+Faithful!”
+
+Chalmers went as far as the door with him and slipped some bills into
+his hand.
+
+“Oh! I’ll take ’em,” said Plumer. “All that’s included in the fall.
+Thanks. And for the very good dinner. I shall sleep on feathers
+to-night and dream of Bagdad. I hope it won’t turn out to be a dream in
+the morning. Farewell, most excellent Caliph!”
+
+Again Chalmers paced restlessly upon his rug. But his beat lay as far
+from the table whereon lay the pastel sketch as the room would permit.
+Twice, thrice, he tried to approach it, but failed. He could see the
+dun and gold and brown of the colors, but there was a wall about it
+built by his fears that kept him at a distance. He sat down and tried
+to calm himself. He sprang up and rang for Phillips.
+
+“There is a young artist in this building,” he said. “—a Mr.
+Reineman—do you know which is his apartment?”
+
+“Top floor, front, sir,” said Phillips.
+
+“Go up and ask him to favor me with his presence here for a few
+minutes.”
+
+Reineman came at once. Chalmers introduced himself.
+
+“Mr. Reineman,” said he, “there is a little pastel sketch on yonder
+table. I would be glad if you will give me your opinion of it as to its
+artistic merits and as a picture.”
+
+The young artist advanced to the table and took up the sketch. Chalmers
+half turned away, leaning upon the back of a chair.
+
+“How—do—you find it?” he asked, slowly.
+
+“As a drawing,” said the artist, “I can’t praise it enough. It’s the
+work of a master—bold and fine and true. It puzzles me a little; I
+haven’t seen any pastel work near as good in years.”
+
+“The face, man—the subject—the original—what would you say of that?”
+
+“The face,” said Reineman, “is the face of one of God’s own angels. May
+I ask who—”
+
+“My wife!” shouted Chalmers, wheeling and pouncing upon the astonished
+artist, gripping his hand and pounding his back. “She is traveling in
+Europe. Take that sketch, boy, and paint the picture of your life from
+it and leave the price to me.”
+
+
+
+
+THE RUBAIYAT OF A SCOTCH HIGHBALL
+
+
+This document is intended to strike somewhere between a temperance
+lecture and the “Bartender’s Guide.” Relative to the latter, drink
+shall swell the theme and be set forth in abundance. Agreeably to the
+former, not an elbow shall be crooked.
+
+Bob Babbitt was “off the stuff.” Which means—as you will discover by
+referring to the unabridged dictionary of Bohemia—that he had “cut out
+the booze;” that he was “on the water wagon.” The reason for Bob’s
+sudden attitude of hostility toward the “demon rum”—as the white
+ribboners miscall whiskey (see the “Bartender’s Guide”), should be of
+interest to reformers and saloon-keepers.
+
+There is always hope for a man who, when sober, will not concede or
+acknowledge that he was ever drunk. But when a man will say (in the apt
+words of the phrase-distiller), “I had a beautiful skate on last
+night,” you will have to put stuff in his coffee as well as pray for
+him.
+
+One evening on his way home Babbitt dropped in at the Broadway bar that
+he liked best. Always there were three or four fellows there from the
+downtown offices whom he knew. And then there would be high-balls and
+stories, and he would hurry home to dinner a little late but feeling
+good, and a little sorry for the poor Standard Oil Company. On this
+evening as he entered he heard some one say: “Babbitt was in last night
+as full as a boiled owl.”
+
+Babbitt walked to the bar, and saw in the mirror that his face was as
+white as chalk. For the first time he had looked Truth in the eyes.
+Others had lied to him; he had dissembled with himself. He was a
+drunkard, and had not known it. What he had fondly imagined was a
+pleasant exhilaration had been maudlin intoxication. His fancied wit
+had been drivel; his gay humors nothing but the noisy vagaries of a
+sot. But, never again!
+
+“A glass of seltzer,” he said to the bartender.
+
+A little silence fell upon the group of his cronies, who had been
+expecting him to join them.
+
+“Going off the stuff, Bob?” one of them asked politely and with more
+formality than the highballs ever called forth.
+
+“Yes,” said Babbitt.
+
+Some one of the group took up the unwashed thread of a story he had
+been telling; the bartender shoved over a dime and a nickel change from
+the quarter, ungarnished with his customary smile; and Babbitt walked
+out.
+
+Now, Babbitt had a home and a wife—but that is another story. And I
+will tell you that story, which will show you a better habit and a
+worse story than you could find in the man who invented the phrase.
+
+It began away up in Sullivan County, where so many rivers and so much
+trouble begins—or begin; how would you say that? It was July, and
+Jessie was a summer boarder at the Mountain Squint Hotel, and Bob, who
+was just out of college, saw her one day—and they were married in
+September. That’s the tabloid novel—one swallow of water, and it’s
+gone.
+
+But those July days!
+
+Let the exclamation point expound it, for I shall not. For particulars
+you might read up on “Romeo and Juliet,” and Abraham Lincoln’s
+thrilling sonnet about “You can fool some of the people,” &c., and
+Darwin’s works.
+
+But one thing I must tell you about. Both of them were mad over Omar’s
+Rubaiyat. They knew every verse of the old bluffer by heart—not
+consecutively, but picking ’em out here and there as you fork the
+mushrooms in a fifty-cent steak à la Bordelaise. Sullivan County is
+full of rocks and trees; and Jessie used to sit on them, and—please be
+good—used to sit on the rocks; and Bob had a way of standing behind her
+with his hands over her shoulders holding her hands, and his face close
+to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favorite verses of
+the old tent-maker. They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the
+lines then—indeed, they agreed that the Wine was only an image, and
+that what was meant to be celebrated was some divinity, or maybe Love
+or Life. However, at that time neither of them had tasted the stuff
+that goes with a sixty-cent _table d’hôte_.
+
+Where was I? Oh, they married and came to New York. Bob showed his
+college diploma, and accepted a position filling inkstands in a
+lawyer’s office at $15 a week. At the end of two years he had worked up
+to $50, and gotten his first taste of Bohemia—the kind that won’t stand
+the borax and formaldehyde tests.
+
+They had two furnished rooms and a little kitchen. To Jess, accustomed
+to the mild but beautiful savor of a country town, the dreggy Bohemia
+was sugar and spice. She hung fish seines on the walls of her rooms,
+and bought a rakish-looking sideboard, and learned to play the banjo.
+Twice or thrice a week they dined at French or Italian _tables d’hôte_
+in a cloud of smoke, and brag and unshorn hair. Jess learned to drink a
+cocktail in order to get the cherry. At home she smoked a cigarette
+after dinner. She learned to pronounce Chianti, and leave her olive
+stones for the waiter to pick up. Once she essayed to say la, la, la!
+in a crowd but got only as far as the second one. They met one or two
+couples while dining out and became friendly with them. The sideboard
+was stocked with Scotch and rye and a liqueur. They had their new
+friends in to dinner and all were laughing at nothing by 1 A. M. Some
+plastering fell in the room below them, for which Bob had to pay $4.50.
+Thus they footed it merrily on the ragged frontiers of the country that
+has no boundary lines or government.
+
+And soon Bob fell in with his cronies and learned to keep his foot on
+the little rail six inches above the floor for an hour or so every
+afternoon before he went home. Drink always rubbed him the right way,
+and he would reach his rooms as jolly as a sandboy. Jessie would meet
+him at the door, and generally they would dance some insane kind of a
+rigadoon about the floor by way of greeting. Once when Bob’s feet
+became confused and he tumbled headlong over a foot-stool Jessie
+laughed so heartily and long that he had to throw all the couch pillows
+at her to make her hush.
+
+In such wise life was speeding for them on the day when Bob Babbitt
+first felt the power that the giftie gi’ed him.
+
+But let us get back to our lamb and mint sauce.
+
+When Bob got home that evening he found Jessie in a long apron cutting
+up a lobster for the Newburg. Usually when Bob came in mellow from his
+hour at the bar his welcome was hilarious, though somewhat tinctured
+with Scotch smoke.
+
+By screams and snatches of song and certain audible testimonials of
+domestic felicity was his advent proclaimed. When she heard his foot on
+the stairs the old maid in the hall room always stuffed cotton into her
+ears. At first Jessie had shrunk from the rudeness and favor of these
+spiritual greetings, but as the fog of the false Bohemia gradually
+encompassed her she came to accept them as love’s true and proper
+greeting.
+
+Bob came in without a word, smiled, kissed her neatly but noiselessly,
+took up a paper and sat down. In the hall room the old maid held her
+two plugs of cotton poised, filled with anxiety.
+
+Jessie dropped lobster and knife and ran to him with frightened eyes.
+
+“What’s the matter, Bob, are you ill?”
+
+“Not at all, dear.”
+
+“Then what’s the matter with you?”
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+Hearken, brethren. When She-who-has-a-right-to-ask interrogates you
+concerning a change she finds in your mood answer her thus: Tell her
+that you, in a sudden rage, have murdered your grandmother; tell her
+that you have robbed orphans and that remorse has stricken you; tell
+her your fortune is swept away; that you are beset by enemies, by
+bunions, by any kind of malevolent fate; but do not, if peace and
+happiness are worth as much as a grain of mustard seed to you—do not
+answer her “Nothing.”
+
+Jessie went back to the lobster in silence. She cast looks of darkest
+suspicion at Bob. He had never acted that way before.
+
+When dinner was on the table she set out the bottle of Scotch and the
+glasses. Bob declined.
+
+“Tell you the truth, Jess,” he said. “I’ve cut out the drink. Help
+yourself, of course. If you don’t mind I’ll try some of the seltzer
+straight.”
+
+“You’ve stopped drinking?” she said, looking at him steadily and
+unsmilingly. “What for?”
+
+“It wasn’t doing me any good,” said Bob. “Don’t you approve of the
+idea?”
+
+Jessie raised her eyebrows and one shoulder slightly.
+
+“Entirely,” she said with a sculptured smile. “I could not
+conscientiously advise any one to drink or smoke, or whistle on
+Sunday.”
+
+The meal was finished almost in silence. Bob tried to make talk, but
+his efforts lacked the stimulus of previous evenings. He felt
+miserable, and once or twice his eye wandered toward the bottle, but
+each time the scathing words of his bibulous friend sounded in his ear,
+and his mouth set with determination.
+
+Jessie felt the change deeply. The essence of their lives seemed to
+have departed suddenly. The restless fever, the false gayety, the
+unnatural excitement of the shoddy Bohemia in which they had lived had
+dropped away in the space of the popping of a cork. She stole curious
+and forlorn glances at the dejected Bob, who bore the guilty look of at
+least a wife-beater or a family tyrant.
+
+After dinner the colored maid who came in daily to perform such chores
+cleared away the things. Jessie, with an unreadable countenance,
+brought back the bottle of Scotch and the glasses and a bowl of cracked
+ice and set them on the table.
+
+“May I ask,” she said, with some of the ice in her tones, “whether I am
+to be included in your sudden spasm of goodness? If not, I’ll make one
+for myself. It’s rather chilly this evening, for some reason.”
+
+“Oh, come now, Jess,” said Bob good-naturedly, “don’t be too rough on
+me. Help yourself, by all means. There’s no danger of your overdoing
+it. But I thought there was with me; and that’s why I quit. Have yours,
+and then let’s get out the banjo and try over that new quickstep.”
+
+“I’ve heard,” said Jessie in the tones of the oracle, “that drinking
+alone is a pernicious habit. No, I don’t think I feel like playing this
+evening. If we are going to reform we may as well abandon the evil
+habit of banjo-playing, too.”
+
+She took up a book and sat in her little willow rocker on the other
+side of the table. Neither of them spoke for half an hour.
+
+And then Bob laid down his paper and got up with a strange, absent look
+on his face and went behind her chair and reached over her shoulders,
+taking her hands in his, and laid his face close to hers.
+
+In a moment to Jessie the walls of the seine-hung room vanished, and
+she saw the Sullivan County hills and rills. Bob felt her hands quiver
+in his as he began the verse from old Omar:
+
+“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
+The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
+The Bird of Time has but a little way
+To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing!”
+
+
+And then he walked to the table and poured a stiff drink of Scotch into
+a glass.
+
+But in that moment a mountain breeze had somehow found its way in and
+blown away the mist of the false Bohemia.
+
+Jessie leaped and with one fierce sweep of her hand sent the bottle and
+glasses crashing to the floor. The same motion of her arm carried it
+around Bob’s neck, where it met its mate and fastened tight.
+
+“Oh, my God, Bobbie—not that verse—I see now. I wasn’t always such a
+fool, was I? The other one, boy—the one that says: ‘Remould it to the
+Heart’s Desire.’ Say that one—‘to the Heart’s Desire.’”
+
+“I know that one,” said Bob. “It goes:
+
+“‘Ah! Love, could you and I with Him conspire
+To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
+Would not we—’”
+
+
+“Let me finish it,” said Jessie.
+
+“‘Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
+Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!’”
+
+
+“It’s shattered all right,” said Bob, crunching some glass under his
+heel.
+
+In some dungeon below the accurate ear of Mrs. Pickens, the landlady,
+located the smash.
+
+“It’s that wild Mr. Babbitt coming home soused again,” she said. “And
+he’s got such a nice little wife, too!”
+
+
+
+
+THE PENDULUM
+
+
+“Eighty-first street—let ’em out, please,” yelled the shepherd in blue.
+
+A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out and another flock scrambled
+aboard. Ding-ding! The cattle cars of the Manhattan Elevated rattled
+away, and John Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with
+the released flock.
+
+John walked slowly toward his flat. Slowly, because in the lexicon of
+his daily life there was no such word as “perhaps.” There are no
+surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a
+flat. As he walked John Perkins prophesied to himself with gloomy and
+downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusions of the monotonous day.
+
+Katy would meet him at the door with a kiss flavored with cold cream
+and butter-scotch. He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized
+lounge and read, in the evening paper, of Russians and Japs slaughtered
+by the deadly linotype. For dinner there would be pot roast, a salad
+flavored with a dressing warranted not to crack or injure the leather,
+stewed rhubarb and the bottle of strawberry marmalade blushing at the
+certificate of chemical purity on its label. After dinner Katy would
+show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the iceman had cut for
+her off the end of his four-in-hand. At half-past seven they would
+spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering
+that fell when the fat man in the flat overhead began to take his
+physical culture exercises. Exactly at eight Hickey & Mooney, of the
+vaudeville team (unbooked) in the flat across the hall, would yield to
+the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs
+under the delusion that Hammerstein was pursuing them with a
+five-hundred-dollar-a-week contract. Then the gent at the window across
+the air-shaft would get out his flute; the nightly gas leak would steal
+forth to frolic in the highways; the dumbwaiter would slip off its
+trolley; the janitor would drive Mrs. Zanowitski’s five children once
+more across the Yalu, the lady with the champagne shoes and the Skye
+terrier would trip downstairs and paste her Thursday name over her bell
+and letter-box—and the evening routine of the Frogmore flats would be
+under way.
+
+John Perkins knew these things would happen. And he knew that at a
+quarter past eight he would summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and
+that his wife would deliver this speech in a querulous tone:
+
+“Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?”
+
+“Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,” he would answer, “and play a game
+or two of pool with the fellows.”
+
+Of late such had been John Perkins’s habit. At ten or eleven he would
+return. Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes waiting up, ready to
+melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the
+wrought steel chains of matrimony. For these things Cupid will have to
+answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the
+Frogmore flats.
+
+To-night John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the
+commonplace when he reached his door. No Katy was there with her
+affectionate, confectionate kiss. The three rooms seemed in portentous
+disorder. All about lay her things in confusion. Shoes in the middle of
+the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder box, jumbled
+together on dresser and chairs—this was not Katy’s way. With a sinking
+heart John saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among
+its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation must have possessed her,
+for she always carefully placed these combings in the little blue vase
+on the mantel to be some day formed into the coveted feminine “rat.”
+
+Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper.
+John seized it. It was a note from his wife running thus:
+
+
+“Dear John: I just had a telegram saying mother is very sick. I am
+going to take the 4.30 train. Brother Sam is going to meet me at the
+depot there. There is cold mutton in the ice box. I hope it isn’t her
+quinzy again. Pay the milkman 50 cents. She had it bad last spring.
+Don’t forget to write to the company about the gas meter, and your good
+socks are in the top drawer. I will write to-morrow.
+
+Hastily,
+KATY.”
+
+
+Never during their two years of matrimony had he and Katy been
+separated for a night. John read the note over and over in a
+dumbfounded way. Here was a break in a routine that had never varied,
+and it left him dazed.
+
+There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless, the
+red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting the
+meals. Her week-day clothes had been tossed here and there in her
+haste. A little paper bag of her favorite butter-scotch lay with its
+string yet unwound. A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping
+rectangularly where a railroad time-table had been clipped from it.
+Everything in the room spoke of a loss, of an essence gone, of its soul
+and life departed. John Perkins stood among the dead remains with a
+queer feeling of desolation in his heart.
+
+He began to set the rooms tidy as well as he could. When he touched her
+clothes a thrill of something like terror went through him. He had
+never thought what existence would be without Katy. She had become so
+thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he
+breathed—necessary but scarcely noticed. Now, without warning, she was
+gone, vanished, as completely absent as if she had never existed. Of
+course it would be only for a few days, or at most a week or two, but
+it seemed to him as if the very hand of death had pointed a finger at
+his secure and uneventful home.
+
+John dragged the cold mutton from the ice-box, made coffee and sat down
+to a lonely meal face to face with the strawberry marmalade’s shameless
+certificate of purity. Bright among withdrawn blessings now appeared to
+him the ghosts of pot roasts and the salad with tan polish dressing.
+His home was dismantled. A quinzied mother-in-law had knocked his lares
+and penates sky-high. After his solitary meal John sat at a front
+window.
+
+He did not care to smoke. Outside the city roared to him to come join
+in its dance of folly and pleasure. The night was his. He might go
+forth unquestioned and thrum the strings of jollity as free as any gay
+bachelor there. He might carouse and wander and have his fling until
+dawn if he liked; and there would be no wrathful Katy waiting for him,
+bearing the chalice that held the dregs of his joy. He might play pool
+at McCloskey’s with his roistering friends until Aurora dimmed the
+electric bulbs if he chose. The hymeneal strings that had curbed him
+always when the Frogmore flats had palled upon him were loosened. Katy
+was gone.
+
+John Perkins was not accustomed to analyzing his emotions. But as he
+sat in his Katy-bereft 10×12 parlor he hit unerringly upon the keynote
+of his discomfort. He knew now that Katy was necessary to his
+happiness. His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull
+round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her
+presence. Has it not been dinned into us by proverb and sermon and
+fable that we never prize the music till the sweet-voiced bird has
+flown—or in other no less florid and true utterances?
+
+“I’m a double-dyed dub,” mused John Perkins, “the way I’ve been
+treating Katy. Off every night playing pool and bumming with the boys
+instead of staying home with her. The poor girl here all alone with
+nothing to amuse her, and me acting that way! John Perkins, you’re the
+worst kind of a shine. I’m going to make it up for the little girl.
+I’ll take her out and let her see some amusement. And I’ll cut out the
+McCloskey gang right from this minute.”
+
+Yes, there was the city roaring outside for John Perkins to come dance
+in the train of Momus. And at McCloskey’s the boys were knocking the
+balls idly into the pockets against the hour for the nightly game. But
+no primrose way nor clicking cue could woo the remorseful soul of
+Perkins the bereft. The thing that was his, lightly held and half
+scorned, had been taken away from him, and he wanted it. Backward to a
+certain man named Adam, whom the cherubim bounced from the orchard,
+could Perkins, the remorseful, trace his descent.
+
+Near the right hand of John Perkins stood a chair. On the back of it
+stood Katy’s blue shirtwaist. It still retained something of her
+contour. Midway of the sleeves were fine, individual wrinkles made by
+the movements of her arms in working for his comfort and pleasure. A
+delicate but impelling odor of bluebells came from it. John took it and
+looked long and soberly at the unresponsive grenadine. Katy had never
+been unresponsive. Tears:—yes, tears—came into John Perkins’s eyes.
+When she came back things would be different. He would make up for all
+his neglect. What was life without her?
+
+The door opened. Katy walked in carrying a little hand satchel. John
+stared at her stupidly.
+
+“My! I’m glad to get back,” said Katy. “Ma wasn’t sick to amount to
+anything. Sam was at the depot, and said she just had a little spell,
+and got all right soon after they telegraphed. So I took the next train
+back. I’m just dying for a cup of coffee.”
+
+Nobody heard the click and rattle of the cog-wheels as the third-floor
+front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of
+Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and
+the wheels revolve in their old orbit.
+
+John Perkins looked at the clock. It was 8.15. He reached for his hat
+and walked to the door.
+
+“Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?” asked Katy,
+in a querulous tone.
+
+“Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,” said John, “and play a game or
+two of pool with the fellows.”
+
+
+
+
+TWO THANKSGIVING DAY GENTLEMEN
+
+
+There is one day that is ours. There is one day when all we Americans
+who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits
+and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used
+to. Bless the day. President Roosevelt gives it to us. We hear some
+talk of the Puritans, but don’t just remember who they were. Bet we can
+lick ’em, anyhow, if they try to land again. Plymouth Rocks? Well, that
+sounds more familiar. Lots of us have had to come down to hens since
+the Turkey Trust got its work in. But somebody in Washington is leaking
+out advance information to ’em about these Thanksgiving proclamations.
+
+The big city east of the cranberry bogs has made Thanksgiving Day an
+institution. The last Thursday in November is the only day in the year
+on which it recognizes the part of America lying across the ferries. It
+is the one day that is purely American. Yes, a day of celebration,
+exclusively American.
+
+And now for the story which is to prove to you that we have traditions
+on this side of the ocean that are becoming older at a much rapider
+rate than those of England are—thanks to our git-up and enterprise.
+
+Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you enter
+Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every
+Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had taken his seat there promptly at
+1 o’clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to
+him—Charles Dickensy things that swelled his waistcoat above his heart,
+and equally on the other side.
+
+But to-day Stuffy Pete’s appearance at the annual trysting place seemed
+to have been rather the result of habit than of the yearly hunger
+which, as the philanthropists seem to think, afflicts the poor at such
+extended intervals.
+
+Certainly Pete was not hungry. He had just come from a feast that had
+left him of his powers barely those of respiration and locomotion. His
+eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded in a swollen and
+gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes; a
+senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his
+upturned coat collar. Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by
+kind Salvation fingers a week before flew like popcorn, strewing the
+earth around him. Ragged he was, with a split shirt front open to the
+wishbone; but the November breeze, carrying fine snowflakes, brought
+him only a grateful coolness. For Stuffy Pete was overcharged with the
+caloric produced by a super-bountiful dinner, beginning with oysters
+and ending with plum pudding, and including (it seemed to him) all the
+roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and
+ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the
+world with after-dinner contempt.
+
+The meal had been an unexpected one. He was passing a red brick mansion
+near the beginning of Fifth avenue, in which lived two old ladies of
+ancient family and a reverence for traditions. They even denied the
+existence of New York, and believed that Thanksgiving Day was declared
+solely for Washington Square. One of their traditional habits was to
+station a servant at the postern gate with orders to admit the first
+hungry wayfarer that came along after the hour of noon had struck, and
+banquet him to a finish. Stuffy Pete happened to pass by on his way to
+the park, and the seneschals gathered him in and upheld the custom of
+the castle.
+
+After Stuffy Pete had gazed straight before him for ten minutes he was
+conscious of a desire for a more varied field of vision. With a
+tremendous effort he moved his head slowly to the left. And then his
+eyes bulged out fearfully, and his breath ceased, and the rough-shod
+ends of his short legs wriggled and rustled on the gravel.
+
+For the Old Gentleman was coming across Fourth avenue toward his bench.
+
+Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years the Old Gentleman had come there
+and found Stuffy Pete on his bench. That was a thing that the Old
+Gentleman was trying to make a tradition of. Every Thanksgiving Day for
+nine years he had found Stuffy there, and had led him to a restaurant
+and watched him eat a big dinner. They do those things in England
+unconsciously. But this is a young country, and nine years is not so
+bad. The Old Gentleman was a staunch American patriot, and considered
+himself a pioneer in American tradition. In order to become picturesque
+we must keep on doing one thing for a long time without ever letting it
+get away from us. Something like collecting the weekly dimes in
+industrial insurance. Or cleaning the streets.
+
+The Old Gentleman moved, straight and stately, toward the Institution
+that he was rearing. Truly, the annual feeding of Stuffy Pete was
+nothing national in its character, such as the Magna Charta or jam for
+breakfast was in England. But it was a step. It was almost feudal. It
+showed, at least, that a Custom was not impossible to New
+Y—ahem!—America.
+
+The Old Gentleman was thin and tall and sixty. He was dressed all in
+black, and wore the old-fashioned kind of glasses that won’t stay on
+your nose. His hair was whiter and thinner than it had been last year,
+and he seemed to make more use of his big, knobby cane with the crooked
+handle.
+
+As his established benefactor came up Stuffy wheezed and shuddered like
+some woman’s over-fat pug when a street dog bristles up at him. He
+would have flown, but all the skill of Santos-Dumont could not have
+separated him from his bench. Well had the myrmidons of the two old
+ladies done their work.
+
+“Good morning,” said the Old Gentleman. “I am glad to perceive that the
+vicissitudes of another year have spared you to move in health about
+the beautiful world. For that blessing alone this day of thanksgiving
+is well proclaimed to each of us. If you will come with me, my man, I
+will provide you with a dinner that should make your physical being
+accord with the mental.”
+
+That is what the old Gentleman said every time. Every Thanksgiving Day
+for nine years. The words themselves almost formed an Institution.
+Nothing could be compared with them except the Declaration of
+Independence. Always before they had been music in Stuffy’s ears. But
+now he looked up at the Old Gentleman’s face with tearful agony in his
+own. The fine snow almost sizzled when it fell upon his perspiring
+brow. But the Old Gentleman shivered a little and turned his back to
+the wind.
+
+Stuffy had always wondered why the Old Gentleman spoke his speech
+rather sadly. He did not know that it was because he was wishing every
+time that he had a son to succeed him. A son who would come there after
+he was gone—a son who would stand proud and strong before some
+subsequent Stuffy, and say: “In memory of my father.” Then it would be
+an Institution.
+
+But the Old Gentleman had no relatives. He lived in rented rooms in one
+of the decayed old family brownstone mansions in one of the quiet
+streets east of the park. In the winter he raised fuchsias in a little
+conservatory the size of a steamer trunk. In the spring he walked in
+the Easter parade. In the summer he lived at a farmhouse in the New
+Jersey hills, and sat in a wicker armchair, speaking of a butterfly,
+the ornithoptera amphrisius, that he hoped to find some day. In the
+autumn he fed Stuffy a dinner. These were the Old Gentleman’s
+occupations.
+
+Stuffy Pete looked up at him for a half minute, stewing and helpless in
+his own self-pity. The Old Gentleman’s eyes were bright with the
+giving-pleasure. His face was getting more lined each year, but his
+little black necktie was in as jaunty a bow as ever, and the linen was
+beautiful and white, and his gray mustache was curled carefully at the
+ends. And then Stuffy made a noise that sounded like peas bubbling in a
+pot. Speech was intended; and as the Old Gentleman had heard the sounds
+nine times before, he rightly construed them into Stuffy’s old formula
+of acceptance.
+
+“Thankee, sir. I’ll go with ye, and much obliged. I’m very hungry,
+sir.”
+
+The coma of repletion had not prevented from entering Stuffy’s mind the
+conviction that he was the basis of an Institution. His Thanksgiving
+appetite was not his own; it belonged by all the sacred rights of
+established custom, if not, by the actual Statute of Limitations, to
+this kind old gentleman who bad preempted it. True, America is free;
+but in order to establish tradition some one must be a repetend—a
+repeating decimal. The heroes are not all heroes of steel and gold. See
+one here that wielded only weapons of iron, badly silvered, and tin.
+
+The Old Gentleman led his annual protégé southward to the restaurant,
+and to the table where the feast had always occurred. They were
+recognized.
+
+“Here comes de old guy,” said a waiter, “dat blows dat same bum to a
+meal every Thanksgiving.”
+
+The Old Gentleman sat across the table glowing like a smoked pearl at
+his corner-stone of future ancient Tradition. The waiters heaped the
+table with holiday food—and Stuffy, with a sigh that was mistaken for
+hunger’s expression, raised knife and fork and carved for himself a
+crown of imperishable bay.
+
+No more valiant hero ever fought his way through the ranks of an enemy.
+Turkey, chops, soups, vegetables, pies, disappeared before him as fast
+as they could be served. Gorged nearly to the uttermost when he entered
+the restaurant, the smell of food had almost caused him to lose his
+honor as a gentleman, but he rallied like a true knight. He saw the
+look of beneficent happiness on the Old Gentleman’s face—a happier look
+than even the fuchsias and the ornithoptera amphrisius had ever brought
+to it—and he had not the heart to see it wane.
+
+In an hour Stuffy leaned back with a battle won. “Thankee kindly, sir,”
+he puffed like a leaky steam pipe; “thankee kindly for a hearty meal.”
+Then he arose heavily with glazed eyes and started toward the kitchen.
+A waiter turned him about like a top, and pointed him toward the door.
+The Old Gentleman carefully counted out $1.30 in silver change, leaving
+three nickels for the waiter.
+
+They parted as they did each year at the door, the Old Gentleman going
+south, Stuffy north.
+
+Around the first corner Stuffy turned, and stood for one minute. Then
+he seemed to puff out his rags as an owl puffs out his feathers, and
+fell to the sidewalk like a sunstricken horse.
+
+When the ambulance came the young surgeon and the driver cursed softly
+at his weight. There was no smell of whiskey to justify a transfer to
+the patrol wagon, so Stuffy and his two dinners went to the hospital.
+There they stretched him on a bed and began to test him for strange
+diseases, with the hope of getting a chance at some problem with the
+bare steel.
+
+And lo! an hour later another ambulance brought the Old Gentleman. And
+they laid him on another bed and spoke of appendicitis, for he looked
+good for the bill.
+
+But pretty soon one of the young doctors met one of the young nurses
+whose eyes he liked, and stopped to chat with her about the cases.
+
+“That nice old gentleman over there, now,” he said, “you wouldn’t think
+that was a case of almost starvation. Proud old family, I guess. He
+told me he hadn’t eaten a thing for three days.”
+
+
+
+
+THE ASSESSOR OF SUCCESS
+
+
+Hastings Beauchamp Morley sauntered across Union Square with a pitying
+look at the hundreds that lolled upon the park benches. They were a
+motley lot, he thought; the men with stolid, animal, unshaven faces;
+the women wriggling and self-conscious, twining and untwining their
+feet that hung four inches above the gravelled walks.
+
+Were I Mr. Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller I would put a few millions in my
+inside pocket and make an appointment with all the Park Commissioners
+(around the corner, if necessary), and arrange for benches in all the
+parks of the world low enough for women to sit upon, and rest their
+feet upon the ground. After that I might furnish libraries to towns
+that would pay for ’em, or build sanitariums for crank professors, and
+call ’em colleges, if I wanted to.
+
+Women’s rights societies have been laboring for many years after
+equality with man. With what result? When they sit on a bench they must
+twist their ankles together and uncomfortably swing their highest
+French heels clear of earthly support. Begin at the bottom, ladies. Get
+your feet on the ground, and then rise to theories of mental equality.
+
+Hastings Beauchamp Morley was carefully and neatly dressed. That was
+the result of an instinct due to his birth and breeding. It is denied
+us to look further into a man’s bosom than the starch on his shirt
+front; so it is left to us only to recount his walks and conversation.
+
+Morley had not a cent in his pockets; but he smiled pityingly at a
+hundred grimy, unfortunate ones who had no more, and who would have no
+more when the sun’s first rays yellowed the tall paper-cutter building
+on the west side of the square. But Morley would have enough by then.
+Sundown had seen his pockets empty before; but sunrise had always seen
+them lined.
+
+First he went to the house of a clergyman off Madison avenue and
+presented a forged letter of introduction that holily purported to
+issue from a pastorate in Indiana. This netted him $5 when backed up by
+a realistic romance of a delayed remittance.
+
+On the sidewalk, twenty steps from the clergyman’s door, a pale-faced,
+fat man huskily enveloped him with a raised, red fist and the voice of
+a bell buoy, demanding payment of an old score.
+
+“Why, Bergman, man,” sang Morley, dulcetly, “is this you? I was just on
+my way up to your place to settle up. That remittance from my aunt
+arrived only this morning. Wrong address was the trouble. Come up to
+the corner and I’ll square up. Glad to see you. Saves me a walk.”
+
+Four drinks placated the emotional Bergman. There was an air about
+Morley when he was backed by money in hand that would have stayed off a
+call loan at Rothschilds’. When he was penniless his bluff was pitched
+half a tone lower, but few are competent to detect the difference in
+the notes.
+
+“You gum to mine blace and bay me to-morrow, Mr. Morley,” said Bergman.
+“Oxcuse me dat I dun you on der street. But I haf not seen you in dree
+mont’. Pros’t!”
+
+Morley walked away with a crooked smile on his pale, smooth face. The
+credulous, drink-softened German amused him. He would have to avoid
+Twenty-ninth street in the future. He had not been aware that Bergman
+ever went home by that route.
+
+At the door of a darkened house two squares to the north Morley knocked
+with a peculiar sequence of raps. The door opened to the length of a
+six-inch chain, and the pompous, important black face of an African
+guardian imposed itself in the opening. Morley was admitted.
+
+In a third-story room, in an atmosphere opaque with smoke, he hung for
+ten minutes above a roulette wheel. Then downstairs he crept, and was
+out-sped by the important negro, jingling in his pocket the 40 cents in
+silver that remained to him of his five-dollar capital. At the corner
+he lingered, undecided.
+
+Across the street was a drug store, well lighted, sending forth gleams
+from the German silver and crystal of its soda fountain and glasses.
+Along came a youngster of five, headed for the dispensary, stepping
+high with the consequence of a big errand, possibly one to which his
+advancing age had earned him promotion. In his hand he clutched
+something tightly, publicly, proudly, conspicuously.
+
+Morley stopped him with his winning smile and soft speech.
+
+“Me?” said the youngster. “I’m doin’ to the drug ’tore for mamma. She
+dave me a dollar to buy a bottle of med’cin.”
+
+“Now, now, now!” said Morley. “Such a big man you are to be doing
+errands for mamma. I must go along with my little man to see that the
+cars don’t run over him. And on the way we’ll have some chocolates. Or
+would he rather have lemon drops?”
+
+Morley entered the drug store leading the child by the hand. He
+presented the prescription that had been wrapped around the money.
+
+On his face was a smile, predatory, parental, politic, profound.
+
+“Aqua pura, one pint,” said he to the druggist. “Sodium chloride, ten
+grains. Fiat solution. And don’t try to skin me, because I know all
+about the number of gallons of H2O in the Croton reservoir, and I
+always use the other ingredient on my potatoes.”
+
+“Fifteen cents,” said the druggist, with a wink after he had compounded
+the order. “I see you understand pharmacy. A dollar is the regular
+price.”
+
+“To gulls,” said Morley, smilingly.
+
+He settled the wrapped bottle carefully in the child’s arms and
+escorted him to the corner. In his own pocket he dropped the 85 cents
+accruing to him by virtue of his chemical knowledge.
+
+“Look out for the cars, sonny,” he said, cheerfully, to his small
+victim.
+
+Two street cars suddenly swooped in opposite directions upon the
+youngster. Morley dashed between them and pinned the infantile
+messenger by the neck, holding him in safety. Then from the corner of
+his street he sent him on his way, swindled, happy, and sticky with
+vile, cheap candy from the Italian’s fruit stand.
+
+Morley went to a restaurant and ordered a sirloin and a pint of
+inexpensive Chateau Breuille. He laughed noiselessly, but so genuinely
+that the waiter ventured to premise that good news had come his way.
+
+“Why, no,” said Morley, who seldom held conversation with any one. “It
+is not that. It is something else that amuses me. Do you know what
+three divisions of people are easiest to over-reach in transactions of
+all kinds?”
+
+“Sure,” said the waiter, calculating the size of the tip promised by
+the careful knot of Morley’s tie; “there’s the buyers from the dry
+goods stores in the South during August, and honeymooners from Staten
+Island, and”—
+
+“Wrong!” said Morley, chuckling happily. “The answer is just—men, women
+and children. The world—well, say New York and as far as summer
+boarders can swim out from Long Island—is full of greenhorns. Two
+minutes longer on the broiler would have made this steak fit to be
+eaten by a gentleman, Francois.”
+
+“If yez t’inks it’s on de bum,” said the waiter, “Oi’ll”—
+
+Morley lifted his hand in protest—slightly martyred protest.
+
+“It will do,” he said, magnanimously. “And now, green Chartreuse,
+frappe and a demi-tasse.”
+
+Morley went out leisurely and stood on a corner where two tradeful
+arteries of the city cross. With a solitary dime in his pocket, he
+stood on the curb watching with confident, cynical, smiling eyes the
+tides of people that flowed past him. Into that stream he must cast his
+net and draw fish for his further sustenance and need. Good Izaak
+Walton had not the half of his self-reliance and bait-lore.
+
+A joyful party of four—two women and two men—fell upon him with cries
+of delight. There was a dinner party on—where had he been for a
+fortnight past?—what luck to thus run upon him! They surrounded and
+engulfed him—he must join them—tra la la—and the rest.
+
+One with a white hat plume curving to the shoulder touched his sleeve,
+and cast at the others a triumphant look that said: “See what I can do
+with him?” and added her queen’s command to the invitations.
+
+“I leave you to imagine,” said Morley, pathetically, “how it desolates
+me to forego the pleasure. But my friend Carruthers, of the New York
+Yacht Club, is to pick me up here in his motor car at 8.”
+
+The white plume tossed, and the quartet danced like midges around an
+arc light down the frolicsome way.
+
+Morley stood, turning over and over the dime in his pocket and laughing
+gleefully to himself. “‘Front,’” he chanted under his breath; “‘front’
+does it. It is trumps in the game. How they take it in! Men, women and
+children—forgeries, water-and-salt lies—how they all take it in!”
+
+An old man with an ill-fitting suit, a straggling gray beard and a
+corpulent umbrella hopped from the conglomeration of cabs and street
+cars to the sidewalk at Morley’s side.
+
+“Stranger,” said he, “excuse me for troubling you, but do you know
+anybody in this here town named Solomon Smothers? He’s my son, and I’ve
+come down from Ellenville to visit him. Be darned if I know what I done
+with his street and number.”
+
+“I do not, sir,” said Morley, half closing his eyes to veil the joy in
+them. “You had better apply to the police.”
+
+“The police!” said the old man. “I ain’t done nothin’ to call in the
+police about. I just come down to see Ben. He lives in a five-story
+house, he writes me. If you know anybody by that name and could”—
+
+“I told you I did not,” said Morley, coldly. “I know no one by the name
+of Smithers, and I advise you to”—
+
+“Smothers not Smithers,” interrupted the old man hopefully. “A
+heavy-set man, sandy complected, about twenty-nine, two front teeth
+out, about five foot”—
+
+“Oh, ‘Smothers!’” exclaimed Morley. “Sol Smothers? Why, he lives in the
+next house to me. I thought you said ‘Smithers.’”
+
+Morley looked at his watch. You must have a watch. You can do it for a
+dollar. Better go hungry than forego a gunmetal or the
+ninety-eight-cent one that the railroads—according to these
+watchmakers—are run by.
+
+“The Bishop of Long Island,” said Morley, “was to meet me here at 8 to
+dine with me at the Kingfishers’ Club. But I can’t leave the father of
+my friend Sol Smothers alone on the street. By St. Swithin, Mr.
+Smothers, we Wall street men have to work! Tired is no name for it! I
+was about to step across to the other corner and have a glass of ginger
+ale with a dash of sherry when you approached me. You must let me take
+you to Sol’s house, Mr. Smothers. But, before we take the car I hope
+you will join me in”—
+
+An hour later Morley seated himself on the end of a quiet bench in
+Madison Square, with a twenty-five-cent cigar between his lips and $140
+in deeply creased bills in his inside pocket. Content, light-hearted,
+ironical, keenly philosophic, he watched the moon drifting in and out
+amidst a maze of flying clouds. An old, ragged man with a low-bowed
+head sat at the other end of the bench.
+
+Presently the old man stirred and looked at his bench companion. In
+Morley’s appearance he seemed to recognize something superior to the
+usual nightly occupants of the benches.
+
+“Kind sir,” he whined, “if you could spare a dime or even a few pennies
+to one who”—
+
+Morley cut short his stereotyped appeal by throwing him a dollar.
+
+“God bless you!” said the old man. “I’ve been trying to find work for”—
+
+“Work!” echoed Morley with his ringing laugh. “You are a fool, my
+friend. The world is a rock to you, no doubt; but you must be an Aaron
+and smite it with your rod. Then things better than water will gush out
+of it for you. That is what the world is for. It gives to me whatever I
+want from it.”
+
+“God has blessed you,” said the old man. “It is only work that I have
+known. And now I can get no more.”
+
+“I must go home,” said Morley, rising and buttoning his coat. “I
+stopped here only for a smoke. I hope you may find work.”
+
+“May your kindness be rewarded this night,” said the old man.
+
+“Oh,” said Morley, “you have your wish already. I am satisfied. I think
+good luck follows me like a dog. I am for yonder bright hotel across
+the square for the night. And what a moon that is lighting up the city
+to-night. I think no one enjoys the moonlight and such little things as
+I do. Well, a good-night to you.”
+
+Morley walked to the corner where he would cross to his hotel. He blew
+slow streams of smoke from his cigar heavenward. A policeman passing
+saluted to his benign nod. What a fine moon it was.
+
+The clock struck nine as a girl just entering womanhood stopped on the
+corner waiting for the approaching car. She was hurrying as if homeward
+from employment or delay. Her eyes were clear and pure, she was dressed
+in simple white, she looked eagerly for the car and neither to the
+right nor the left.
+
+Morley knew her. Eight years before he had sat on the same bench with
+her at school. There had been no sentiment between them—nothing but the
+friendship of innocent days.
+
+But he turned down the side street to a quiet spot and laid his
+suddenly burning face against the cool iron of a lamp-post, and said
+dully:
+
+“God! I wish I could die.”
+
+
+
+
+THE BUYER FROM CACTUS CITY
+
+
+It is well that hay fever and colds do not obtain in the healthful
+vicinity of Cactus City, Texas, for the dry goods emporium of Navarro &
+Platt, situated there, is not to be sneezed at.
+
+Twenty thousand people in Cactus City scatter their silver coin with
+liberal hands for the things that their hearts desire. The bulk of this
+semiprecious metal goes to Navarro & Platt. Their huge brick building
+covers enough ground to graze a dozen head of sheep. You can buy of
+them a rattlesnake-skin necktie, an automobile or an eighty-five
+dollar, latest style, ladies’ tan coat in twenty different shades.
+Navarro & Platt first introduced pennies west of the Colorado River.
+They had been ranchmen with business heads, who saw that the world did
+not necessarily have to cease its revolutions after free grass went
+out.
+
+Every Spring, Navarro, senior partner, fifty-five, half Spanish,
+cosmopolitan, able, polished, had “gone on” to New York to buy goods.
+This year he shied at taking up the long trail. He was undoubtedly
+growing older; and he looked at his watch several times a day before
+the hour came for his siesta.
+
+“John,” he said, to his junior partner, “you shall go on this year to
+buy the goods.”
+
+Platt looked tired.
+
+“I’m told,” said he, “that New York is a plumb dead town; but I’ll go.
+I can take a whirl in San Antone for a few days on my way and have some
+fun.”
+
+Two weeks later a man in a Texas full dress suit—black frock coat,
+broad-brimmed soft white hat, and lay-down collar 3-4 inch high, with
+black, wrought iron necktie—entered the wholesale cloak and suit
+establishment of Zizzbaum & Son, on lower Broadway.
+
+Old Zizzbaum had the eye of an osprey, the memory of an elephant and a
+mind that unfolded from him in three movements like the puzzle of the
+carpenter’s rule. He rolled to the front like a brunette polar bear,
+and shook Platt’s hand.
+
+“And how is the good Mr. Navarro in Texas?” he said. “The trip was too
+long for him this year, so? We welcome Mr. Platt instead.”
+
+“A bull’s eye,” said Platt, “and I’d give forty acres of unirrigated
+Pecos County land to know how you did it.”
+
+“I knew,” grinned Zizzbaum, “just as I know that the rainfall in El
+Paso for the year was 28.5 inches, or an increase of 15 inches, and
+that therefore Navarro & Platt will buy a $15,000 stock of suits this
+spring instead of $10,000, as in a dry year. But that will be
+to-morrow. There is first a cigar in my private office that will remove
+from your mouth the taste of the ones you smuggle across the Rio Grande
+and like—because they are smuggled.”
+
+It was late in the afternoon and business for the day had ended,
+Zizzbaum left Platt with a half-smoked cigar, and came out of the
+private office to Son, who was arranging his diamond scarfpin before a
+mirror, ready to leave.
+
+“Abey,” he said, “you will have to take Mr. Platt around to-night and
+show him things. They are customers for ten years. Mr. Navarro and I we
+played chess every moment of spare time when he came. That is good, but
+Mr. Platt is a young man and this is his first visit to New York. He
+should amuse easily.”
+
+“All right,” said Abey, screwing the guard tightly on his pin. “I’ll
+take him on. After he’s seen the Flatiron and the head waiter at the
+Hotel Astor and heard the phonograph play ‘Under the Old Apple Tree’
+it’ll be half past ten, and Mr. Texas will be ready to roll up in his
+blanket. I’ve got a supper engagement at 11:30, but he’ll be all to the
+Mrs. Winslow before then.”
+
+The next morning at 10 Platt walked into the store ready to do
+business. He had a bunch of hyacinths pinned on his lapel. Zizzbaum
+himself waited on him. Navarro & Platt were good customers, and never
+failed to take their discount for cash.
+
+“And what did you think of our little town?” asked Zizzbaum, with the
+fatuous smile of the Manhattanite.
+
+“I shouldn’t care to live in it,” said the Texan. “Your son and I
+knocked around quite a little last night. You’ve got good water, but
+Cactus City is better lit up.”
+
+“We’ve got a few lights on Broadway, don’t you think, Mr. Platt?”
+
+“And a good many shadows,” said Platt. “I think I like your horses
+best. I haven’t seen a crow-bait since I’ve been in town.”
+
+Zizzbaum led him up stairs to show the samples of suits.
+
+“Ask Miss Asher to come,” he said to a clerk.
+
+Miss Asher came, and Platt, of Navarro & Platt, felt for the first time
+the wonderful bright light of romance and glory descend upon him. He
+stood still as a granite cliff above the cañon of the Colorado, with
+his wide-open eyes fixed upon her. She noticed his look and flushed a
+little, which was contrary to her custom.
+
+Miss Asher was the crack model of Zizzbaum & Son. She was of the blond
+type known as “medium,” and her measurements even went the required
+38-25-42 standard a little better. She had been at Zizzbaum’s two
+years, and knew her business. Her eye was bright, but cool; and had she
+chosen to match her gaze against the optic of the famed basilisk, that
+fabulous monster’s gaze would have wavered and softened first.
+Incidentally, she knew buyers.
+
+“Now, Mr. Platt,” said Zizzbaum, “I want you to see these princess
+gowns in the light shades. They will be the thing in your climate. This
+first, if you please, Miss Asher.”
+
+Swiftly in and out of the dressing-room the prize model flew, each time
+wearing a new costume and looking more stunning with every change. She
+posed with absolute self-possession before the stricken buyer, who
+stood, tongue-tied and motionless, while Zizzbaum orated oilily of the
+styles. On the model’s face was her faint, impersonal professional
+smile that seemed to cover something like weariness or contempt.
+
+When the display was over Platt seemed to hesitate. Zizzbaum was a
+little anxious, thinking that his customer might be inclined to try
+elsewhere. But Platt was only looking over in his mind the best
+building sites in Cactus City, trying to select one on which to build a
+house for his wife-to-be—who was just then in the dressing-room taking
+off an evening gown of lavender and tulle.
+
+“Take your time, Mr. Platt,” said Zizzbaum. “Think it over to-night.
+You won’t find anybody else meet our prices on goods like these. I’m
+afraid you’re having a dull time in New York, Mr. Platt. A young man
+like you—of course, you miss the society of the ladies. Wouldn’t you
+like a nice young lady to take out to dinner this evening? Miss Asher,
+now, is a very nice young lady; she will make it agreeable for you.”
+
+“Why, she doesn’t know me,” said Platt, wonderingly. “She doesn’t know
+anything about me. Would she go? I’m not acquainted with her.”
+
+“Would she go?” repeated Zizzbaum, with uplifted eyebrows. “Sure, she
+would go. I will introduce you. Sure, she would go.”
+
+He called Miss Asher loudly.
+
+She came, calm and slightly contemptuous, in her white shirt waist and
+plain black skirt.
+
+“Mr. Platt would like the pleasure of your company to dinner this
+evening,” said Zizzbaum, walking away.
+
+“Sure,” said Miss Asher, looking at the ceiling. “I’d be much pleased.
+Nine-eleven West Twentieth street. What time?”
+
+“Say seven o’clock.”
+
+“All right, but please don’t come ahead of time. I room with a school
+teacher, and she doesn’t allow any gentlemen to call in the room. There
+isn’t any parlor, so you’ll have to wait in the hall. I’ll be ready.”
+
+At half past seven Platt and Miss Asher sat at a table in a Broadway
+restaurant. She was dressed in a plain, filmy black. Platt didn’t know
+that it was all a part of her day’s work.
+
+With the unobtrusive aid of a good waiter he managed to order a
+respectable dinner, minus the usual Broadway preliminaries.
+
+Miss Asher flashed upon him a dazzling smile.
+
+“Mayn’t I have something to drink?” she asked.
+
+“Why, certainly,” said Platt. “Anything you want.”
+
+“A dry Martini,” she said to the waiter.
+
+When it was brought and set before her Platt reached over and took it
+away.
+
+“What is this?” he asked.
+
+“A cocktail, of course.”
+
+“I thought it was some kind of tea you ordered. This is liquor. You
+can’t drink this. What is your first name?”
+
+“To my intimate friends,” said Miss Asher, freezingly, “it is ‘Helen.’”
+
+“Listen, Helen,” said Platt, leaning over the table. “For many years
+every time the spring flowers blossomed out on the prairies I got to
+thinking of somebody that I’d never seen or heard of. I knew it was you
+the minute I saw you yesterday. I’m going back home to-morrow, and
+you’re going with me. I know it, for I saw it in your eyes when you
+first looked at me. You needn’t kick, for you’ve got to fall into line.
+Here’s a little trick I picked out for you on my way over.”
+
+He flicked a two-carat diamond solitaire ring across the table. Miss
+Asher flipped it back to him with her fork.
+
+“Don’t get fresh,” she said, severely.
+
+“I’m worth a hundred thousand dollars,” said Platt. “I’ll build you the
+finest house in West Texas.”
+
+“You can’t buy me, Mr. Buyer,” said Miss Asher, “if you had a hundred
+million. I didn’t think I’d have to call you down. You didn’t look like
+the others to me at first, but I see you’re all alike.”
+
+“All who?” asked Platt.
+
+“All you buyers. You think because we girls have to go out to dinner
+with you or lose our jobs that you’re privileged to say what you
+please. Well, forget it. I thought you were different from the others,
+but I see I was mistaken.”
+
+Platt struck his fingers on the table with a gesture of sudden,
+illuminating satisfaction.
+
+“I’ve got it!” he exclaimed, almost hilariously—“the Nicholson place,
+over on the north side. There’s a big grove of live oaks and a natural
+lake. The old house can be pulled down and the new one set further
+back.”
+
+“Put out your pipe,” said Miss Asher. “I’m sorry to wake you up, but
+you fellows might as well get wise, once for all, to where you stand.
+I’m supposed to go to dinner with you and help jolly you along so
+you’ll trade with old Zizzy, but don’t expect to find me in any of the
+suits you buy.”
+
+“Do you mean to tell me,” said Platt, “that you go out this way with
+customers, and they all—they all talk to you like I have?”
+
+“They all make plays,” said Miss Asher. “But I must say that you’ve got
+’em beat in one respect. They generally talk diamonds, while you’ve
+actually dug one up.”
+
+“How long have you been working, Helen?”
+
+“Got my name pat, haven’t you? I’ve been supporting myself for eight
+years. I was a cash girl and a wrapper and then a shop girl until I was
+grown, and then I got to be a suit model. Mr. Texas Man, don’t you
+think a little wine would make this dinner a little less dry?”
+
+“You’re not going to drink wine any more, dear. It’s awful to think
+how— I’ll come to the store to-morrow and get you. I want you to pick
+out an automobile before we leave. That’s all we need to buy here.”
+
+“Oh, cut that out. If you knew how sick I am of hearing such talk.”
+
+After the dinner they walked down Broadway and came upon Diana’s little
+wooded park. The trees caught Platt’s eye at once, and he must turn
+along under the winding walk beneath them. The lights shone upon two
+bright tears in the model’s eyes.
+
+“I don’t like that,” said Platt. “What’s the matter?”
+
+“Don’t you mind,” said Miss Asher. “Well, it’s because—well, I didn’t
+think you were that kind when I first saw you. But you are all like.
+And now will you take me home, or will I have to call a cop?”
+
+Platt took her to the door of her boarding-house. They stood for a
+minute in the vestibule. She looked at him with such scorn in her eyes
+that even his heart of oak began to waver. His arm was half way around
+her waist, when she struck him a stinging blow on the face with her
+open hand.
+
+As he stepped back a ring fell from somewhere and bounded on the tiled
+floor. Platt groped for it and found it.
+
+“Now, take your useless diamond and go, Mr. Buyer,” she said.
+
+“This was the other one—the wedding ring,” said the Texan, holding the
+smooth gold band on the palm of his hand.
+
+Miss Asher’s eyes blazed upon him in the half darkness.
+
+“Was that what you meant?—did you”—
+
+Somebody opened the door from inside the house.
+
+“Good-night,” said Platt. “I’ll see you at the store to-morrow.”
+
+Miss Asher ran up to her room and shook the school teacher until she
+sat up in bed ready to scream “Fire!”
+
+“Where is it?” she cried.
+
+“That’s what I want to know,” said the model. “You’ve studied
+geography, Emma, and you ought to know. Where is a town called
+Cac—Cac—Carac—Caracas City, I think, they called it?”
+
+“How dare you wake me up for that?” said the school teacher. “Caracas
+is in Venezuela, of course.”
+
+“What’s it like?”
+
+“Why, it’s principally earthquakes and negroes and monkeys and malarial
+fever and volcanoes.”
+
+“I don’t care,” said Miss Asher, blithely; “I’m going there to-morrow.”
+
+
+
+
+THE BADGE OF POLICEMAN O’ROON
+
+
+It cannot be denied that men and women have looked upon one another for
+the first time and become instantly enamored. It is a risky process,
+this love at first sight, before she has seen him in Bradstreet or he
+has seen her in curl papers. But these things do happen; and one
+instance must form a theme for this story—though not, thank Heaven, to
+the overshadowing of more vital and important subjects, such as drink,
+policemen, horses and earldoms.
+
+During a certain war a troop calling itself the Gentle Riders rode into
+history and one or two ambuscades. The Gentle Riders were recruited
+from the aristocracy of the wild men of the West and the wild men of
+the aristocracy of the East. In khaki there is little telling them one
+from another, so they became good friends and comrades all around.
+
+Ellsworth Remsen, whose old Knickerbocker descent atoned for his modest
+rating at only ten millions, ate his canned beef gayly by the campfires
+of the Gentle Riders. The war was a great lark to him, so that he
+scarcely regretted polo and planked shad.
+
+One of the troopers was a well set up, affable, cool young man, who
+called himself O’Roon. To this young man Remsen took an especial
+liking. The two rode side by side during the famous mooted up-hill
+charge that was disputed so hotly at the time by the Spaniards and
+afterward by the Democrats.
+
+After the war Remsen came back to his polo and shad. One day a well set
+up, affable, cool young man disturbed him at his club, and he and
+O’Roon were soon pounding each other and exchanging opprobrious
+epithets after the manner of long-lost friends. O’Roon looked seedy and
+out of luck and perfectly contented. But it seemed that his content was
+only apparent.
+
+“Get me a job, Remsen,” he said. “I’ve just handed a barber my last
+shilling.”
+
+“No trouble at all,” said Remsen. “I know a lot of men who have banks
+and stores and things downtown. Any particular line you fancy?”
+
+“Yes,” said O’Roon, with a look of interest. “I took a walk in your
+Central Park this morning. I’d like to be one of those bobbies on
+horseback. That would be about the ticket. Besides, it’s the only thing
+I could do. I can ride a little and the fresh air suits me. Think you
+could land that for me?”
+
+Remsen was sure that he could. And in a very short time he did. And
+they who were not above looking at mounted policemen might have seen a
+well set up, affable, cool young man on a prancing chestnut steed
+attending to his duties along the driveways of the park.
+
+And now at the extreme risk of wearying old gentlemen who carry leather
+fob chains, and elderly ladies who—but no! grandmother herself yet
+thrills at foolish, immortal Romeo—there must be a hint of love at
+first sight.
+
+It came just as Remsen was strolling into Fifth avenue from his club a
+few doors away.
+
+A motor car was creeping along foot by foot, impeded by a freshet of
+vehicles that filled the street. In the car was a chauffeur and an old
+gentleman with snowy side whiskers and a Scotch plaid cap which could
+not be worn while automobiling except by a personage. Not even a wine
+agent would dare do it. But these two were of no consequence—except,
+perhaps, for the guiding of the machine and the paying for it. At the
+old gentleman’s side sat a young lady more beautiful than pomegranate
+blossoms, more exquisite than the first quarter moon viewed at twilight
+through the tops of oleanders. Remsen saw her and knew his fate. He
+could have flung himself under the very wheels that conveyed her, but
+he knew that would be the last means of attracting the attention of
+those who ride in motor cars. Slowly the auto passed, and, if we place
+the poets above the autoists, carried the heart of Remsen with it. Here
+was a large city of millions, and many women who at a certain distance
+appear to resemble pomegranate blossoms. Yet he hoped to see her again;
+for each one fancies that his romance has its own tutelary guardian and
+divinity.
+
+Luckily for Remsen’s peace of mind there came a diversion in the guise
+of a reunion of the Gentle Riders of the city. There were not many of
+them—perhaps a score—and there was wassail and things to eat, and
+speeches and the Spaniard was bearded again in recapitulation. And when
+daylight threatened them the survivors prepared to depart. But some
+remained upon the battlefield. One of these was Trooper O’Roon, who was
+not seasoned to potent liquids. His legs declined to fulfil the
+obligations they had sworn to the police department.
+
+“I’m stewed, Remsen,” said O’Roon to his friend. “Why do they build
+hotels that go round and round like catherine wheels? They’ll take away
+my shield and break me. I can think and talk
+con-con-consec-sec-secutively, but I s-s-stammer with my feet. I’ve got
+to go on duty in three hours. The jig is up, Remsen. The jig is up, I
+tell you.”
+
+“Look at me,” said Remsen, who was his smiling self, pointing to his
+own face; “whom do you see here?”
+
+“Goo’ fellow,” said O’Roon, dizzily, “Goo’ old Remsen.”
+
+“Not so,” said Remsen. “You see Mounted Policeman O’Roon. Look at your
+face—no; you can’t do that without a glass—but look at mine, and think
+of yours. How much alike are we? As two French _table d’hôte_ dinners.
+With your badge, on your horse, in your uniform, will I charm
+nurse-maids and prevent the grass from growing under people’s feet in
+the Park this day. I will have your badge and your honor, besides
+having the jolliest lark I’ve been blessed with since we licked Spain.”
+
+Promptly on time the counterfeit presentment of Mounted Policeman
+O’Roon single-footed into the Park on his chestnut steed. In a uniform
+two men who are unlike will look alike; two who somewhat resemble each
+other in feature and figure will appear as twin brothers. So Remsen
+trotted down the bridle paths, enjoying himself hugely, so few real
+pleasures do ten-millionaires have.
+
+Along the driveway in the early morning spun a victoria drawn by a pair
+of fiery bays. There was something foreign about the affair, for the
+Park is rarely used in the morning except by unimportant people who
+love to be healthy, poor and wise. In the vehicle sat an old gentleman
+with snowy side-whiskers and a Scotch plaid cap which could not be worn
+while driving except by a personage. At his side sat the lady of
+Remsen’s heart—the lady who looked like pomegranate blossoms and the
+gibbous moon.
+
+Remsen met them coming. At the instant of their passing her eyes looked
+into his, and but for the ever coward’s heart of a true lover he could
+have sworn that she flushed a faint pink. He trotted on for twenty
+yards, and then wheeled his horse at the sound of runaway hoofs. The
+bays had bolted.
+
+Remsen sent his chestnut after the victoria like a shot. There was work
+cut out for the impersonator of Policeman O’Roon. The chestnut ranged
+alongside the off bay thirty seconds after the chase began, rolled his
+eye back at Remsen, and said in the only manner open to policemen’s
+horses:
+
+“Well, you duffer, are you going to do your share? You’re not O’Roon,
+but it seems to me if you’d lean to the right you could reach the reins
+of that foolish slow-running bay—ah! you’re all right; O’Roon couldn’t
+have done it more neatly!”
+
+The runaway team was tugged to an inglorious halt by Remsen’s tough
+muscles. The driver released his hands from the wrapped reins, jumped
+from his seat and stood at the heads of the team. The chestnut,
+approving his new rider, danced and pranced, reviling equinely the
+subdued bays. Remsen, lingering, was dimly conscious of a vague,
+impossible, unnecessary old gentleman in a Scotch cap who talked
+incessantly about something. And he was acutely conscious of a pair of
+violet eyes that would have drawn Saint Pyrites from his iron pillar—or
+whatever the allusion is—and of the lady’s smile and look—a little
+frightened, but a look that, with the ever coward heart of a true
+lover, he could not yet construe. They were asking his name and
+bestowing upon him wellbred thanks for his heroic deed, and the Scotch
+cap was especially babbling and insistent. But the eloquent appeal was
+in the eyes of the lady.
+
+A little thrill of satisfaction ran through Remsen, because he had a
+name to give which, without undue pride, was worthy of being spoken in
+high places, and a small fortune which, with due pride, he could leave
+at his end without disgrace.
+
+He opened his lips to speak and closed them again.
+
+Who was he? Mounted Policeman O’Roon. The badge and the honor of his
+comrade were in his hands. If Ellsworth Remsen, ten-millionaire and
+Knickerbocker, had just rescued pomegranate blossoms and Scotch cap
+from possible death, where was Policeman O’Roon? Off his beat, exposed,
+disgraced, discharged. Love had come, but before that there had been
+something that demanded precedence—the fellowship of men on
+battlefields fighting an alien foe.
+
+Remsen touched his cap, looked between the chestnut’s ears, and took
+refuge in vernacularity.
+
+“Don’t mention it,” he said stolidly. “We policemen are paid to do
+these things. It’s our duty.”
+
+And he rode away—rode away cursing _noblesse oblige_, but knowing he
+could never have done anything else.
+
+At the end of the day Remsen sent the chestnut to his stable and went
+to O’Roon’s room. The policeman was again a well set up, affable, cool
+young man who sat by the window smoking cigars.
+
+“I wish you and the rest of the police force and all badges, horses,
+brass buttons and men who can’t drink two glasses of _brut_ without
+getting upset were at the devil,” said Remsen feelingly.
+
+O’Roon smiled with evident satisfaction.
+
+“Good old Remsen,” he said, affably, “I know all about it. They trailed
+me down and cornered me here two hours ago. There was a little row at
+home, you know, and I cut sticks just to show them. I don’t believe I
+told you that my Governor was the Earl of Ardsley. Funny you should bob
+against them in the Park. If you damaged that horse of mine I’ll never
+forgive you. I’m going to buy him and take him back with me. Oh, yes,
+and I think my sister—Lady Angela, you know—wants particularly for you
+to come up to the hotel with me this evening. Didn’t lose my badge, did
+you, Remsen? I’ve got to turn that in at Headquarters when I resign.”
+
+
+
+
+BRICKDUST ROW
+
+
+Blinker was displeased. A man of less culture and poise and wealth
+would have sworn. But Blinker always remembered that he was a
+gentleman—a thing that no gentleman should do. So he merely looked
+bored and sardonic while he rode in a hansom to the center of
+disturbance, which was the Broadway office of Lawyer Oldport, who was
+agent for the Blinker estate.
+
+“I don’t see,” said Blinker, “why I should be always signing confounded
+papers. I am packed, and was to have left for the North Woods this
+morning. Now I must wait until to-morrow morning. I hate night trains.
+My best razors are, of course, at the bottom of some unidentifiable
+trunk. It is a plot to drive me to bay rum and a monologueing,
+thumb-handed barber. Give me a pen that doesn’t scratch. I hate pens
+that scratch.”
+
+“Sit down,” said double-chinned, gray Lawyer Oldport. “The worst has
+not been told you. Oh, the hardships of the rich! The papers are not
+yet ready to sign. They will be laid before you to-morrow at eleven.
+You will miss another day. Twice shall the barber tweak the helpless
+nose of a Blinker. Be thankful that your sorrows do not embrace a
+haircut.”
+
+“If,” said Blinker, rising, “the act did not involve more signing of
+papers I would take my business out of your hands at once. Give me a
+cigar, please.”
+
+“If,” said Lawyer Oldport, “I had cared to see an old friend’s son
+gulped down at one mouthful by sharks I would have ordered you to take
+it away long ago. Now, let’s quit fooling, Alexander. Besides the
+grinding task of signing your name some thirty times to-morrow, I must
+impose upon you the consideration of a matter of business—of business,
+and I may say humanity or right. I spoke to you about this five years
+ago, but you would not listen—you were in a hurry for a coaching trip,
+I think. The subject has come up again. The property—”
+
+“Oh, property!” interrupted Blinker. “Dear Mr. Oldport, I think you
+mentioned to-morrow. Let’s have it all at one dose to-morrow—signatures
+and property and snappy rubber bands and that smelly sealing-wax and
+all. Have luncheon with me? Well, I’ll try to remember to drop in at
+eleven to-morrow. Morning.”
+
+The Blinker wealth was in lands, tenements and hereditaments, as the
+legal phrase goes. Lawyer Oldport had once taken Alexander in his
+little pulmonary gasoline runabout to see the many buildings and rows
+of buildings that he owned in the city. For Alexander was sole heir.
+They had amused Blinker very much. The houses looked so incapable of
+producing the big sums of money that Lawyer Oldport kept piling up in
+banks for him to spend.
+
+In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine.
+Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him
+with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt. Everybody
+was out of town. But here he was kept in like a schoolboy to write his
+name over and over on pieces of paper. His wounds were deep.
+
+Blinker turned his back on the fogies, and said to the club steward who
+had come forward with some nonsense about cold fresh salmon roe:
+
+“Symons, I’m going to Coney Island.” He said it as one might say:
+“All’s off; I’m going to jump into the river.”
+
+The joke pleased Symons. He laughed within a sixteenth of a note of the
+audibility permitted by the laws governing employees.
+
+“Certainly, sir,” he tittered. “Of course, sir, I think I can see you
+at Coney, Mr. Blinker.”
+
+Blinker got a paper and looked up the movements of Sunday steamboats.
+Then he found a cab at the first corner and drove to a North River
+pier. He stood in line, as democratic as you or I, and bought a ticket,
+and was trampled upon and shoved forward until, at last, he found
+himself on the upper deck of the boat staring brazenly at a girl who
+sat alone upon a camp stool. But Blinker did not intend to be brazen;
+the girl was so wonderfully good looking that he forgot for one minute
+that he was the prince incog, and behaved just as he did in society.
+
+She was looking at him, too, and not severely. A puff of wind
+threatened Blinker’s straw hat. He caught it warily and settled it
+again. The movement gave the effect of a bow. The girl nodded and
+smiled, and in another instant he was seated at her side. She was
+dressed all in white, she was paler than Blinker imagined milkmaids and
+girls of humble stations to be, but she was as tidy as a cherry
+blossom, and her steady, supremely frank gray eyes looked out from the
+intrepid depths of an unshadowed and untroubled soul.
+
+“How dare you raise your hat to me?” she asked, with a smile-redeemed
+severity.
+
+“I didn’t,” Blinker said, but he quickly covered the mistake by
+extending it to “I didn’t know how to keep from it after I saw you.”
+
+“I do not allow gentlemen to sit by me to whom I have not been
+introduced,” she said, with a sudden haughtiness that deceived him. He
+rose reluctantly, but her clear, teasing laugh brought him down to his
+chair again.
+
+“I guess you weren’t going far,” she declared, with beauty’s
+magnificent self-confidence.
+
+“Are you going to Coney Island?” asked Blinker.
+
+“Me?” She turned upon him wide-open eyes full of bantering surprise.
+“Why, what a question! Can’t you see that I’m riding a bicycle in the
+park?” Her drollery took the form of impertinence.
+
+“And I am laying brick on a tall factory chimney,” said Blinker.
+“Mayn’t we see Coney together? I’m all alone and I’ve never been there
+before.”
+
+“It depends,” said the girl, “on how nicely you behave. I’ll consider
+your application until we get there.”
+
+Blinker took pains to provide against the rejection of his application.
+He strove to please. To adopt the metaphor of his nonsensical phrase,
+he laid brick upon brick on the tall chimney of his devoirs until, at
+length, the structure was stable and complete. The manners of the best
+society come around finally to simplicity; and as the girl’s way was
+that naturally, they were on a mutual plane of communication from the
+beginning.
+
+He learned that she was twenty, and her name was Florence; that she
+trimmed hats in a millinery shop; that she lived in a furnished room
+with her best chum Ella, who was cashier in a shoe store; and that a
+glass of milk from the bottle on the window-sill and an egg that boils
+itself while you twist up your hair makes a breakfast good enough for
+any one. Florence laughed when she heard “Blinker.”
+
+“Well,” she said. “It certainly shows that you have imagination. It
+gives the ‘Smiths’ a chance for a little rest, anyhow.”
+
+They landed at Coney, and were dashed on the crest of a great human
+wave of mad pleasure-seekers into the walks and avenues of Fairyland
+gone into vaudeville.
+
+With a curious eye, a critical mind and a fairly withheld judgment
+Blinker considered the temples, pagodas and kiosks of popularized
+delights. Hoi polloi trampled, hustled and crowded him. Basket parties
+bumped him; sticky children tumbled, howling, under his feet, candying
+his clothes. Insolent youths strolling among the booths with hard-won
+canes under one arm and easily won girls on the other, blew defiant
+smoke from cheap cigars into his face. The publicity gentlemen with
+megaphones, each before his own stupendous attraction, roared like
+Niagara in his ears. Music of all kinds that could be tortured from
+brass, reed, hide or string, fought in the air to gain space for its
+vibrations against its competitors. But what held Blinker in awful
+fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking,
+struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy,
+with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery
+and tinsel pleasures. The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all
+the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste,
+repelled him strongly.
+
+In the midst of his disgust he turned and looked down at Florence by
+his side. She was ready with her quick smile and upturned, happy eyes,
+as bright and clear as the water in trout pools. The eyes were saying
+that they had the right to be shining and happy, for was their owner
+not with her (for the present) Man, her Gentleman Friend and holder of
+the keys to the enchanted city of fun?
+
+Blinker did not read her look accurately, but by some miracle he
+suddenly saw Coney aright.
+
+He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys. He now looked
+clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists. Their offenses were
+wiped out. Counterfeit and false though the garish joys of these
+spangled temples were, he perceived that deep under the gilt surface
+they offered saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the restless
+human heart. Here, at least, was the husk of Romance, the empty but
+shining casque of Chivalry, the breath-catching though safe-guarded dip
+and flight of Adventure, the magic carpet that transports you to the
+realms of fairyland, though its journey be through but a few poor yards
+of space. He no longer saw a rabble, but his brothers seeking the
+ideal. There was no magic of poesy here or of art; but the glamour of
+their imagination turned yellow calico into cloth of gold and the
+megaphones into the silver trumpets of joy’s heralds.
+
+Almost humbled, Blinker rolled up the shirt sleeves of his mind and
+joined the idealists.
+
+“You are the lady doctor,” he said to Florence. “How shall we go about
+doing this jolly conglomeration of fairy tales, incorporated?”
+
+“We will begin there,” said the Princess, pointing to a fun pagoda on
+the edge of the sea, “and we will take them all in, one by one.”
+
+They caught the eight o’clock returning boat and sat, filled with
+pleasant fatigue, against the rail in the bow, listening to the
+Italians’ fiddle and harp. Blinker had thrown off all care. The North
+Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness. What a fuss he had
+made over signing his name—pooh! he could sign it a hundred times. And
+her name was as pretty as she was—“Florence,” he said it to himself a
+great many times.
+
+As the boat was nearing its pier in the North River a two-funnelled,
+drab, foreign-looking sea-going steamer was dropping down toward the
+bay. The boat turned its nose in toward its slip. The steamer veered as
+if to seek midstream, and then yawed, seemed to increase its speed and
+struck the Coney boat on the side near the stern, cutting into it with
+a terrifying shock and crash.
+
+While the six hundred passengers on the boat were mostly tumbling about
+the decks in a shrieking panic the captain was shouting at the steamer
+that it should not back off and leave the rent exposed for the water to
+enter. But the steamer tore its way out like a savage sawfish and
+cleaved its heartless way, full speed ahead.
+
+The boat began to sink at its stern, but moved slowly toward the slip.
+The passengers were a frantic mob, unpleasant to behold.
+
+Blinker held Florence tightly until the boat had righted itself. She
+made no sound or sign of fear. He stood on a camp stool, ripped off the
+slats above his head and pulled down a number of the life preservers.
+He began to buckle one around Florence. The rotten canvas split and the
+fraudulent granulated cork came pouring out in a stream. Florence
+caught a handful of it and laughed gleefully.
+
+“It looks like breakfast food,” she said. “Take it off. They’re no
+good.”
+
+She unbuckled it and threw it on the deck. She made Blinker sit down
+and sat by his side and put her hand in his. “What’ll you bet we don’t
+reach the pier all right?” she said and began to hum a song.
+
+And now the captain moved among the passengers and compelled order. The
+boat would undoubtedly make her slip, he said, and ordered the women
+and children to the bow, where they could land first. The boat, very
+low in the water at the stern, tried gallantly to make his promise
+good.
+
+“Florence,” said Blinker, as she held him close by an arm and hand, “I
+love you.”
+
+“That’s what they all say,” she replied, lightly.
+
+“I am not one of ‘they all,’” he persisted. “I never knew any one I
+could love before. I could pass my life with you and be happy every
+day. I am rich. I can make things all right for you.”
+
+“That’s what they all say,” said the girl again, weaving the words into
+her little, reckless song.
+
+“Don’t say that again,” said Blinker in a tone that made her look at
+him in frank surprise.
+
+“Why shouldn’t I say it?” she asked calmly. “They all do.”
+
+“Who are ‘they’?” he asked, jealous for the first time in his
+existence.
+
+“Why, the fellows I know.”
+
+“Do you know so many?”
+
+“Oh, well, I’m not a wall flower,” she answered with modest
+complacency.
+
+“Where do you see these—these men? At your home?”
+
+“Of course not. I meet them just as I did you. Sometimes on the boat,
+sometimes in the park, sometimes on the street. I’m a pretty good judge
+of a man. I can tell in a minute if a fellow is one who is likely to
+get fresh.”
+
+“What do you mean by ‘fresh?’”
+
+“Why, try to kiss you—me, I mean.”
+
+“Do any of them try that?” asked Blinker, clenching his teeth.
+
+“Sure. All men do. You know that.”
+
+“Do you allow them?”
+
+“Some. Not many. They won’t take you out anywhere unless you do.”
+
+She turned her head and looked searchingly at Blinker. Her eyes were as
+innocent as a child’s. There was a puzzled look in them, as though she
+did not understand him.
+
+“What’s wrong about my meeting fellows?” she asked, wonderingly.
+
+“Everything,” he answered, almost savagely. “Why don’t you entertain
+your company in the house where you live? Is it necessary to pick up
+Tom, Dick and Harry on the streets?”
+
+She kept her absolutely ingenuous eyes upon his. “If you could see the
+place where I live you wouldn’t ask that. I live in Brickdust Row. They
+call it that because there’s red dust from the bricks crumbling over
+everything. I’ve lived there for more than four years. There’s no place
+to receive company. You can’t have anybody come to your room. What else
+is there to do? A girl has got to meet the men, hasn’t she?”
+
+“Yes,” he said, hoarsely. “A girl has got to meet a—has got to meet the
+men.”
+
+“The first time one spoke to me on the street,” she continued, “I ran
+home and cried all night. But you get used to it. I meet a good many
+nice fellows at church. I go on rainy days and stand in the vestibule
+until one comes up with an umbrella. I wish there was a parlor, so I
+could ask you to call, Mr. Blinker—are you really sure it isn’t
+‘Smith,’ now?”
+
+The boat landed safely. Blinker had a confused impression of walking
+with the girl through quiet crosstown streets until she stopped at a
+corner and held out her hand.
+
+“I live just one more block over,” she said. “Thank you for a very
+pleasant afternoon.”
+
+Blinker muttered something and plunged northward till he found a cab. A
+big, gray church loomed slowly at his right. Blinker shook his fist at
+it through the window.
+
+“I gave you a thousand dollars last week,” he cried under his breath,
+“and she meets them in your very doors. There is something wrong; there
+is something wrong.”
+
+At eleven the next day Blinker signed his name thirty times with a new
+pen provided by Lawyer Oldport.
+
+“Now let me go to the woods,” he said surlily.
+
+“You are not looking well,” said Lawyer Oldport. “The trip will do you
+good. But listen, if you will, to that little matter of business of
+which I spoke to you yesterday, and also five years ago. There are some
+buildings, fifteen in number, of which there are new five-year leases
+to be signed. Your father contemplated a change in the lease
+provisions, but never made it. He intended that the parlors of these
+houses should not be sub-let, but that the tenants should be allowed to
+use them for reception rooms. These houses are in the shopping
+district, and are mainly tenanted by young working girls. As it is they
+are forced to seek companionship outside. This row of red brick—”
+
+Blinker interrupted him with a loud, discordant laugh.
+
+“Brickdust Row for an even hundred,” he cried. “And I own it. Have I
+guessed right?”
+
+“The tenants have some such name for it,” said Lawyer Oldport.
+
+Blinker arose and jammed his hat down to his eyes.
+
+“Do what you please with it,” he said harshly. “Remodel it, burn it,
+raze it to the ground. But, man, it’s too late I tell you. It’s too
+late. It’s too late. It’s too late.”
+
+
+
+
+THE MAKING OF A NEW YORKER
+
+
+Besides many other things, Raggles was a poet. He was called a tramp;
+but that was only an elliptical way of saying that he was a
+philosopher, an artist, a traveller, a naturalist and a discoverer. But
+most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a line of
+verse; he lived his poetry. His Odyssey would have been a Limerick, had
+it been written. But, to linger with the primary proposition, Raggles
+was a poet.
+
+Raggles’s specialty, had he been driven to ink and paper, would have
+been sonnets to the cities. He studied cities as women study their
+reflections in mirrors; as children study the glue and sawdust of a
+dislocated doll; as the men who write about wild animals study the
+cages in the zoo. A city to Raggles was not merely a pile of bricks and
+mortar, peopled by a certain number of inhabitants; it was a thing with
+a soul characteristic and distinct; an individual conglomeration of
+life, with its own peculiar essence, flavor and feeling. Two thousand
+miles to the north and south, east and west, Raggles wandered in poetic
+fervor, taking the cities to his breast. He footed it on dusty roads,
+or sped magnificently in freight cars, counting time as of no account.
+And when he had found the heart of a city and listened to its secret
+confession, he strayed on, restless, to another. Fickle Raggles!—but
+perhaps he had not met the civic corporation that could engage and hold
+his critical fancy.
+
+Through the ancient poets we have learned that the cities are feminine.
+So they were to poet Raggles; and his mind carried a concrete and clear
+conception of the figure that symbolized and typified each one that he
+had wooed.
+
+Chicago seemed to swoop down upon him with a breezy suggestion of Mrs.
+Partington, plumes and patchouli, and to disturb his rest with a
+soaring and beautiful song of future promise. But Raggles would awake
+to a sense of shivering cold and a haunting impression of ideals lost
+in a depressing aura of potato salad and fish.
+
+Thus Chicago affected him. Perhaps there is a vagueness and inaccuracy
+in the description; but that is Raggles’s fault. He should have
+recorded his sensations in magazine poems.
+
+Pittsburg impressed him as the play of “Othello” performed in the
+Russian language in a railroad station by Dockstader’s minstrels. A
+royal and generous lady this Pittsburg, though—homely, hearty, with
+flushed face, washing the dishes in a silk dress and white kid
+slippers, and bidding Raggles sit before the roaring fireplace and
+drink champagne with his pigs’ feet and fried potatoes.
+
+New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony. He could see
+her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and that was
+all. Only once he came face to face with her. It was at dawn, when she
+was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with a pail of water. She
+laughed and hummed a chansonette and filled Raggles’s shoes with
+ice-cold water. Allons!
+
+Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and
+singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the
+city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his
+brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And,
+after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth,
+becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed.
+
+Indefinite and unintelligible ideas, you will say; but your
+disapprobation should be tempered with gratitude, for these are poets’
+fancies—and suppose you had come upon them in verse!
+
+One day Raggles came and laid siege to the heart of the great city of
+Manhattan. She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn her note
+in the scale; to taste and appraise and classify and solve and label
+her and arrange her with the other cities that had given him up the
+secret of their individuality. And here we cease to be Raggles’s
+translator and become his chronicler.
+
+Raggles landed from a ferry-boat one morning and walked into the core
+of the town with the blasé air of a cosmopolite. He was dressed with
+care to play the rôle of an “unidentified man.” No country, race,
+class, clique, union, party clan or bowling association could have
+claimed him. His clothing, which had been donated to him piece-meal by
+citizens of different height, but same number of inches around the
+heart, was not yet as uncomfortable to his figure as those specimens of
+raiment, self-measured, that are railroaded to you by transcontinental
+tailors with a suit case, suspenders, silk handkerchief and pearl studs
+as a bonus. Without money—as a poet should be—but with the ardor of an
+astronomer discovering a new star in the chorus of the milky way, or a
+man who has seen ink suddenly flow from his fountain pen, Raggles
+wandered into the great city.
+
+Late in the afternoon he drew out of the roar and commotion with a look
+of dumb terror on his countenance. He was defeated, puzzled,
+discomfited, frightened. Other cities had been to him as long primer to
+read; as country maidens quickly to fathom; as
+send-price-of-subscription-with-answer rebuses to solve; as oyster
+cocktails to swallow; but here was one as cold, glittering, serene,
+impossible as a four-carat diamond in a window to a lover outside
+fingering damply in his pocket his ribbon-counter salary.
+
+The greetings of the other cities he had known—their homespun
+kindliness, their human gamut of rough charity, friendly curses,
+garrulous curiosity and easily estimated credulity or indifference.
+This city of Manhattan gave him no clue; it was walled against him.
+Like a river of adamant it flowed past him in the streets. Never an eye
+was turned upon him; no voice spoke to him. His heart yearned for the
+clap of Pittsburg’s sooty hand on his shoulder; for Chicago’s menacing
+but social yawp in his ear; for the pale and eleemosynary stare through
+the Bostonian eyeglass—even for the precipitate but unmalicious
+boot-toe of Louisville or St. Louis.
+
+On Broadway Raggles, successful suitor of many cities, stood, bashful,
+like any country swain. For the first time he experienced the poignant
+humiliation of being ignored. And when he tried to reduce this
+brilliant, swiftly changing, ice-cold city to a formula he failed
+utterly. Poet though he was, it offered him no color similes, no points
+of comparison, no flaw in its polished facets, no handle by which he
+could hold it up and view its shape and structure, as he familiarly and
+often contemptuously had done with other towns. The houses were
+interminable ramparts loopholed for defense; the people were bright but
+bloodless spectres passing in sinister and selfish array.
+
+The thing that weighed heaviest on Raggles’s soul and clogged his
+poet’s fancy was the spirit of absolute egotism that seemed to saturate
+the people as toys are saturated with paint. Each one that he
+considered appeared a monster of abominable and insolent conceit.
+Humanity was gone from them; they were toddling idols of stone and
+varnish, worshipping themselves and greedy for though oblivious of
+worship from their fellow graven images. Frozen, cruel, implacable,
+impervious, cut to an identical pattern, they hurried on their ways
+like statues brought by some miracles to motion, while soul and feeling
+lay unaroused in the reluctant marble.
+
+Gradually Raggles became conscious of certain types. One was an elderly
+gentleman with a snow-white, short beard, pink, unwrinkled face and
+stony, sharp blue eyes, attired in the fashion of a gilded youth, who
+seemed to personify the city’s wealth, ripeness and frigid unconcern.
+Another type was a woman, tall, beautiful, clear as a steel engraving,
+goddess-like, calm, clothed like the princesses of old, with eyes as
+coldly blue as the reflection of sunlight on a glacier. And another was
+a by-product of this town of marionettes—a broad, swaggering, grim,
+threateningly sedate fellow, with a jowl as large as a harvested wheat
+field, the complexion of a baptized infant and the knuckles of a
+prize-fighter. This type leaned against cigar signs and viewed the
+world with frappéd contumely.
+
+A poet is a sensitive creature, and Raggles soon shrivelled in the
+bleak embrace of the undecipherable. The chill, sphinx-like, ironical,
+illegible, unnatural, ruthless expression of the city left him downcast
+and bewildered. Had it no heart? Better the woodpile, the scolding of
+vinegar-faced housewives at back doors, the kindly spleen of bartenders
+behind provincial free-lunch counters, the amiable truculence of rural
+constables, the kicks, arrests and happy-go-lucky chances of the other
+vulgar, loud, crude cities than this freezing heartlessness.
+
+Raggles summoned his courage and sought alms from the populace.
+Unheeding, regardless, they passed on without the wink of an eyelash to
+testify that they were conscious of his existence. And then he said to
+himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a
+soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs,
+and that he was alone in a great wilderness.
+
+Raggles started to cross the street. There was a blast, a roar, a
+hissing and a crash as something struck him and hurled him over and
+over six yards from where he had been. As he was coming down like the
+stick of a rocket the earth and all the cities thereof turned to a
+fractured dream.
+
+Raggles opened his eyes. First an odor made itself known to him—an odor
+of the earliest spring flowers of Paradise. And then a hand soft as a
+falling petal touched his brow. Bending over him was the woman clothed
+like the princess of old, with blue eyes, now soft and humid with human
+sympathy. Under his head on the pavement were silks and furs. With
+Raggles’s hat in his hand and with his face pinker than ever from a
+vehement burst of oratory against reckless driving, stood the elderly
+gentleman who personified the city’s wealth and ripeness. From a nearby
+café hurried the by-product with the vast jowl and baby complexion,
+bearing a glass full of a crimson fluid that suggested delightful
+possibilities.
+
+“Drink dis, sport,” said the by-product, holding the glass to Raggles’s
+lips.
+
+Hundreds of people huddled around in a moment, their faces wearing the
+deepest concern. Two flattering and gorgeous policemen got into the
+circle and pressed back the overplus of Samaritans. An old lady in a
+black shawl spoke loudly of camphor; a newsboy slipped one of his
+papers beneath Raggles’s elbow, where it lay on the muddy pavement. A
+brisk young man with a notebook was asking for names.
+
+A bell clanged importantly, and the ambulance cleaned a lane through
+the crowd. A cool surgeon slipped into the midst of affairs.
+
+“How do you feel, old man?” asked the surgeon, stooping easily to his
+task. The princess of silks and satins wiped a red drop or two from
+Raggles’s brow with a fragrant cobweb.
+
+“Me?” said Raggles, with a seraphic smile, “I feel fine.”
+
+He had found the heart of his new city.
+
+In three days they let him leave his cot for the convalescent ward in
+the hospital. He had been in there an hour when the attendants heard
+sounds of conflict. Upon investigation they found that Raggles had
+assaulted and damaged a brother convalescent—a glowering transient whom
+a freight train collision had sent in to be patched up.
+
+“What’s all this about?” inquired the head nurse.
+
+“He was runnin’ down me town,” said Raggles.
+
+“What town?” asked the nurse.
+
+“Noo York,” said Raggles.
+
+
+
+
+VANITY AND SOME SABLES
+
+
+When “Kid” Brady was sent to the ropes by Molly McKeever’s blue-black
+eyes he withdrew from the Stovepipe Gang. So much for the power of a
+colleen’s blanderin’ tongue and stubborn true-heartedness. If you are a
+man who read this, may such an influence be sent you before 2 o’clock
+to-morrow; if you are a woman, may your Pomeranian greet you this
+morning with a cold nose—a sign of doghealth and your happiness.
+
+The Stovepipe Gang borrowed its name from a sub-district of the city
+called the “Stovepipe,” which is a narrow and natural extension of the
+familiar district known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The “Stovepipe” strip of
+town runs along Eleventh and Twelfth avenues on the river, and bends a
+hard and sooty elbow around little, lost homeless DeWitt Clinton park.
+Consider that a stovepipe is an important factor in any kitchen and the
+situation is analyzed. The chefs in “Hell’s Kitchen” are many, and the
+“Stovepipe” gang, wears the cordon blue.
+
+The members of this unchartered but widely known brotherhood appeared
+to pass their time on street corners arrayed like the lilies of the
+conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as
+a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in
+a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and
+immaterial as that heard in clubs seven blocks to the east.
+
+But off exhibition the “Stovepipes” were not mere street corner
+ornaments addicted to posing and manicuring. Their serious occupation
+was the separating of citizens from their coin and valuables.
+Preferably this was done by weird and singular tricks without noise or
+bloodshed; but whenever the citizen honored by their attentions refused
+to impoverish himself gracefully his objections came to be spread
+finally upon some police station blotter or hospital register.
+
+The police held the “Stovepipe” gang in perpetual suspicion and
+respect. As the nightingale’s liquid note is heard in the deepest
+shadows, so along the “Stovepipe’s” dark and narrow confines the
+whistle for reserves punctures the dull ear of night. Whenever there
+was smoke in the “stovepipe” the tasselled men in blue knew there was
+fire in “Hell’s Kitchen.”
+
+“Kid” Brady promised Molly to be good. “Kid” was the vainest, the
+strongest, the wariest and the most successful plotter in the gang.
+Therefore, the boys were sorry to give him up.
+
+But they witnessed his fall to a virtuous life without protest. For, in
+the Kitchen it is considered neither unmanly nor improper for a guy to
+do as his girl advises.
+
+Black her eye for love’s sake, if you will; but it is all-to-the-good
+business to do a thing when she wants you to do it.
+
+“Turn off the hydrant,” said the Kid, one night when Molly, tearful,
+besought him to amend his ways. “I’m going to cut out the gang. You for
+mine, and the simple life on the side. I’ll tell you, Moll—I’ll get
+work; and in a year we’ll get married. I’ll do it for you. We’ll get a
+flat and a flute, and a sewing machine and a rubber plant and live as
+honest as we can.”
+
+“Oh, Kid,” sighed Molly, wiping the powder off his shoulder with her
+handkerchief, “I’d rather hear you say that than to own all of New
+York. And we can be happy on so little!”
+
+The Kid looked down at his speckless cuffs and shining patent leathers
+with a suspicion of melancholy.
+
+“It’ll hurt hardest in the rags department,” said he. “I’ve kind of
+always liked to rig out swell when I could. You know how I hate cheap
+things, Moll. This suit set me back sixty-five. Anything in the wearing
+apparel line has got to be just so, or it’s to the misfit parlors for
+it, for mine. If I work I won’t have so much coin to hand over to the
+little man with the big shears.”
+
+“Never mind, Kid. I’ll like you just as much in a blue jumper as I
+would in a red automobile.”
+
+Before the Kid had grown large enough to knock out his father he had
+been compelled to learn the plumber’s art. So now back to this
+honorable and useful profession he returned. But it was as an assistant
+that he engaged himself; and it is the master plumber and not the
+assistant, who wears diamonds as large as hailstones and looks
+contemptuously upon the marble colonnades of Senator Clark’s mansion.
+
+Eight months went by as smoothly and surely as though they had
+“elapsed” on a theater program. The Kid worked away at his pipes and
+solder with no symptoms of backsliding. The Stovepipe gang continued
+its piracy on the high avenues, cracked policemen’s heads, held up late
+travelers, invented new methods of peaceful plundering, copied Fifth
+avenue’s cut of clothes and neckwear fancies and comported itself
+according to its lawless bylaws. But the Kid stood firm and faithful to
+his Molly, even though the polish was gone from his fingernails and it
+took him 15 minutes to tie his purple silk ascot so that the worn
+places would not show.
+
+One evening he brought a mysterious bundle with him to Molly’s house.
+
+“Open that, Moll!” he said in his large, quiet way. “It’s for you.”
+
+Molly’s eager fingers tore off the wrappings. She shrieked aloud, and
+in rushed a sprinkling of little McKeevers, and Ma McKeever, dishwashy,
+but an undeniable relative of the late Mrs. Eve.
+
+Again Molly shrieked, and something dark and long and sinuous flew and
+enveloped her neck like an anaconda.
+
+“Russian sables,” said the Kid, pridefully, enjoying the sight of
+Molly’s round cheek against the clinging fur. “The real thing. They
+don’t grow anything in Russia too good for you, Moll.”
+
+Molly plunged her hands into the muff, overturned a row of the family
+infants and flew to the mirror. Hint for the beauty column. To make
+bright eyes, rosy cheeks and a bewitching smile: Recipe—one set Russian
+sables. Apply.
+
+When they were alone Molly became aware of a small cake of the ice of
+common sense floating down the full tide of her happiness.
+
+“You’re a bird, all right, Kid,” she admitted gratefully. “I never had
+any furs on before in my life. But ain’t Russian sables awful
+expensive? Seems to me I’ve heard they were.”
+
+“Have I ever chucked any bargain-sale stuff at you, Moll?” asked the
+Kid, with calm dignity. “Did you ever notice me leaning on the remnant
+counter or peering in the window of the five-and-ten? Call that scarf
+$250 and the muff $175 and you won’t make any mistake about the price
+of Russian sables. The swell goods for me. Say, they look fine on you,
+Moll.”
+
+Molly hugged the sables to her bosom in rapture. And then her smile
+went away little by little, and she looked the Kid straight in the eye
+sadly and steadily.
+
+He knew what every look of hers meant; and he laughed with a faint
+flush upon his face.
+
+“Cut it out,” he said, with affectionate roughness. “I told you I was
+done with that. I bought ’em and paid for ’em, all right, with my own
+money.”
+
+“Out of the money you worked for, Kid? Out of $75 a month?”
+
+“Sure. I been saving up.”
+
+“Let’s see—saved $425 in eight months, Kid?”
+
+“Ah, let up,” said the Kid, with some heat. “I had some money when I
+went to work. Do you think I’ve been holding ’em up again? I told you
+I’d quit. They’re paid for on the square. Put ’em on and come out for a
+walk.”
+
+Molly calmed her doubts. Sables are soothing. Proud as a queen she went
+forth in the streets at the Kid’s side. In all that region of low-lying
+streets Russian sables had never been seen before. The word sped, and
+doors and windows blossomed with heads eager to see the swell furs Kid
+Brady had given his girl. All down the street there were “Oh’s” and
+“Ah’s” and the reported fabulous sum paid for the sables was passed
+from lip to lip, increasing as it went. At her right elbow sauntered
+the Kid with the air of princes. Work had not diminished his love of
+pomp and show and his passion for the costly and genuine. On a corner
+they saw a group of the Stovepipe Gang loafing, immaculate. They raised
+their hats to the Kid’s girl and went on with their calm, unaccented
+palaver.
+
+Three blocks behind the admired couple strolled Detective Ransom, of
+the Central office. Ransom was the only detective on the force who
+could walk abroad with safety in the Stovepipe district. He was fair
+dealing and unafraid and went there with the hypothesis that the
+inhabitants were human. Many liked him, and now and then one would tip
+off to him something that he was looking for.
+
+“What’s the excitement down the street?” asked Ransom of a pale youth
+in a red sweater.
+
+“Dey’re out rubberin’ at a set of buffalo robes Kid Brady staked his
+girl to,” answered the youth. “Some say he paid $900 for de skins.
+Dey’re swell all right enough.”
+
+“I hear Brady has been working at his old trade for nearly a year,”
+said the detective. “He doesn’t travel with the gang any more, does
+he?”
+
+“He’s workin’, all right,” said the red sweater, “but—say, sport, are
+you trailin’ anything in the fur line? A job in a plumbin’ shop don’
+match wid dem skins de Kid’s girl’s got on.”
+
+Ransom overtook the strolling couple on an empty street near the river
+bank. He touched the Kid’s arm from behind.
+
+“Let me see you a moment, Brady,” he said, quietly. His eye rested for
+a second on the long fur scarf thrown stylishly back over Molly’s left
+shoulder. The Kid, with his old-time police hating frown on his face,
+stepped a yard or two aside with the detective.
+
+“Did you go to Mrs. Hethcote’s on West 7—th street yesterday to fix a
+leaky water pipe?” asked Ransom.
+
+“I did,” said the Kid. “What of it?”
+
+“The lady’s $1,000 set of Russian sables went out of the house about
+the same time you did. The description fits the ones this lady has on.”
+
+“To h—Harlem with you,” cried the Kid, angrily. “You know I’ve cut out
+that sort of thing, Ransom. I bought them sables yesterday at—”
+
+The Kid stopped short.
+
+“I know you’ve been working straight lately,” said Ransom. “I’ll give
+you every chance. I’ll go with you where you say you bought the furs
+and investigate. The lady can wear ’em along with us and nobody’ll be
+on. That’s fair, Brady.”
+
+“Come on,” agreed the Kid, hotly. And then he stopped suddenly in his
+tracks and looked with an odd smile at Molly’s distressed and anxious
+face.
+
+“No use,” he said, grimly. “They’re the Hethcote sables, all right.
+You’ll have to turn ’em over, Moll, but they ain’t too good for you if
+they cost a million.”
+
+Molly, with anguish in her face, hung upon the Kid’s arm.
+
+“Oh, Kiddy, you’ve broke my heart,” she said. “I was so proud of
+you—and now they’ll do you—and where’s our happiness gone?”
+
+“Go home,” said the Kid, wildly. “Come on, Ransom—take the furs. Let’s
+get away from here. Wait a minute—I’ve a good mind to—no, I’ll be d––––
+if I can do it—run along, Moll—I’m ready, Ransom.”
+
+Around the corner of a lumber-yard came Policeman Kohen on his way to
+his beat along the river. The detective signed to him for assistance.
+Kohen joined the group. Ransom explained.
+
+“Sure,” said Kohen. “I hear about those saples dat vas stole. You say
+you have dem here?”
+
+Policeman Kohen took the end of Molly’s late scarf in his hands and
+looked at it closely.
+
+“Once,” he said, “I sold furs in Sixth avenue. Yes, dese are saples.
+Dey come from Alaska. Dis scarf is vort $12 and dis muff—”
+
+“Biff!” came the palm of the Kid’s powerful hand upon the policeman’s
+mouth. Kohen staggered and rallied. Molly screamed. The detective threw
+himself upon Brady and with Kohen’s aid got the nippers on his wrist.
+
+“The scarf is vort $12 and the muff is vort $9,” persisted the
+policeman. “Vot is dis talk about $1,000 saples?”
+
+The Kid sat upon a pile of lumber and his face turned dark red.
+
+“Correct, Solomonski!” he declared, viciously. “I paid $21.50 for the
+set. I’d rather have got six months and not have told it. Me, the swell
+guy that wouldn’t look at anything cheap! I’m a plain bluffer. Moll—my
+salary couldn’t spell sables in Russian.”
+
+Molly cast herself upon his neck.
+
+“What do I care for all the sables and money in the world,” she cried.
+“It’s my Kiddy I want. Oh, you dear, stuck-up, crazy blockhead!”
+
+“You can take dose nippers off,” said Kohen to the detective. “Before I
+leaf de station de report come in dat de lady vind her saples—hanging
+in her wardrobe. Young man, I excuse you dat punch in my vace—dis von
+time.”
+
+Ransom handed Molly her furs. Her eyes were smiling upon the Kid. She
+wound the scarf and threw the end over her left shoulder with a
+duchess’ grace.
+
+“A gouple of young vools,” said Policeman Kohen to Ransom; “come on
+away.”
+
+
+
+
+THE SOCIAL TRIANGLE
+
+
+At the stroke of six Ikey Snigglefritz laid down his goose. Ikey was a
+tailor’s apprentice. Are there tailor’s apprentices nowadays?
+
+At any rate, Ikey toiled and snipped and basted and pressed and patched
+and sponged all day in the steamy fetor of a tailor-shop. But when work
+was done Ikey hitched his wagon to such stars as his firmament let
+shine.
+
+It was Saturday night, and the boss laid twelve begrimed and begrudged
+dollars in his hand. Ikey dabbled discreetly in water, donned coat, hat
+and collar with its frazzled tie and chalcedony pin, and set forth in
+pursuit of his ideals.
+
+For each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal,
+whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet
+silence of the musty bookshelves.
+
+Behold Ikey as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring “El” between
+the rows of reeking sweat-shops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant,
+squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he
+swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his
+cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the
+bacillus of society.
+
+Ikey’s legs carried him to and into that famous place of entertainment
+known as the Café Maginnis—famous because it was the rendezvous of
+Billy McMahan, the greatest man, the most wonderful man, Ikey thought,
+that the world had ever produced.
+
+Billy McMahan was the district leader. Upon him the Tiger purred, and
+his hand held manna to scatter. Now, as Ikey entered, McMahan stood,
+flushed and triumphant and mighty, the centre of a huzzaing concourse
+of his lieutenants and constituents. It seems there had been an
+election; a signal victory had been won; the city had been swept back
+into line by a resistless besom of ballots.
+
+Ikey slunk along the bar and gazed, breath-quickened, at his idol.
+
+How magnificent was Billy McMahan, with his great, smooth, laughing
+face; his gray eye, shrewd as a chicken hawk’s; his diamond ring, his
+voice like a bugle call, his prince’s air, his plump and active roll of
+money, his clarion call to friend and comrade—oh, what a king of men he
+was! How he obscured his lieutenants, though they themselves loomed
+large and serious, blue of chin and important of mien, with hands
+buried deep in the pockets of their short overcoats! But Billy—oh, what
+small avail are words to paint for you his glory as seen by Ikey
+Snigglefritz!
+
+The Café Maginnis rang to the note of victory. The white-coated
+bartenders threw themselves featfully upon bottle, cork and glass. From
+a score of clear Havanas the air received its paradox of clouds. The
+leal and the hopeful shook Billy McMahan’s hand. And there was born
+suddenly in the worshipful soul of Ikey Snigglefritz an audacious,
+thrilling impulse.
+
+He stepped forward into the little cleared space in which majesty
+moved, and held out his hand.
+
+Billy McMahan grasped it unhesitatingly, shook it and smiled.
+
+Made mad now by the gods who were about to destroy him, Ikey threw away
+his scabbard and charged upon Olympus.
+
+“Have a drink with me, Billy,” he said familiarly, “you and your
+friends?”
+
+“Don’t mind if I do, old man,” said the great leader, “just to keep the
+ball rolling.”
+
+The last spark of Ikey’s reason fled.
+
+“Wine,” he called to the bartender, waving a trembling hand.
+
+The corks of three bottles were drawn; the champagne bubbled in the
+long row of glasses set upon the bar. Billy McMahan took his and
+nodded, with his beaming smile, at Ikey. The lieutenants and satellites
+took theirs and growled “Here’s to you.” Ikey took his nectar in
+delirium. All drank.
+
+Ikey threw his week’s wages in a crumpled roll upon the bar.
+
+“C’rect,” said the bartender, smoothing the twelve one-dollar notes.
+The crowd surged around Billy McMahan again. Some one was telling how
+Brannigan fixed ’em over in the Eleventh. Ikey leaned against the bar a
+while, and then went out.
+
+He went down Hester street and up Chrystie, and down Delancey to where
+he lived. And there his women folk, a bibulous mother and three dingy
+sisters, pounced upon him for his wages. And at his confession they
+shrieked and objurgated him in the pithy rhetoric of the locality.
+
+But even as they plucked at him and struck him Ikey remained in his
+ecstatic trance of joy. His head was in the clouds; the star was
+drawing his wagon. Compared with what he had achieved the loss of wages
+and the bray of women’s tongues were slight affairs.
+
+He had shaken the hand of Billy McMahan.
+
+
+Billy McMahan had a wife, and upon her visiting cards was engraved the
+name “Mrs. William Darragh McMahan.” And there was a certain vexation
+attendant upon these cards; for, small as they were, there were houses
+in which they could not be inserted. Billy McMahan was a dictator in
+politics, a four-walled tower in business, a mogul, dreaded, loved and
+obeyed among his own people. He was growing rich; the daily papers had
+a dozen men on his trail to chronicle his every word of wisdom; he had
+been honored in caricature holding the Tiger cringing in leash.
+
+But the heart of Billy was sometimes sore within him. There was a race
+of men from which he stood apart but that he viewed with the eye of
+Moses looking over into the promised land. He, too, had ideals, even as
+had Ikey Snigglefritz; and sometimes, hopeless of attaining them, his
+own solid success was as dust and ashes in his mouth. And Mrs. William
+Darragh McMahan wore a look of discontent upon her plump but pretty
+face, and the very rustle of her silks seemed a sigh.
+
+There was a brave and conspicuous assemblage in the dining saloon of a
+noted hostelry where Fashion loves to display her charms. At one table
+sat Billy McMahan and his wife. Mostly silent they were, but the
+accessories they enjoyed little needed the indorsement of speech. Mrs.
+McMahan’s diamonds were outshone by few in the room. The waiter bore
+the costliest brands of wine to their table. In evening dress, with an
+expression of gloom upon his smooth and massive countenance, you would
+look in vain for a more striking figure than Billy’s.
+
+Four tables away sat alone a tall, slender man, about thirty, with
+thoughtful, melancholy eyes, a Van Dyke beard and peculiarly white,
+thin hands. He was dining on filet mignon, dry toast and apollinaris.
+That man was Cortlandt Van Duyckink, a man worth eighty millions, who
+inherited and held a sacred seat in the exclusive inner circle of
+society.
+
+Billy McMahan spoke to no one around him, because he knew no one. Van
+Duyckink kept his eyes on his plate because he knew that every one
+present was hungry to catch his. He could bestow knighthood and
+prestige by a nod, and he was chary of creating a too extensive
+nobility.
+
+And then Billy McMahan conceived and accomplished the most startling
+and audacious act of his life. He rose deliberately and walked over to
+Cortlandt Van Duyckink’s table and held out his hand.
+
+“Say, Mr. Van Duyckink,” he said, “I’ve heard you was talking about
+starting some reforms among the poor people down in my district. I’m
+McMahan, you know. Say, now, if that’s straight I’ll do all I can to
+help you. And what I says goes in that neck of the woods, don’t it? Oh,
+say, I rather guess it does.”
+
+Van Duyckink’s rather sombre eyes lighted up. He rose to his lank
+height and grasped Billy McMahan’s hand.
+
+“Thank you, Mr. McMahan,” he said, in his deep, serious tones. “I have
+been thinking of doing some work of that sort. I shall be glad of your
+assistance. It pleases me to have become acquainted with you.”
+
+Billy walked back to his seat. His shoulder was tingling from the
+accolade bestowed by royalty. A hundred eyes were now turned upon him
+in envy and new admiration. Mrs. William Darragh McMahan trembled with
+ecstasy, so that her diamonds smote the eye almost with pain. And now
+it was apparent that at many tables there were those who suddenly
+remembered that they enjoyed Mr. McMahan’s acquaintance. He saw smiles
+and bows about him. He became enveloped in the aura of dizzy greatness.
+His campaign coolness deserted him.
+
+“Wine for that gang!” he commanded the waiter, pointing with his
+finger. “Wine over there. Wine to those three gents by that green bush.
+Tell ’em it’s on me. D––––n it! Wine for everybody!”
+
+The waiter ventured to whisper that it was perhaps inexpedient to carry
+out the order, in consideration of the dignity of the house and its
+custom.
+
+“All right,” said Billy, “if it’s against the rules. I wonder if
+’twould do to send my friend Van Duyckink a bottle? No? Well, it’ll
+flow all right at the caffy to-night, just the same. It’ll be rubber
+boots for anybody who comes in there any time up to 2 A. M.”
+
+Billy McMahan was happy.
+
+He had shaken the hand of Cortlandt Van Duyckink.
+
+
+The big pale-gray auto with its shining metal work looked out of place
+moving slowly among the push carts and trash-heaps on the lower east
+side. So did Cortlandt Van Duyckink, with his aristocratic face and
+white, thin hands, as he steered carefully between the groups of
+ragged, scurrying youngsters in the streets. And so did Miss Constance
+Schuyler, with her dim, ascetic beauty, seated at his side.
+
+“Oh, Cortlandt,” she breathed, “isn’t it sad that human beings have to
+live in such wretchedness and poverty? And you—how noble it is of you
+to think of them, to give your time and money to improve their
+condition!”
+
+Van Duyckink turned his solemn eyes upon her.
+
+“It is little,” he said, sadly, “that I can do. The question is a large
+one, and belongs to society. But even individual effort is not thrown
+away. Look, Constance! On this street I have arranged to build soup
+kitchens, where no one who is hungry will be turned away. And down this
+other street are the old buildings that I shall cause to be torn down
+and there erect others in place of those death-traps of fire and
+disease.”
+
+Down Delancey slowly crept the pale-gray auto. Away from it toddled
+coveys of wondering, tangle-haired, barefooted, unwashed children. It
+stopped before a crazy brick structure, foul and awry.
+
+Van Duyckink alighted to examine at a better perspective one of the
+leaning walls. Down the steps of the building came a young man who
+seemed to epitomize its degradation, squalor and infelicity—a
+narrow-chested, pale, unsavory young man, puffing at a cigarette.
+
+Obeying a sudden impulse, Van Duyckink stepped out and warmly grasped
+the hand of what seemed to him a living rebuke.
+
+“I want to know you people,” he said, sincerely. “I am going to help
+you as much as I can. We shall be friends.”
+
+As the auto crept carefully away Cortlandt Van Duyckink felt an
+unaccustomed glow about his heart. He was near to being a happy man.
+
+He had shaken the hand of Ikey Snigglefritz.
+
+
+
+
+THE PURPLE DRESS
+
+
+We are to consider the shade known as purple. It is a color justly in
+repute among the sons and daughters of man. Emperors claim it for their
+especial dye. Good fellows everywhere seek to bring their noses to the
+genial hue that follows the commingling of the red and blue. We say of
+princes that they are born to the purple; and no doubt they are, for
+the colic tinges their faces with the royal tint equally with the
+snub-nosed countenance of a woodchopper’s brat. All women love it—when
+it is the fashion.
+
+And now purple is being worn. You notice it on the streets. Of course
+other colors are quite stylish as well—in fact, I saw a lovely thing
+the other day in olive green albatross, with a triple-lapped flounce
+skirt trimmed with insert squares of silk, and a draped fichu of lace
+opening over a shirred vest and double puff sleeves with a lace band
+holding two gathered frills—but you see lots of purple too. Oh, yes,
+you do; just take a walk down Twenty-third street any afternoon.
+
+Therefore Maida—the girl with the big brown eyes and cinnamon-colored
+hair in the Bee-Hive Store—said to Grace—the girl with the rhinestone
+brooch and peppermint-pepsin flavor to her speech—“I’m going to have a
+purple dress—a tailor-made purple dress—for Thanksgiving.”
+
+“Oh, are you,” said Grace, putting away some 7½ gloves into the 6¾ box.
+“Well, it’s me for red. You see more red on Fifth avenue. And the men
+all seem to like it.”
+
+“I like purple best,” said Maida. “And old Schlegel has promised to
+make it for $8. It’s going to be lovely. I’m going to have a plaited
+skirt and a blouse coat trimmed with a band of galloon under a white
+cloth collar with two rows of—”
+
+“Sly boots!” said Grace with an educated wink.
+
+“—soutache braid over a surpliced white vest; and a plaited basque
+and—”
+
+“Sly boots—sly boots!” repeated Grace.
+
+“—plaited gigot sleeves with a drawn velvet ribbon over an inside cuff.
+What do you mean by saying that?”
+
+“You think Mr. Ramsay likes purple. I heard him say yesterday he
+thought some of the dark shades of red were stunning.”
+
+“I don’t care,” said Maida. “I prefer purple, and them that don’t like
+it can just take the other side of the street.”
+
+Which suggests the thought that after all, the followers of purple may
+be subject to slight delusions. Danger is near when a maiden thinks she
+can wear purple regardless of complexions and opinions; and when
+Emperors think their purple robes will wear forever.
+
+Maida had saved $18 after eight months of economy; and this had bought
+the goods for the purple dress and paid Schlegel $4 on the making of
+it. On the day before Thanksgiving she would have just enough to pay
+the remaining $4. And then for a holiday in a new dress—can earth offer
+anything more enchanting?
+
+Old Bachman, the proprietor of the Bee-Hive Store, always gave a
+Thanksgiving dinner to his employees. On every one of the subsequent
+364 days, excusing Sundays, he would remind them of the joys of the
+past banquet and the hopes of the coming ones, thus inciting them to
+increased enthusiasm in work. The dinner was given in the store on one
+of the long tables in the middle of the room. They tacked wrapping
+paper over the front windows; and the turkeys and other good things
+were brought in the back way from the restaurant on the corner. You
+will perceive that the Bee-Hive was not a fashionable department store,
+with escalators and pompadours. It was almost small enough to be called
+an emporium; and you could actually go in there and get waited on and
+walk out again. And always at the Thanksgiving dinners Mr. Ramsay—
+
+Oh, bother! I should have mentioned Mr. Ramsay first of all. He is more
+important than purple or green, or even the red cranberry sauce.
+
+Mr. Ramsay was the head clerk; and as far as I am concerned I am for
+him. He never pinched the girls’ arms when he passed them in dark
+corners of the store; and when he told them stories when business was
+dull and the girls giggled and said: “Oh, pshaw!” it wasn’t G. Bernard
+they meant at all. Besides being a gentleman, Mr. Ramsay was queer and
+original in other ways. He was a health crank, and believed that people
+should never eat anything that was good for them. He was violently
+opposed to anybody being comfortable, and coming in out of snow storms,
+or wearing overshoes, or taking medicine, or coddling themselves in any
+way. Every one of the ten girls in the store had little
+pork-chop-and-fried-onion dreams every night of becoming Mrs. Ramsay.
+For, next year old Bachman was going to take him in for a partner. And
+each one of them knew that if she should catch him she would knock
+those cranky health notions of his sky high before the wedding cake
+indigestion was over.
+
+Mr. Ramsay was master of ceremonies at the dinners. Always they had two
+Italians in to play a violin and harp and had a little dance in the
+store.
+
+And here were two dresses being conceived to charm Ramsay—one purple
+and the other red. Of course, the other eight girls were going to have
+dresses too, but they didn’t count. Very likely they’d wear some
+shirt-waist-and-black-skirt-affairs—nothing as resplendent as purple or
+red.
+
+Grace had saved her money, too. She was going to buy her dress
+ready-made. Oh, what’s the use of bothering with a tailor—when you’ve
+got a figger it’s easy to get a fit—the ready-made are intended for a
+perfect figger—except I have to have ’em all taken in at the waist—the
+average figger is so large waisted.
+
+The night before Thanksgiving came. Maida hurried home, keen and bright
+with the thoughts of the blessed morrow. Her thoughts were of purple,
+but they were white themselves—the joyous enthusiasm of the young for
+the pleasures that youth must have or wither. She knew purple would
+become her, and—for the thousandth time she tried to assure herself
+that it was purple Mr. Ramsay said he liked and not red. She was going
+home first to get the $4 wrapped in a piece of tissue paper in the
+bottom drawer of her dresser, and then she was going to pay Schlegel
+and take the dress home herself.
+
+Grace lived in the same house. She occupied the hall room above
+Maida’s.
+
+At home Maida found clamor and confusion. The landlady’s tongue
+clattering sourly in the halls like a churn dasher dabbing in
+buttermilk. And then Grace come down to her room crying with eyes as
+red as any dress.
+
+“She says I’ve got to get out,” said Grace. “The old beast. Because I
+owe her $4. She’s put my trunk in the hall and locked the door. I can’t
+go anywhere else. I haven’t got a cent of money.”
+
+“You had some yesterday,” said Maida.
+
+“I paid it on my dress,” said Grace. “I thought she’d wait till next
+week for the rent.”
+
+Sniffle, sniffle, sob, sniffle.
+
+Out came—out it had to come—Maida’s $4.
+
+“You blessed darling,” cried Grace, now a rainbow instead of sunset.
+“I’ll pay the mean old thing and then I’m going to try on my dress. I
+think it’s heavenly. Come up and look at it. I’ll pay the money back, a
+dollar a week—honest I will.”
+
+Thanksgiving.
+
+The dinner was to be at noon. At a quarter to twelve Grace switched
+into Maida’s room. Yes, she looked charming. Red was her color. Maida
+sat by the window in her old cheviot skirt and blue waist darning a
+st—. Oh, doing fancy work.
+
+“Why, goodness me! ain’t you dressed yet?” shrilled the red one. “How
+does it fit in the back? Don’t you think these velvet tabs look awful
+swell? Why ain’t you dressed, Maida?”
+
+“My dress didn’t get finished in time,” said Maida. “I’m not going to
+the dinner.”
+
+“That’s too bad. Why, I’m awfully sorry, Maida. Why don’t you put on
+anything and come along—it’s just the store folks, you know, and they
+won’t mind.”
+
+“I was set on my purple,” said Maida. “If I can’t have it I won’t go at
+all. Don’t bother about me. Run along or you’ll be late. You look awful
+nice in red.”
+
+At her window Maida sat through the long morning and past the time of
+the dinner at the store. In her mind she could hear the girls shrieking
+over a pull-bone, could hear old Bachman’s roar over his own
+deeply-concealed jokes, could see the diamonds of fat Mrs. Bachman, who
+came to the store only on Thanksgiving days, could see Mr. Ramsay
+moving about, alert, kindly, looking to the comfort of all.
+
+At four in the afternoon, with an expressionless face and a lifeless
+air she slowly made her way to Schlegel’s shop and told him she could
+not pay the $4 due on the dress.
+
+“Gott!” cried Schlegel, angrily. “For what do you look so glum? Take
+him away. He is ready. Pay me some time. Haf I not seen you pass mine
+shop every day in two years? If I make clothes is it that I do not know
+how to read beoples because? You will pay me some time when you can.
+Take him away. He is made goot; and if you look bretty in him all
+right. So. Pay me when you can.”
+
+Maida breathed a millionth part of the thanks in her heart, and hurried
+away with her dress. As she left the shop a smart dash of rain struck
+upon her face. She smiled and did not feel it.
+
+Ladies who shop in carriages, you do not understand. Girls whose
+wardrobes are charged to the old man’s account, you cannot begin to
+comprehend—you could not understand why Maida did not feel the cold
+dash of the Thanksgiving rain.
+
+At five o’clock she went out upon the street wearing her purple dress.
+The rain had increased, and it beat down upon her in a steady,
+wind-blown pour. People were scurrying home and to cars with close-held
+umbrellas and tight buttoned raincoats. Many of them turned their heads
+to marvel at this beautiful, serene, happy-eyed girl in the purple
+dress walking through the storm as though she were strolling in a
+garden under summer skies.
+
+I say you do not understand it, ladies of the full purse and varied
+wardrobe. You do not know what it is to live with a perpetual longing
+for pretty things—to starve eight months in order to bring a purple
+dress and a holiday together. What difference if it rained, hailed,
+blew, snowed, cycloned?
+
+Maida had no umbrella nor overshoes. She had her purple dress and she
+walked abroad. Let the elements do their worst. A starved heart must
+have one crumb during a year. The rain ran down and dripped from her
+fingers.
+
+Some one turned a corner and blocked her way. She looked up into Mr.
+Ramsay’s eyes, sparkling with admiration and interest.
+
+“Why, Miss Maida,” said he, “you look simply magnificent in your new
+dress. I was greatly disappointed not to see you at our dinner. And of
+all the girls I ever knew, you show the greatest sense and
+intelligence. There is nothing more healthful and invigorating than
+braving the weather as you are doing. May I walk with you?”
+
+And Maida blushed and sneezed.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOREIGN POLICY OF COMPANY 99
+
+
+John Byrnes, hose-cart driver of Engine Company No. 99, was afflicted
+with what his comrades called Japanitis.
+
+Byrnes had a war map spread permanently upon a table in the second
+story of the engine-house, and he could explain to you at any hour of
+the day or night the exact positions, conditions and intentions of both
+the Russian and Japanese armies. He had little clusters of pins stuck
+in the map which represented the opposing forces, and these he moved
+about from day to day in conformity with the war news in the daily
+papers.
+
+Wherever the Japs won a victory John Byrnes would shift his pins, and
+then he would execute a war dance of delight, and the other firemen
+would hear him yell: “Go it, you blamed little, sawed-off,
+huckleberry-eyed, monkey-faced hot tamales! Eat ’em up, you little
+sleight-o’-hand, bow-legged bull terriers—give ’em another of them Yalu
+looloos, and you’ll eat rice in St. Petersburg. Talk about your
+Russians—say, wouldn’t they give you a painsky when it comes to a
+scrapovitch?”
+
+Not even on the fair island of Nippon was there a more enthusiastic
+champion of the Mikado’s men. Supporters of the Russian cause did well
+to keep clear of Engine-House No. 99.
+
+Sometimes all thoughts of the Japs left John Byrnes’s head. That was
+when the alarm of fire had sounded and he was strapped in his driver’s
+seat on the swaying cart, guiding Erebus and Joe, the finest team in
+the whole department—according to the crew of 99.
+
+Of all the codes adopted by man for regulating his actions toward his
+fellow-mortals, the greatest are these—the code of King Arthur’s
+Knights of the Round Table, the Constitution of the United States and
+the unwritten rules of the New York Fire Department. The Round Table
+methods are no longer practicable since the invention of street cars
+and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more
+and more unconstitutional every day, so the code of our firemen must be
+considered in the lead, with the Golden Rule and Jeffries’s new punch
+trying for place and show.
+
+The Constitution says that one man is as good as another; but the Fire
+Department says he is better. This is a too generous theory, but the
+law will not allow itself to be construed otherwise. All of which comes
+perilously near to being a paradox, and commends itself to the
+attention of the S. P. C. A.
+
+One of the transatlantic liners dumped out at Ellis Island a lump of
+protozoa which was expected to evolve into an American citizen. A
+steward kicked him down the gangway, a doctor pounced upon his eyes
+like a raven, seeking for trachoma or ophthalmia; he was hustled ashore
+and ejected into the city in the name of Liberty—perhaps,
+theoretically, thus inoculating against kingocracy with a drop of its
+own virus. This hypodermic injection of Europeanism wandered happily
+into the veins of the city with the broad grin of a pleased child. It
+was not burdened with baggage, cares or ambitions. Its body was lithely
+built and clothed in a sort of foreign fustian; its face was brightly
+vacant, with a small, flat nose, and was mostly covered by a thick,
+ragged, curling beard like the coat of a spaniel. In the pocket of the
+imported Thing were a few
+coins—denarii—scudi—kopecks—pfennigs—pilasters—whatever the financial
+nomenclature of his unknown country may have been.
+
+Prattling to himself, always broadly grinning, pleased by the roar and
+movement of the barbarous city into which the steamship cut-rates had
+shunted him, the alien strayed away from the sea, which he hated, as
+far as the district covered by Engine Company No. 99. Light as a cork,
+he was kept bobbing along by the human tide, the crudest atom in all
+the silt of the stream that emptied into the reservoir of Liberty.
+
+While crossing Third avenue he slowed his steps, enchanted by the
+thunder of the elevated trains above him and the soothing crash of the
+wheels on the cobbles. And then there was a new, delightful chord in
+the uproar—the musical clanging of a gong and a great shining
+juggernaut belching fire and smoke, that people were hurrying to see.
+
+This beautiful thing, entrancing to the eye, dashed past, and the
+protoplasmic immigrant stepped into the wake of it with his broad,
+enraptured, uncomprehending grin. And so stepping, stepped into the
+path of No. 99’s flying hose-cart, with John Byrnes gripping, with arms
+of steel, the reins over the plunging backs of Erebus and Joe.
+
+The unwritten constitutional code of the fireman has no exceptions or
+amendments. It is a simple thing—as simple as the rule of three. There
+was the heedless unit in the right of way; there was the hose-cart and
+the iron pillar of the elevated railroad.
+
+John Byrnes swung all his weight and muscle on the left rein. The team
+and cart swerved that way and crashed like a torpedo into the pillar.
+The men on the cart went flying like skittles. The driver’s strap
+burst, the pillar rang with the shock, and John Byrnes fell on the car
+track with a broken shoulder twenty feet away, while Erebus—beautiful,
+raven-black, best-loved Erebus—lay whickering in his harness with a
+broken leg.
+
+In consideration for the feelings of Engine Company No. 99 the details
+will be lightly touched. The company does not like to be reminded of
+that day. There was a great crowd, and hurry calls were sent in; and
+while the ambulance gong was clearing the way the men of No. 99 heard
+the crack of the S. P. C. A. agent’s pistol, and turned their heads
+away, not daring to look toward Erebus again.
+
+When the firemen got back to the engine-house they found that one of
+them was dragging by the collar the cause of their desolation and
+grief. They set it in the middle of the floor and gathered grimly about
+it. Through its whiskers the calamitous object chattered effervescently
+and waved its hands.
+
+“Sounds like a seidlitz powder,” said Mike Dowling, disgustedly, “and
+it makes me sicker than one. Call that a man!—that hoss was worth a
+steamer full of such two-legged animals. It’s a immigrant—that’s what
+it is.”
+
+“Look at the doctor’s chalk mark on its coat,” said Reilly, the desk
+man. “It’s just landed. It must be a kind of a Dago or a Hun or one of
+them Finns, I guess. That’s the kind of truck that Europe unloads onto
+us.”
+
+“Think of a thing like that getting in the way and laying John up in
+hospital and spoiling the best fire team in the city,” groaned another
+fireman. “It ought to be taken down to the dock and drowned.”
+
+“Somebody go around and get Sloviski,” suggested the engine driver,
+“and let’s see what nation is responsible for this conglomeration of
+hair and head noises.”
+
+Sloviski kept a delicatessen store around the corner on Third avenue,
+and was reputed to be a linguist.
+
+One of the men fetched him—a fat, cringing man, with a discursive eye
+and the odors of many kinds of meats upon him.
+
+“Take a whirl at this importation with your jaw-breakers, Sloviski,”
+requested Mike Dowling. “We can’t quite figure out whether he’s from
+the Hackensack bottoms or Hongkong-on-the-Ganges.”
+
+Sloviski addressed the stranger in several dialects that ranged in
+rhythm and cadence from the sounds produced by a tonsilitis gargle to
+the opening of a can of tomatoes with a pair of scissors. The immigrant
+replied in accents resembling the uncorking of a bottle of ginger ale.
+
+“I have you his name,” reported Sloviski. “You shall not pronounce it.
+Writing of it in paper is better.” They gave him paper, and he wrote,
+“Demetre Svangvsk.”
+
+“Looks like short hand,” said the desk man.
+
+“He speaks some language,” continued the interpreter, wiping his
+forehead, “of Austria and mixed with a little Turkish. And, den, he
+have some Magyar words and a Polish or two, and many like the
+Roumanian, but not without talk of one tribe in Bessarabia. I do not
+him quite understand.”
+
+“Would you call him a Dago or a Polocker, or what?” asked Mike,
+frowning at the polyglot description.
+
+“He is a”—answered Sloviski—“he is a—I dink he come from—I dink he is a
+fool,” he concluded, impatient at his linguistic failure, “and if you
+pleases I will go back at mine delicatessen.”
+
+“Whatever he is, he’s a bird,” said Mike Dowling; “and you want to
+watch him fly.”
+
+Taking by the wing the alien fowl that had fluttered into the nest of
+Liberty, Mike led him to the door of the engine-house and bestowed upon
+him a kick hearty enough to convey the entire animus of Company 99.
+Demetre Svangvsk hustled away down the sidewalk, turning once to show
+his ineradicable grin to the aggrieved firemen.
+
+In three weeks John Byrnes was back at his post from the hospital. With
+great gusto he proceeded to bring his war map up to date. “My money on
+the Japs every time,” he declared. “Why, look at them Russians—they’re
+nothing but wolves. Wipe ’em out, I say—and the little old jiu jitsu
+gang are just the cherry blossoms to do the trick, and don’t you forget
+it!”
+
+The second day after Byrnes’s reappearance came Demetre Svangvsk, the
+unidentified, to the engine-house, with a broader grin than ever. He
+managed to convey the idea that he wished to congratulate the hose-cart
+driver on his recovery and to apologize for having caused the accident.
+This he accomplished by so many extravagant gestures and explosive
+noises that the company was diverted for half an hour. Then they kicked
+him out again, and on the next day he came back grinning. How or where
+he lived no one knew. And then John Byrnes’s nine-year-old son, Chris,
+who brought him convalescent delicacies from home to eat, took a fancy
+to Svangvsk, and they allowed him to loaf about the door of the
+engine-house occasionally.
+
+One afternoon the big drab automobile of the Deputy Fire Commissioner
+buzzed up to the door of No. 99 and the Deputy stepped inside for an
+informal inspection. The men kicked Svangvsk out a little harder than
+usual and proudly escorted the Deputy around 99, in which everything
+shone like my lady’s mirror.
+
+The Deputy respected the sorrow of the company concerning the loss of
+Erebus, and he had come to promise it another mate for Joe that would
+do him credit. So they let Joe out of his stall and showed the Deputy
+how deserving he was of the finest mate that could be in horsedom.
+
+While they were circling around Joe confabbing, Chris climbed into the
+Deputy’s auto and threw the power full on. The men heard a monster
+puffing and a shriek from the lad, and sprang out too late. The big
+auto shot away, luckily taking a straight course down the street. The
+boy knew nothing of its machinery; he sat clutching the cushions and
+howling. With the power on nothing could have stopped that auto except
+a brick house, and there was nothing for Chris to gain by such a
+stoppage.
+
+Demetre Svangvsk was just coming in again with a grin for another kick
+when Chris played his merry little prank. While the others sprang for
+the door Demetre sprang for Joe. He glided upon the horse’s bare back
+like a snake and shouted something at him like the crack of a dozen
+whips. One of the firemen afterward swore that Joe answered him back in
+the same language. Ten seconds after the auto started the big horse was
+eating up the asphalt behind it like a strip of macaroni.
+
+Some people two blocks and a half away saw the rescue. They said that
+the auto was nothing but a drab noise with a black speck in the middle
+of it for Chris, when a big bay horse with a lizard lying on its back
+cantered up alongside of it, and the lizard reached over and picked the
+black speck out of the noise.
+
+Only fifteen minutes after Svangvsk’s last kicking at the hands—or
+rather the feet—of Engine Company No. 99 he rode Joe back through the
+door with the boy safe, but acutely conscious of the licking he was
+going to receive.
+
+Svangvsk slipped to the floor, leaned his head against Joe’s and made a
+noise like a clucking hen. Joe nodded and whistled loudly through his
+nostrils, putting to shame the knowledge of Sloviski, of the
+delicatessen.
+
+John Byrnes walked up to Svangvsk, who grinned, expecting to be kicked.
+Byrnes gripped the outlander so strongly by the hand that Demetre
+grinned anyhow, conceiving it to be a new form of punishment.
+
+“The heathen rides like a Cossack,” remarked a fireman who had seen a
+Wild West show—“they’re the greatest riders in the world.”
+
+The word seemed to electrify Svangvsk. He grinned wider than ever.
+
+“Yas—yas—me Cossack,” he spluttered, striking his chest.
+
+“Cossack!” repeated John Byrnes, thoughtfully, “ain’t that a kind of a
+Russian?”
+
+“They’re one of the Russian tribes, sure,” said the desk man, who read
+books between fire alarms.
+
+Just then Alderman Foley, who was on his way home and did not know of
+the runaway, stopped at the door of the engine-house and called to
+Byrnes:
+
+“Hello there, Jimmy, me boy—how’s the war coming along? Japs still got
+the bear on the trot, have they?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” said John Byrnes, argumentatively, “them Japs
+haven’t got any walkover. You wait till Kuropatkin gets a good whack at
+’em and they won’t be knee-high to a puddle-ducksky.”
+
+
+
+
+THE LOST BLEND
+
+
+Since the bar has been blessed by the clergy, and cocktails open the
+dinners of the elect, one may speak of the saloon. Teetotalers need not
+listen, if they choose; there is always the slot restaurant, where a
+dime dropped into the cold bouillon aperture will bring forth a dry
+Martini.
+
+Con Lantry worked on the sober side of the bar in Kenealy’s café. You
+and I stood, one-legged like geese, on the other side and went into
+voluntary liquidation with our week’s wages. Opposite danced Con,
+clean, temperate, clear-headed, polite, white-jacketed, punctual,
+trustworthy, young, responsible, and took our money.
+
+The saloon (whether blessed or cursed) stood in one of those little
+“places” which are parallelograms instead of streets, and inhabited by
+laundries, decayed Knickerbocker families and Bohemians who have
+nothing to do with either.
+
+Over the café lived Kenealy and his family. His daughter Katherine had
+eyes of dark Irish—but why should you be told? Be content with your
+Geraldine or your Eliza Ann. For Con dreamed of her; and when she
+called softly at the foot of the back stairs for the pitcher of beer
+for dinner, his heart went up and down like a milk punch in the shaker.
+Orderly and fit are the rules of Romance; and if you hurl the last
+shilling of your fortune upon the bar for whiskey, the bartender shall
+take it, and marry his boss’s daughter, and good will grow out of it.
+
+But not so Con. For in the presence of woman he was tongue-tied and
+scarlet. He who would quell with his eye the sonorous youth whom the
+claret punch made loquacious, or smash with lemon squeezer the
+obstreperous, or hurl gutterward the cantankerous without a wrinkle
+coming to his white lawn tie, when he stood before woman he was
+voiceless, incoherent, stuttering, buried beneath a hot avalanche of
+bashfulness and misery. What then was he before Katherine? A trembler,
+with no word to say for himself, a stone without blarney, the dumbest
+lover that ever babbled of the weather in the presence of his divinity.
+
+There came to Kenealy’s two sunburned men, Riley and McQuirk. They had
+conference with Kenealy; and then they took possession of a back room
+which they filled with bottles and siphons and jugs and druggist’s
+measuring glasses. All the appurtenances and liquids of a saloon were
+there, but they dispensed no drinks. All day long the two sweltered in
+there pouring and mixing unknown brews and decoctions from the liquors
+in their store. Riley had the education, and he figured on reams of
+paper, reducing gallons to ounces and quarts to fluid drams. McQuirk, a
+morose man with a red eye, dashed each unsuccessful completed mixture
+into the waste pipes with curses gentle, husky and deep. They labored
+heavily and untiringly to achieve some mysterious solution like two
+alchemists striving to resolve gold from the elements.
+
+Into this back room one evening when his watch was done sauntered Con.
+His professional curiosity had been stirred by these occult bartenders
+at whose bar none drank, and who daily drew upon Kenealy’s store of
+liquors to follow their consuming and fruitless experiments.
+
+Down the back stairs came Katherine with her smile like sunrise on
+Gweebarra Bay.
+
+“Good evening, Mr. Lantry,” says she. “And what is the news to-day, if
+you please?”
+
+“It looks like r-rain,” stammered the shy one, backing to the wall.
+
+“It couldn’t do better,” said Katherine. “I’m thinking there’s nothing
+the worse off for a little water.” In the back room Riley and McQuirk
+toiled like bearded witches over their strange compounds. From fifty
+bottles they drew liquids carefully measured after Riley’s figures, and
+shook the whole together in a great glass vessel. Then McQuirk would
+dash it out, with gloomy profanity, and they would begin again.
+
+“Sit down,” said Riley to Con, “and I’ll tell you.
+
+“Last summer me and Tim concludes that an American bar in this nation
+of Nicaragua would pay. There was a town on the coast where there’s
+nothing to eat but quinine and nothing to drink but rum. The natives
+and foreigners lay down with chills and get up with fevers; and a good
+mixed drink is nature’s remedy for all such tropical inconveniences.
+
+“So we lays in a fine stock of wet goods in New York, and bar fixtures
+and glassware, and we sails for that Santa Palma town on a lime
+steamer. On the way me and Tim sees flying fish and plays seven-up with
+the captain and steward, and already begins to feel like the high-ball
+kings of the tropics of Capricorn.
+
+“When we gets in five hours of the country that we was going to
+introduce to long drinks and short change the captain calls us over to
+the starboard binnacle and recollects a few things.
+
+“‘I forgot to tell you, boys,’ says he, ‘that Nicaragua slapped an
+import duty of 48 per cent. ad valorem on all bottled goods last month.
+The President took a bottle of Cincinnati hair tonic by mistake for
+tabasco sauce, and he’s getting even. Barrelled goods is free.’
+
+“‘Sorry you didn’t mention it sooner,’ says we. And we bought two
+forty-two gallon casks from the captain, and opened every bottle we had
+and dumped the stuff all together in the casks. That 48 per cent. would
+have ruined us; so we took the chances on making that $1,200 cocktail
+rather than throw the stuff away.
+
+“Well, when we landed we tapped one of the barrels. The mixture was
+something heartrending. It was the color of a plate of Bowery pea soup,
+and it tasted like one of those coffee substitutes your aunt makes you
+take for the heart trouble you get by picking losers. We gave a nigger
+four fingers of it to try it, and he lay under a cocoanut tree three
+days beating the sand with his heels and refused to sign a testimonial.
+
+“But the other barrel! Say, bartender, did you ever put on a straw hat
+with a yellow band around it and go up in a balloon with a pretty girl
+with $8,000,000 in your pocket all at the same time? That’s what thirty
+drops of it would make you feel like. With two fingers of it inside you
+you would bury your face in your hands and cry because there wasn’t
+anything more worth while around for you to lick than little Jim
+Jeffries. Yes, sir, the stuff in that second barrel was distilled
+elixir of battle, money and high life. It was the color of gold and as
+clear as glass, and it shone after dark like the sunshine was still in
+it. A thousand years from now you’ll get a drink like that across the
+bar.
+
+“Well, we started up business with that one line of drinks, and it was
+enough. The piebald gentry of that country stuck to it like a hive of
+bees. If that barrel had lasted that country would have become the
+greatest on earth. When we opened up of mornings we had a line of
+Generals and Colonels and ex-Presidents and revolutionists a block long
+waiting to be served. We started in at 50 cents silver a drink. The
+last ten gallons went easy at $5 a gulp. It was wonderful stuff. It
+gave a man courage and ambition and nerve to do anything; at the same
+time he didn’t care whether his money was tainted or fresh from the Ice
+Trust. When that barrel was half gone Nicaragua had repudiated the
+National debt, removed the duty on cigarettes and was about to declare
+war on the United States and England.
+
+“’Twas by accident we discovered this king of drinks, and ’twill be by
+good luck if we strike it again. For ten months we’ve been trying.
+Small lots at a time, we’ve mixed barrels of all the harmful
+ingredients known to the profession of drinking. Ye could have stocked
+ten bars with the whiskies, brandies, cordials, bitters, gins and wines
+me and Tim have wasted. A glorious drink like that to be denied to the
+world! ’Tis a sorrow and a loss of money. The United States as a nation
+would welcome a drink of that sort, and pay for it.”
+
+All the while McQuirk had been carefully measuring and pouring together
+small quantities of various spirits, as Riley called them, from his
+latest pencilled prescription. The completed mixture was of a vile,
+mottled chocolate color. McQuirk tasted it, and hurled it, with
+appropriate epithets, into the waste sink.
+
+“’Tis a strange story, even if true,” said Con. “I’ll be going now
+along to my supper.”
+
+“Take a drink,” said Riley. “We’ve all kinds except the lost blend.”
+
+“I never drink,” said Con, “anything stronger than water. I am just
+after meeting Miss Katherine by the stairs. She said a true word.
+‘There’s not anything,’ says she, ‘but is better off for a little
+water.’”
+
+When Con had left them Riley almost felled McQuirk by a blow on the
+back.
+
+“Did ye hear that?” he shouted. “Two fools are we. The six dozen
+bottles of ’pollinaris we had on the ship—ye opened them yourself—which
+barrel did ye pour them in—which barrel, ye mudhead?”
+
+“I mind,” said McQuirk, slowly, “’twas in the second barrel we opened.
+I mind the blue piece of paper pasted on the side of it.”
+
+“We’ve got it now,” cried Riley. “’Twas that we lacked. ’Tis the water
+that does the trick. Everything else we had right. Hurry, man, and get
+two bottles of ’pollinaris from the bar, while I figure out the
+proportionments with me pencil.”
+
+An hour later Con strolled down the sidewalk toward Kenealy’s café.
+Thus faithful employees haunt, during their recreation hours, the
+vicinity where they labor, drawn by some mysterious attraction.
+
+A police patrol wagon stood at the side door. Three able cops were half
+carrying, half hustling Riley and McQuirk up its rear steps. The eyes
+and faces of each bore the bruises and cuts of sanguinary and assiduous
+conflict. Yet they whooped with strange joy, and directed upon the
+police the feeble remnants of their pugnacious madness.
+
+“Began fighting each other in the back room,” explained Kenealy to Con.
+“And singing! That was worse. Smashed everything pretty much up. But
+they’re good men. They’ll pay for everything. Trying to invent some new
+kind of cocktail, they was. I’ll see they come out all right in the
+morning.”
+
+Con sauntered into the back room to view the battlefield. As he went
+through the hall Katherine was just coming down the stairs.
+
+“Good evening again, Mr. Lantry,” said she. “And is there no news from
+the weather yet?”
+
+“Still threatens r-rain,” said Con, slipping past with red in his
+smooth, pale cheek.
+
+Riley and McQuirk had indeed waged a great and friendly battle. Broken
+bottles and glasses were everywhere. The room was full of alcohol
+fumes; the floor was variegated with spirituous puddles.
+
+On the table stood a 32-ounce glass graduated measure. In the bottom of
+it were two tablespoonfuls of liquid—a bright golden liquid that seemed
+to hold the sunshine a prisoner in its auriferous depths.
+
+Con smelled it. He tasted it. He drank it.
+
+As he returned through the hall Katherine was just going up the stairs.
+
+“No news yet, Mr. Lantry?” she asked with her teasing laugh.
+
+Con lifted her clear from the floor and held her there.
+
+“The news is,” he said, “that we’re to be married.”
+
+“Put me down, sir!” she cried indignantly, “or I will— Oh, Con, where,
+oh, wherever did you get the nerve to say it?”
+
+
+
+
+A HARLEM TRAGEDY
+
+
+Harlem.
+
+Mrs. Fink had dropped into Mrs. Cassidy’s flat one flight below.
+
+“Ain’t it a beaut?” said Mrs. Cassidy.
+
+She turned her face proudly for her friend Mrs. Fink to see. One eye
+was nearly closed, with a great, greenish-purple bruise around it. Her
+lip was cut and bleeding a little and there were red finger-marks on
+each side of her neck.
+
+“My husband wouldn’t ever think of doing that to me,” said Mrs. Fink,
+concealing her envy.
+
+“I wouldn’t have a man,” declared Mrs. Cassidy, “that didn’t beat me up
+at least once a week. Shows he thinks something of you. Say! but that
+last dose Jack gave me wasn’t no homeopathic one. I can see stars yet.
+But he’ll be the sweetest man in town for the rest of the week to make
+up for it. This eye is good for theater tickets and a silk shirt waist
+at the very least.”
+
+“I should hope,” said Mrs. Fink, assuming complacency, “that Mr. Fink
+is too much of a gentleman ever to raise his hand against me.”
+
+“Oh, go on, Maggie!” said Mrs. Cassidy, laughing and applying witch
+hazel, “you’re only jealous. Your old man is too frappéd and slow to
+ever give you a punch. He just sits down and practises physical culture
+with a newspaper when he comes home—now ain’t that the truth?”
+
+“Mr. Fink certainly peruses of the papers when he comes home,”
+acknowledged Mrs. Fink, with a toss of her head; “but he certainly
+don’t ever make no Steve O’Donnell out of me just to amuse
+himself—that’s a sure thing.”
+
+Mrs. Cassidy laughed the contented laugh of the guarded and happy
+matron. With the air of Cornelia exhibiting her jewels, she drew down
+the collar of her kimono and revealed another treasured bruise,
+maroon-colored, edged with olive and orange—a bruise now nearly well,
+but still to memory dear.
+
+Mrs. Fink capitulated. The formal light in her eye softened to envious
+admiration. She and Mrs. Cassidy had been chums in the downtown
+paper-box factory before they had married, one year before. Now she and
+her man occupied the flat above Mame and her man. Therefore she could
+not put on airs with Mame.
+
+“Don’t it hurt when he soaks you?” asked Mrs. Fink, curiously.
+
+“Hurt!”—Mrs. Cassidy gave a soprano scream of delight. “Well, say—did
+you ever have a brick house fall on you?—well, that’s just the way it
+feels—just like when they’re digging you out of the ruins. Jack’s got a
+left that spells two matinees and a new pair of Oxfords—and his
+right!—well, it takes a trip to Coney and six pairs of openwork, silk
+lisle threads to make that good.”
+
+“But what does he beat you for?” inquired Mrs. Fink, with wide-open
+eyes.
+
+“Silly!” said Mrs. Cassidy, indulgently. “Why, because he’s full. It’s
+generally on Saturday nights.”
+
+“But what cause do you give him?” persisted the seeker after knowledge.
+
+“Why, didn’t I marry him? Jack comes in tanked up; and I’m here, ain’t
+I? Who else has he got a right to beat? I’d just like to catch him once
+beating anybody else! Sometimes it’s because supper ain’t ready; and
+sometimes it’s because it is. Jack ain’t particular about causes. He
+just lushes till he remembers he’s married, and then he makes for home
+and does me up. Saturday nights I just move the furniture with sharp
+corners out of the way, so I won’t cut my head when he gets his work
+in. He’s got a left swing that jars you! Sometimes I take the count in
+the first round; but when I feel like having a good time during the
+week or want some new rags I come up again for more punishment. That’s
+what I done last night. Jack knows I’ve been wanting a black silk waist
+for a month, and I didn’t think just one black eye would bring it. Tell
+you what, Mag, I’ll bet you the ice cream he brings it to-night.”
+
+Mrs. Fink was thinking deeply.
+
+“My Mart,” she said, “never hit me a lick in his life. It’s just like
+you said, Mame; he comes in grouchy and ain’t got a word to say. He
+never takes me out anywhere. He’s a chair-warmer at home for fair. He
+buys me things, but he looks so glum about it that I never appreciate
+’em.”
+
+Mrs. Cassidy slipped an arm around her chum. “You poor thing!” she
+said. “But everybody can’t have a husband like Jack. Marriage wouldn’t
+be no failure if they was all like him. These discontented wives you
+hear about—what they need is a man to come home and kick their slats in
+once a week, and then make it up in kisses, and chocolate creams.
+That’d give ’em some interest in life. What I want is a masterful man
+that slugs you when he’s jagged and hugs you when he ain’t jagged.
+Preserve me from the man that ain’t got the sand to do neither!”
+
+Mrs. Fink sighed.
+
+The hallways were suddenly filled with sound. The door flew open at the
+kick of Mr. Cassidy. His arms were occupied with bundles. Mame flew and
+hung about his neck. Her sound eye sparkled with the love light that
+shines in the eye of the Maori maid when she recovers consciousness in
+the hut of the wooer who has stunned and dragged her there.
+
+“Hello, old girl!” shouted Mr. Cassidy. He shed his bundles and lifted
+her off her feet in a mighty hug. “I got tickets for Barnum & Bailey’s,
+and if you’ll bust the string of one of them bundles I guess you’ll
+find that silk waist—why, good evening, Mrs. Fink—I didn’t see you at
+first. How’s old Mart coming along?”
+
+“He’s very well, Mr. Cassidy—thanks,” said Mrs. Fink. “I must be going
+along up now. Mart’ll be home for supper soon. I’ll bring you down that
+pattern you wanted to-morrow, Mame.”
+
+Mrs. Fink went up to her flat and had a little cry. It was a
+meaningless cry, the kind of cry that only a woman knows about, a cry
+from no particular cause, altogether an absurd cry; the most transient
+and the most hopeless cry in the repertory of grief. Why had Martin
+never thrashed her? He was as big and strong as Jack Cassidy. Did he
+not care for her at all? He never quarrelled; he came home and lounged
+about, silent, glum, idle. He was a fairly good provider, but he
+ignored the spices of life.
+
+Mrs. Fink’s ship of dreams was becalmed. Her captain ranged between
+plum duff and his hammock. If only he would shiver his timbers or stamp
+his foot on the quarter-deck now and then! And she had thought to sail
+so merrily, touching at ports in the Delectable Isles! But now, to vary
+the figure, she was ready to throw up the sponge, tired out, without a
+scratch to show for all those tame rounds with her sparring partner.
+For one moment she almost hated Mame—Mame, with her cuts and bruises,
+her salve of presents and kisses; her stormy voyage with her fighting,
+brutal, loving mate.
+
+Mr. Fink came home at 7. He was permeated with the curse of
+domesticity. Beyond the portals of his cozy home he cared not to roam,
+to roam. He was the man who had caught the street car, the anaconda
+that had swallowed its prey, the tree that lay as it had fallen.
+
+“Like the supper, Mart?” asked Mrs. Fink, who had striven over it.
+
+“M-m-m-yep,” grunted Mr. Fink.
+
+After supper he gathered his newspapers to read. He sat in his stocking
+feet.
+
+Arise, some new Dante, and sing me the befitting corner of perdition
+for the man who sitteth in the house in his stockinged feet. Sisters of
+Patience who by reason of ties or duty have endured it in silk, yarn,
+cotton, lisle thread or woollen—does not the new canto belong?
+
+The next day was Labor Day. The occupations of Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Fink
+ceased for one passage of the sun. Labor, triumphant, would parade and
+otherwise disport itself.
+
+Mrs. Fink took Mrs. Cassidy’s pattern down early. Mame had on her new
+silk waist. Even her damaged eye managed to emit a holiday gleam. Jack
+was fruitfully penitent, and there was a hilarious scheme for the day
+afoot, with parks and picnics and Pilsener in it.
+
+A rising, indignant jealousy seized Mrs. Fink as she returned to her
+flat above. Oh, happy Mame, with her bruises and her quick-following
+balm! But was Mame to have a monopoly of happiness? Surely Martin Fink
+was as good a man as Jack Cassidy. Was his wife to go always
+unbelabored and uncaressed? A sudden, brilliant, breathless idea came
+to Mrs. Fink. She would show Mame that there were husbands as able to
+use their fists and perhaps to be as tender afterward as any Jack.
+
+The holiday promised to be a nominal one with the Finks. Mrs. Fink had
+the stationary washtubs in the kitchen filled with a two weeks’ wash
+that had been soaking overnight. Mr. Fink sat in his stockinged feet
+reading a newspaper. Thus Labor Day presaged to speed.
+
+Jealousy surged high in Mrs. Fink’s heart, and higher still surged an
+audacious resolve. If her man would not strike her—if he would not so
+far prove his manhood, his prerogative and his interest in conjugal
+affairs, he must be prompted to his duty.
+
+Mr. Fink lit his pipe and peacefully rubbed an ankle with a stockinged
+toe. He reposed in the state of matrimony like a lump of unblended suet
+in a pudding. This was his level Elysium—to sit at ease vicariously
+girdling the world in print amid the wifely splashing of suds and the
+agreeable smells of breakfast dishes departed and dinner ones to come.
+Many ideas were far from his mind; but the furthest one was the thought
+of beating his wife.
+
+Mrs. Fink turned on the hot water and set the washboards in the suds.
+Up from the flat below came the gay laugh of Mrs. Cassidy. It sounded
+like a taunt, a flaunting of her own happiness in the face of the
+unslugged bride above. Now was Mrs. Fink’s time.
+
+Suddenly she turned like a fury upon the man reading.
+
+“You lazy loafer!” she cried, “must I work my arms off washing and
+toiling for the ugly likes of you? Are you a man or are you a kitchen
+hound?”
+
+Mr. Fink dropped his paper, motionless from surprise. She feared that
+he would not strike—that the provocation had been insufficient. She
+leaped at him and struck him fiercely in the face with her clenched
+hand. In that instant she felt a thrill of love for him such as she had
+not felt for many a day. Rise up, Martin Fink, and come into your
+kingdom! Oh, she must feel the weight of his hand now—just to show that
+he cared—just to show that he cared!
+
+Mr. Fink sprang to his feet—Maggie caught him again on the jaw with a
+wide swing of her other hand. She closed her eyes in that fearful,
+blissful moment before his blow should come—she whispered his name to
+herself—she leaned to the expected shock, hungry for it.
+
+In the flat below Mr. Cassidy, with a shamed and contrite face was
+powdering Mame’s eye in preparation for their junket. From the flat
+above came the sound of a woman’s voice, high-raised, a bumping, a
+stumbling and a shuffling, a chair overturned—unmistakable sounds of
+domestic conflict.
+
+“Mart and Mag scrapping?” postulated Mr. Cassidy. “Didn’t know they
+ever indulged. Shall I trot up and see if they need a sponge holder?”
+
+One of Mrs. Cassidy’s eyes sparkled like a diamond. The other twinkled
+at least like paste.
+
+“Oh, oh,” she said, softly and without apparent meaning, in the
+feminine ejaculatory manner. “I wonder if—wonder if! Wait, Jack, till I
+go up and see.”
+
+Up the stairs she sped. As her foot struck the hallway above out from
+the kitchen door of her flat wildly flounced Mrs. Fink.
+
+“Oh, Maggie,” cried Mrs. Cassidy, in a delighted whisper; “did he? Oh,
+did he?”
+
+Mrs. Fink ran and laid her face upon her chum’s shoulder and sobbed
+hopelessly.
+
+Mrs. Cassidy took Maggie’s face between her hands and lifted it gently.
+Tear-stained it was, flushing and paling, but its velvety,
+pink-and-white, becomingly freckled surface was unscratched, unbruised,
+unmarred by the recreant fist of Mr. Fink.
+
+“Tell me, Maggie,” pleaded Mame, “or I’ll go in there and find out.
+What was it? Did he hurt you—what did he do?”
+
+Mrs. Fink’s face went down again despairingly on the bosom of her
+friend.
+
+“For God’s sake don’t open that door, Mame,” she sobbed. “And don’t
+ever tell nobody—keep it under your hat. He—he never touched me,
+and—he’s—oh, Gawd—he’s washin’ the clothes—he’s washin’ the clothes!”
+
+
+
+
+“THE GUILTY PARTY”
+
+
+A red-haired, unshaven, untidy man sat in a rocking chair by a window.
+He had just lighted a pipe, and was puffing blue clouds with great
+satisfaction. He had removed his shoes and donned a pair of blue, faded
+carpet-slippers. With the morbid thirst of the confirmed daily news
+drinker, he awkwardly folded back the pages of an evening paper,
+eagerly gulping down the strong, black headlines, to be followed as a
+chaser by the milder details of the smaller type.
+
+In an adjoining room a woman was cooking supper. Odors from strong
+bacon and boiling coffee contended against the cut-plug fumes from the
+vespertine pipe.
+
+Outside was one of those crowded streets of the east side, in which, as
+twilight falls, Satan sets up his recruiting office. A mighty host of
+children danced and ran and played in the street. Some in rags, some in
+clean white and beribboned, some wild and restless as young hawks, some
+gentle-faced and shrinking, some shrieking rude and sinful words, some
+listening, awed, but soon, grown familiar, to embrace—here were the
+children playing in the corridors of the House of Sin. Above the
+playground forever hovered a great bird. The bird was known to
+humorists as the stork. But the people of Chrystie street were better
+ornithologists. They called it a vulture.
+
+A little girl of twelve came up timidly to the man reading and resting
+by the window, and said:
+
+“Papa, won’t you play a game of checkers with me if you aren’t too
+tired?”
+
+The red-haired, unshaven, untidy man sitting shoeless by the window
+answered, with a frown.
+
+“Checkers. No, I won’t. Can’t a man who works hard all day have a
+little rest when he comes home? Why don’t you go out and play with the
+other kids on the sidewalk?”
+
+The woman who was cooking came to the door.
+
+“John,” she said, “I don’t like for Lizzie to play in the street. They
+learn too much there that ain’t good for ’em. She’s been in the house
+all day long. It seems that you might give up a little of your time to
+amuse her when you come home.”
+
+“Let her go out and play like the rest of ’em if she wants to be
+amused,” said the red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, “and don’t bother
+me.”
+
+
+“You’re on,” said Kid Mullaly. “Fifty dollars to $25 I take Annie to
+the dance. Put up.”
+
+The Kid’s black eyes were snapping with the fire of the baited and
+challenged. He drew out his “roll” and slapped five tens upon the bar.
+The three or four young fellows who were thus “taken” more slowly
+produced their stake. The bartender, ex-officio stakeholder, took the
+money, laboriously wrapped it, recorded the bet with an inch-long
+pencil and stuffed the whole into a corner of the cash register.
+
+“And, oh, what’ll be done to you’ll be a plenty,” said a bettor, with
+anticipatory glee.
+
+“That’s my lookout,” said the “Kid,” sternly. “Fill ’em up all around,
+Mike.”
+
+After the round Burke, the “Kid’s” sponge, sponge-holder, pal, Mentor
+and Grand Vizier, drew him out to the bootblack stand at the saloon
+corner where all the official and important matters of the Small Hours
+Social Club were settled. As Tony polished the light tan shoes of the
+club’s President and Secretary for the fifth time that day, Burke spake
+words of wisdom to his chief.
+
+“Cut that blond out, ‘Kid,’” was his advice, “or there’ll be trouble.
+What do you want to throw down that girl of yours for? You’ll never
+find one that’ll freeze to you like Liz has. She’s worth a hallful of
+Annies.”
+
+“I’m no Annie admirer!” said the “Kid,” dropping a cigarette ash on his
+polished toe, and wiping it off on Tony’s shoulder. “But I want to
+teach Liz a lesson. She thinks I belong to her. She’s been bragging
+that I daren’t speak to another girl. Liz is all right—in some ways.
+She’s drinking a little too much lately. And she uses language that a
+lady oughtn’t.”
+
+“You’re engaged, ain’t you?” asked Burke.
+
+“Sure. We’ll get married next year, maybe.”
+
+“I saw you make her drink her first glass of beer,” said Burke. “That
+was two years ago, when she used to come down to the corner of Chrystie
+bare-headed to meet you after supper. She was a quiet sort of a kid
+then, and couldn’t speak without blushing.”
+
+“She’s a little spitfire, sometimes, now,” said the Kid. “I hate
+jealousy. That’s why I’m going to the dance with Annie. It’ll teach her
+some sense.”
+
+“Well, you better look a little out,” were Burke’s last words. “If Liz
+was my girl and I was to sneak out to a dance coupled up with an Annie,
+I’d want a suit of chain armor on under my gladsome rags, all right.”
+
+Through the land of the stork-vulture wandered Liz. Her black eyes
+searched the passing crowds fierily but vaguely. Now and then she
+hummed bars of foolish little songs. Between times she set her small,
+white teeth together, and spake crisp words that the east side has
+added to language.
+
+Liz’s skirt was green silk. Her waist was a large brown-and-pink plaid,
+well-fitting and not without style. She wore a cluster ring of huge
+imitation rubies, and a locket that banged her knees at the bottom of a
+silver chain. Her shoes were run down over twisted high heels, and were
+strangers to polish. Her hat would scarcely have passed into a flour
+barrel.
+
+The “Family Entrance” of the Blue Jay Café received her. At a table she
+sat, and punched the button with the air of milady ringing for her
+carriage. The waiter came with his large-chinned, low-voiced manner of
+respectful familiarity. Liz smoothed her silken skirt with a satisfied
+wriggle. She made the most of it. Here she could order and be waited
+upon. It was all that her world offered her of the prerogative of
+woman.
+
+“Whiskey, Tommy,” she said as her sisters further uptown murmur,
+“Champagne, James.”
+
+“Sure, Miss Lizzie. What’ll the chaser be?”
+
+“Seltzer. And say, Tommy, has the Kid been around to-day?”
+
+“Why, no, Miss Lizzie, I haven’t saw him to-day.”
+
+Fluently came the “Miss Lizzie,” for the Kid was known to be one who
+required rigid upholdment of the dignity of his fiancee.
+
+“I’m lookin’ for ’m,” said Liz, after the chaser had sputtered under
+her nose. “It’s got to me that he says he’ll take Annie Karlson to the
+dance. Let him. The pink-eyed white rat! I’m lookin’ for ’m. You know
+me, Tommy. Two years me and the Kid’s been engaged. Look at that ring.
+Five hundred, he said it cost. Let him take her to the dance. What’ll I
+do? I’ll cut his heart out. Another whiskey, Tommy.”
+
+“I wouldn’t listen to no such reports, Miss Lizzie,” said the waiter
+smoothly, from the narrow opening above his chin. “Kid Mullaly’s not
+the guy to throw a lady like you down. Seltzer on the side?”
+
+“Two years,” repeated Liz, softening a little to sentiment under the
+magic of the distiller’s art. “I always used to play out on the street
+of evenin’s ’cause there was nothin’ doin’ for me at home. For a long
+time I just sat on doorsteps and looked at the lights and the people
+goin’ by. And then the Kid came along one evenin’ and sized me up, and
+I was mashed on the spot for fair. The first drink he made me take I
+cried all night at home, and got a lickin’ for makin’ a noise. And
+now—say, Tommy, you ever see this Annie Karlson? If it wasn’t for
+peroxide the chloroform limit would have put her out long ago. Oh, I’m
+lookin’ for ’m. You tell the Kid if he comes in. Me? I’ll cut his heart
+out. Leave it to me. Another whiskey, Tommy.”
+
+A little unsteadily, but with watchful and brilliant eyes, Liz walked
+up the avenue. On the doorstep of a brick tenement a curly-haired child
+sat, puzzling over the convolutions of a tangled string. Liz flopped
+down beside her, with a crooked, shifting smile on her flushed face.
+But her eyes had grown clear and artless of a sudden.
+
+“Let me show you how to make a cat’s-cradle, kid,” she said, tucking
+her green silk skirt under her rusty shoes.
+
+And while they sat there the lights were being turned on for the dance
+in the hall of the Small Hours Social Club. It was the bi-monthly
+dance, a dress affair in which the members took great pride and
+bestirred themselves huskily to further and adorn.
+
+At 9 o’clock the President, Kid Mullaly, paced upon the floor with a
+lady on his arm. As the Loreley’s was her hair golden. Her “yes” was
+softened to a “yah,” but its quality of assent was patent to the most
+Milesian ears. She stepped upon her own train and blushed, and—she
+smiled into the eyes of Kid Mullaly.
+
+And then, as the two stood in the middle of the waxed floor, the thing
+happened to prevent which many lamps are burning nightly in many
+studies and libraries.
+
+Out from the circle of spectators in the hall leaped Fate in a green
+silk skirt, under the _nom de guerre_ of “Liz.” Her eyes were hard and
+blacker than jet. She did not scream or waver. Most unwomanly, she
+cried out one oath—the Kid’s own favorite oath—and in his own deep
+voice; and then while the Small Hours Social Club went frantically to
+pieces, she made good her boast to Tommy, the waiter—made good as far
+as the length of her knife blade and the strength of her arm permitted.
+
+And next came the primal instinct of self-preservation—or was it
+self-annihilation, the instinct that society has grafted on the natural
+branch?
+
+Liz ran out and down the street swift and true as a woodcock flying
+through a grove of saplings at dusk.
+
+And then followed the big city’s biggest shame, its most ancient and
+rotten surviving canker, its pollution and disgrace, its blight and
+perversion, its forever infamy and guilt, fostered, unreproved and
+cherished, handed down from a long-ago century of the basest
+barbarity—the Hue and Cry. Nowhere but in the big cities does it
+survive, and here most of all, where the ultimate perfection of
+culture, citizenship and alleged superiority joins, bawling, in the
+chase.
+
+They pursued—a shrieking mob of fathers, mothers, lovers and
+maidens—howling, yelling, calling, whistling, crying for blood. Well
+may the wolf in the big city stand outside the door. Well may his
+heart, the gentler, falter at the siege.
+
+Knowing her way, and hungry for her surcease, she darted down the
+familiar ways until at last her feet struck the dull solidity of the
+rotting pier. And then it was but a few more panting steps—and good
+mother East River took Liz to her bosom, soothed her muddily but
+quickly, and settled in five minutes the problem that keeps lights
+burning o’ nights in thousands of pastorates and colleges.
+
+
+It’s mighty funny what kind of dreams one has sometimes. Poets call
+them visions, but a vision is only a dream in blank verse. I dreamed
+the rest of this story.
+
+I thought I was in the next world. I don’t know how I got there; I
+suppose I had been riding on the Ninth avenue elevated or taking patent
+medicine or trying to pull Jim Jeffries’s nose, or doing some such
+little injudicious stunt. But, anyhow, there I was, and there was a
+great crowd of us outside the courtroom where the judgments were going
+on. And every now and then a very beautiful and imposing court-officer
+angel would come outside the door and call another case.
+
+While I was considering my own worldly sins and wondering whether there
+would be any use of my trying to prove an alibi by claiming that I
+lived in New Jersey, the bailiff angel came to the door and sang out:
+
+“Case No. 99,852,743.”
+
+Up stepped a plain-clothes man—there were lots of ’em there, dressed
+exactly like preachers and hustling us spirits around just like cops do
+on earth—and by the arm he dragged—whom, do you think? Why, Liz!
+
+The court officer took her inside and closed the door. I went up to Mr.
+Fly-Cop and inquired about the case.
+
+“A very sad one,” says he, laying the points of his manicured fingers
+together. “An utterly incorrigible girl. I am Special Terrestrial
+Officer the Reverend Jones. The case was assigned to me. The girl
+murdered her fiance and committed suicide. She had no defense. My
+report to the court relates the facts in detail, all of which are
+substantiated by reliable witnesses. The wages of sin is death. Praise
+the Lord.”
+
+The court officer opened the door and stepped out.
+
+“Poor girl,” said Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones, with
+a tear in his eye. “It was one of the saddest cases that I ever met
+with. Of course she was”—
+
+“Discharged,” said the court officer. “Come here, Jonesy. First thing
+you know you’ll be switched to the pot-pie squad. How would you like to
+be on the missionary force in the South Sea Islands—hey? Now, you quit
+making these false arrests, or you’ll be transferred—see? The guilty
+party you’ve got to look for in this case is a red-haired, unshaven,
+untidy man, sitting by the window reading, in his stocking feet, while
+his children play in the streets. Get a move on you.”
+
+Now, wasn’t that a silly dream?
+
+
+
+
+ACCORDING TO THEIR LIGHTS
+
+
+Somewhere in the depths of the big city, where the unquiet dregs are
+forever being shaken together, young Murray and the Captain had met and
+become friends. Both were at the lowest ebb possible to their fortunes;
+both had fallen from at least an intermediate Heaven of respectability
+and importance, and both were typical products of the monstrous and
+peculiar social curriculum of their overweening and bumptious civic
+alma mater.
+
+The captain was no longer a captain. One of those sudden moral
+cataclysms that sometimes sweep the city had hurled him from a high and
+profitable position in the Police Department, ripping off his badge and
+buttons and washing into the hands of his lawyers the solid pieces of
+real estate that his frugality had enabled him to accumulate. The
+passing of the flood left him low and dry. One month after his
+dishabilitation a saloon-keeper plucked him by the neck from his
+free-lunch counter as a tabby plucks a strange kitten from her nest,
+and cast him asphaltward. This seems low enough. But after that he
+acquired a pair of cloth top, button Congress gaiters and wrote
+complaining letters to the newspapers. And then he fought the attendant
+at the Municipal Lodging House who tried to give him a bath. When
+Murray first saw him he was holding the hand of an Italian woman who
+sold apples and garlic on Essex street, and quoting the words of a song
+book ballad.
+
+Murray’s fall had been more Luciferian, if less spectacular. All the
+pretty, tiny little kickshaws of Gotham had once been his. The
+megaphone man roars out at you to observe the house of his uncle on a
+grand and revered avenue. But there had been an awful row about
+something, and the prince had been escorted to the door by the butler,
+which, in said avenue, is equivalent to the impact of the avuncular
+shoe. A weak Prince Hal, without inheritance or sword, he drifted
+downward to meet his humorless Falstaff, and to pick the crusts of the
+streets with him.
+
+One evening they sat on a bench in a little downtown park. The great
+bulk of the Captain, which starvation seemed to increase—drawing irony
+instead of pity to his petitions for aid—was heaped against the arm of
+the bench in a shapeless mass. His red face, spotted by tufts of
+vermilion, week-old whiskers and topped by a sagging white straw hat,
+looked, in the gloom, like one of those structures that you may observe
+in a dark Third avenue window, challenging your imagination to say
+whether it be something recent in the way of ladies’ hats or a
+strawberry shortcake. A tight-drawn belt—last relic of his official
+spruceness—made a deep furrow in his circumference. The Captain’s shoes
+were buttonless. In a smothered bass he cursed his star of ill-luck.
+
+Murray, at his side, was shrunk into his dingy and ragged suit of blue
+serge. His hat was pulled low; he sat quiet and a little indistinct,
+like some ghost that had been dispossessed.
+
+“I’m hungry,” growled the Captain—“by the top sirloin of the Bull of
+Bashan, I’m starving to death. Right now I could eat a Bowery
+restaurant clear through to the stovepipe in the alley. Can’t you think
+of nothing, Murray? You sit there with your shoulders scrunched up,
+giving an imitation of Reginald Vanderbilt driving his coach—what good
+are them airs doing you now? Think of some place we can get something
+to chew.”
+
+“You forget, my dear Captain,” said Murray, without moving, “that our
+last attempt at dining was at my suggestion.”
+
+“You bet it was,” groaned the Captain, “you bet your life it was. Have
+you got any more like that to make—hey?”
+
+“I admit we failed,” sighed Murray. “I was sure Malone would be good
+for one more free lunch after the way he talked baseball with me the
+last time I spent a nickel in his establishment.”
+
+“I had this hand,” said the Captain, extending the unfortunate
+member—“I had this hand on the drumstick of a turkey and two sardine
+sandwiches when them waiters grabbed us.”
+
+“I was within two inches of the olives,” said Murray. “Stuffed olives.
+I haven’t tasted one in a year.”
+
+“What’ll we do?” grumbled the Captain. “We can’t starve.”
+
+“Can’t we?” said Murray quietly. “I’m glad to hear that. I was afraid
+we could.”
+
+“You wait here,” said the Captain, rising heavily and puffily to his
+feet. “I’m going to try to make one more turn. You stay here till I
+come back, Murray. I won’t be over half an hour. If I turn the trick
+I’ll come back flush.”
+
+He made some elephantine attempts at smartening his appearance. He gave
+his fiery mustache a heavenward twist; he dragged into sight a pair of
+black-edged cuffs, deepened the crease in his middle by tightening his
+belt another hole, and set off, jaunty as a zoo rhinoceros, across the
+south end of the park.
+
+When he was out of sight Murray also left the park, hurrying swiftly
+eastward. He stopped at a building whose steps were flanked by two
+green lights.
+
+“A police captain named Maroney,” he said to the desk sergeant, “was
+dismissed from the force after being tried under charges three years
+ago. I believe sentence was suspended. Is this man wanted now by the
+police?”
+
+“Why are ye asking?” inquired the sergeant, with a frown.
+
+“I thought there might be a reward standing,” explained Murray, easily.
+“I know the man well. He seems to be keeping himself pretty shady at
+present. I could lay my hands on him at any time. If there should be a
+reward—”
+
+“There’s no reward,” interrupted the sergeant, shortly. “The man’s not
+wanted. And neither are ye. So, get out. Ye are frindly with um, and ye
+would be selling um. Out with ye quick, or I’ll give ye a start.”
+
+Murray gazed at the officer with serene and virtuous dignity.
+
+“I would be simply doing my duty as a citizen and gentleman,” he said,
+severely, “if I could assist the law in laying hold of one of its
+offenders.”
+
+Murray hurried back to the bench in the park. He folded his arms and
+shrank within his clothes to his ghost-like presentment.
+
+Ten minutes afterward the Captain arrived at the rendezvous, windy and
+thunderous as a dog-day in Kansas. His collar had been torn away; his
+straw hat had been twisted and battered; his shirt with ox-blood
+stripes split to the waist. And from head to knee he was drenched with
+some vile and ignoble greasy fluid that loudly proclaimed to the nose
+its component leaven of garlic and kitchen stuff.
+
+“For Heaven’s sake, Captain,” sniffed Murray, “I doubt that I would
+have waited for you if I had suspected you were so desperate as to
+resort to swill barrels. I”—
+
+“Cheese it,” said the Captain, harshly. “I’m not hogging it yet. It’s
+all on the outside. I went around on Essex and proposed marriage to
+that Catrina that’s got the fruit shop there. Now, that business could
+be built up. She’s a peach as far as a Dago could be. I thought I had
+that senoreena mashed sure last week. But look what she done to me! I
+guess I got too fresh. Well there’s another scheme queered.”
+
+“You don’t mean to say,” said Murray, with infinite contempt, “that you
+would have married that woman to help yourself out of your disgraceful
+troubles!”
+
+“Me?” said the Captain. “I’d marry the Empress of China for one bowl of
+chop suey. I’d commit murder for a plate of beef stew. I’d steal a
+wafer from a waif. I’d be a Mormon for a bowl of chowder.”
+
+“I think,” said Murray, resting his head on his hands, “that I would
+play Judas for the price of one drink of whiskey. For thirty pieces of
+silver I would”—
+
+“Oh, come now!” exclaimed the Captain in dismay. “You wouldn’t do that,
+Murray! I always thought that Kike’s squeal on his boss was about the
+lowest-down play that ever happened. A man that gives his friend away
+is worse than a pirate.”
+
+Through the park stepped a large man scanning the benches where the
+electric light fell.
+
+“Is that you, Mac?” he said, halting before the derelicts. His diamond
+stickpin dazzled. His diamond-studded fob chain assisted. He was big
+and smooth and well fed. “Yes, I see it’s you,” he continued. “They
+told me at Mike’s that I might find you over here. Let me see you a few
+minutes, Mac.”
+
+The Captain lifted himself with a grunt of alacrity. If Charlie
+Finnegan had come down in the bottomless pit to seek him there must be
+something doing. Charlie guided him by an arm into a patch of shadow.
+
+“You know, Mac,” he said, “they’re trying Inspector Pickering on graft
+charges.”
+
+“He was my inspector,” said the Captain.
+
+“O’Shea wants the job,” went on Finnegan. “He must have it. It’s for
+the good of the organization. Pickering must go under. Your testimony
+will do it. He was your ‘man higher up’ when you were on the force. His
+share of the boodle passed through your hands. You must go on the stand
+and testify against him.”
+
+“He was”—began the Captain.
+
+“Wait a minute,” said Finnegan. A bundle of yellowish stuff came out of
+his inside pocket. “Five hundred dollars in it for you. Two-fifty on
+the spot, and the rest”—
+
+“He was my friend, I say,” finished the Captain. “I’ll see you and the
+gang, and the city, and the party in the flames of Hades before I’ll
+take the stand against Dan Pickering. I’m down and out; but I’m no
+traitor to a man that’s been my friend.” The Captain’s voice rose and
+boomed like a split trombone. “Get out of this park, Charlie Finnegan,
+where us thieves and tramps and boozers are your betters; and take your
+dirty money with you.”
+
+Finnegan drifted out by another walk. The Captain returned to his seat.
+
+“I couldn’t avoid hearing,” said Murray, drearily. “I think you are the
+biggest fool I ever saw.”
+
+“What would you have done?” asked the Captain.
+
+“Nailed Pickering to the cross,” said Murray.
+
+“Sonny,” said the Captain, huskily and without heat. “You and me are
+different. New York is divided into two parts—above Forty-second
+street, and below Fourteenth. You come from the other part. We both act
+according to our lights.”
+
+An illuminated clock above the trees retailed the information that it
+lacked the half hour of twelve. Both men rose from the bench and moved
+away together as if seized by the same idea. They left the park, struck
+through a narrow cross street, and came into Broadway, at this hour as
+dark, echoing and de-peopled as a byway in Pompeii.
+
+Northward they turned; and a policeman who glanced at their unkempt and
+slinking figures withheld the attention and suspicion that he would
+have granted them at any other hour and place. For on every street in
+that part of the city other unkempt and slinking figures were shuffling
+and hurrying toward a converging point—a point that is marked by no
+monument save that groove on the pavement worn by tens of thousands of
+waiting feet.
+
+At Ninth street a tall man wearing an opera hat alighted from a
+Broadway car and turned his face westward. But he saw Murray, pounced
+upon him and dragged him under a street light. The Captain lumbered
+slowly to the corner, like a wounded bear, and waited, growling.
+
+“Jerry!” cried the hatted one. “How fortunate! I was to begin a search
+for you to-morrow. The old gentleman has capitulated. You’re to be
+restored to favor. Congratulate you. Come to the office in the morning
+and get all the money you want. I’ve liberal instructions in that
+respect.”
+
+“And the little matrimonial arrangement?” said Murray, with his head
+turned sidewise.
+
+“Why—er—well, of course, your uncle understands—expects that the
+engagement between you and Miss Vanderhurst shall be”—
+
+“Good night,” said Murray, moving away.
+
+“You madman!” cried the other, catching his arm. “Would you give up two
+millions on account of”—
+
+“Did you ever see her nose, old man?” asked Murray, solemnly.
+
+“But, listen to reason, Jerry. Miss Vanderhurst is an heiress, and”—
+
+“Did you ever see it?”
+
+“Yes, I admit that her nose isn’t”—
+
+“Good night!” said Murray. “My friend is waiting for me. I am quoting
+him when I authorize you to report that there is ‘nothing doing.’ Good
+night.”
+
+A wriggling line of waiting men extended from a door in Tenth street
+far up Broadway, on the outer edge of the pavement. The Captain and
+Murray fell in at the tail of the quivering millipede.
+
+“Twenty feet longer than it was last night,” said Murray, looking up at
+his measuring angle of Grace Church.
+
+“Half an hour,” growled the Captain, “before we get our punk.”
+
+The city clocks began to strike 12; the Bread Line moved forward
+slowly, its leathern feet sliding on the stones with the sound of a
+hissing serpent, as they who had lived according to their lights closed
+up in the rear.
+
+
+
+
+A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM
+
+
+“_The knights are dead;
+Their swords are rust.
+Except a few who have to hust-
+Le all the time
+To raise the dust._”
+
+
+Dear Reader: It was summertime. The sun glared down upon the city with
+pitiless ferocity. It is difficult for the sun to be ferocious and
+exhibit compunction simultaneously. The heat was—oh, bother
+thermometers!—who cares for standard measures, anyhow? It was so hot
+that—
+
+The roof gardens put on so many extra waiters that you could hope to
+get your gin fizz now—as soon as all the other people got theirs. The
+hospitals were putting in extra cots for bystanders. For when little,
+woolly dogs loll their tongues out and say “woof, woof!” at the fleas
+that bite ’em, and nervous old black bombazine ladies screech “Mad
+dog!” and policemen begin to shoot, somebody is going to get hurt. The
+man from Pompton, N.J., who always wears an overcoat in July, had
+turned up in a Broadway hotel drinking hot Scotches and enjoying his
+annual ray from the calcium. Philanthropists were petitioning the
+Legislature to pass a bill requiring builders to make tenement
+fire-escapes more commodious, so that families might die all together
+of the heat instead of one or two at a time. So many men were telling
+you about the number of baths they took each day that you wondered how
+they got along after the real lessee of the apartment came back to town
+and thanked ’em for taking such good care of it. The young man who
+called loudly for cold beef and beer in the restaurant, protesting that
+roast pullet and Burgundy was really too heavy for such weather,
+blushed when he met your eye, for you had heard him all winter calling,
+in modest tones, for the same ascetic viands. Soup, pocketbooks, shirt
+waists, actors and baseball excuses grew thinner. Yes, it was
+summertime.
+
+A man stood at Thirty-fourth street waiting for a downtown car. A man
+of forty, gray-haired, pink-faced, keen, nervous, plainly dressed, with
+a harassed look around the eyes. He wiped his forehead and laughed
+loudly when a fat man with an outing look stopped and spoke with him.
+
+“No, siree,” he shouted with defiance and scorn. “None of your old
+mosquito-haunted swamps and skyscraper mountains without elevators for
+me. When I want to get away from hot weather I know how to do it. New
+York, sir, is the finest summer resort in the country. Keep in the
+shade and watch your diet, and don’t get too far away from an electric
+fan. Talk about your Adirondacks and your Catskills! There’s more solid
+comfort in the borough of Manhattan than in all the rest of the country
+together. No, siree! No tramping up perpendicular cliffs and being
+waked up at 4 in the morning by a million flies, and eating canned
+goods straight from the city for me. Little old New York will take a
+few select summer boarders; comforts and conveniences of homes—that’s
+the ad. that I answer every time.”
+
+“You need a vacation,” said the fat man, looking closely at the other.
+“You haven’t been away from town in years. Better come with me for two
+weeks, anyhow. The trout in the Beaverkill are jumping at anything now
+that looks like a fly. Harding writes me that he landed a three-pound
+brown last week.”
+
+“Nonsense!” cried the other man. “Go ahead, if you like, and boggle
+around in rubber boots wearing yourself out trying to catch fish. When
+I want one I go to a cool restaurant and order it. I laugh at you
+fellows whenever I think of you hustling around in the heat in the
+country thinking you are having a good time. For me Father
+Knickerbocker’s little improved farm with the big shady lane running
+through the middle of it.”
+
+The fat man sighed over his friend and went his way. The man who
+thought New York was the greatest summer resort in the country boarded
+a car and went buzzing down to his office. On the way he threw away his
+newspaper and looked up at a ragged patch of sky above the housetops.
+
+“Three pounds!” he muttered, absently. “And Harding isn’t a liar. I
+believe, if I could—but it’s impossible—they’ve got to have another
+month—another month at least.”
+
+In his office the upholder of urban midsummer joys dived, headforemost,
+into the swimming pool of business. Adkins, his clerk, came and added a
+spray of letters, memoranda and telegrams.
+
+At 5 o’clock in the afternoon the busy man leaned back in his office
+chair, put his feet on the desk and mused aloud:
+
+“I wonder what kind of bait Harding used.”
+
+
+She was all in white that day; and thereby Compton lost a bet to
+Gaines. Compton had wagered she would wear light blue, for she knew
+that was his favorite color, and Compton was a millionaire’s son, and
+that almost laid him open to the charge of betting on a sure thing. But
+white was her choice, and Gaines held up his head with twenty-five’s
+lordly air.
+
+The little summer hotel in the mountains had a lively crowd that year.
+There were two or three young college men and a couple of artists and a
+young naval officer on one side. On the other there were enough
+beauties among the young ladies for the correspondent of a society
+paper to refer to them as a “bevy.” But the moon among the stars was
+Mary Sewell. Each one of the young men greatly desired to arrange
+matters so that he could pay her millinery bills, and fix the furnace,
+and have her do away with the “Sewell” part of her name forever. Those
+who could stay only a week or two went away hinting at pistols and
+blighted hearts. But Compton stayed like the mountains themselves, for
+he could afford it. And Gaines stayed because he was a fighter and
+wasn’t afraid of millionaire’s sons, and—well, he adored the country.
+
+“What do you think, Miss Mary?” he said once. “I knew a duffer in New
+York who claimed to like it in the summer time. Said you could keep
+cooler there than you could in the woods. Wasn’t he an awful silly? I
+don’t think I could breathe on Broadway after the 1st of June.”
+
+“Mamma was thinking of going back week after next,” said Miss Mary with
+a lovely frown.
+
+“But when you think of it,” said Gaines, “there are lots of jolly
+places in town in the summer. The roof gardens, you know, and
+the—er—the roof gardens.”
+
+Deepest blue was the lake that day—the day when they had the mock
+tournament, and the men rode clumsy farm horses around in a glade in
+the woods and caught curtain rings on the end of a lance. Such fun!
+
+Cool and dry as the finest wine came the breath of the shadowed forest.
+The valley below was a vision seen through an opal haze. A white mist
+from hidden falls blurred the green of a hand’s breadth of tree tops
+half-way down the gorge. Youth made merry hand-in-hand with young
+summer. Nothing on Broadway like that.
+
+The villagers gathered to see the city folks pursue their mad drollery.
+The woods rang with the laughter of pixies and naiads and sprites.
+Gaines caught most of the rings. His was the privilege to crown the
+queen of the tournament. He was the conquering knight—as far as the
+rings went. On his arm he wore a white scarf. Compton wore light blue.
+She had declared her preference for blue, but she wore white that day.
+
+Gaines looked about for the queen to crown her. He heard her merry
+laugh, as if from the clouds. She had slipped away and climbed Chimney
+Rock, a little granite bluff, and stood there, a white fairy among the
+laurels, fifty feet above their heads.
+
+Instantly he and Compton accepted the implied challenge. The bluff was
+easily mounted at the rear, but the front offered small hold to hand or
+foot. Each man quickly selected his route and began to climb. A
+crevice, a bush, a slight projection, a vine or tree branch—all of
+these were aids that counted in the race. It was all foolery—there was
+no stake; but there was youth in it, cross reader, and light hearts,
+and something else that Miss Clay writes so charmingly about.
+
+Gaines gave a great tug at the root of a laurel and pulled himself to
+Miss Mary’s feet. On his arm he carried the wreath of roses; and while
+the villagers and summer boarders screamed and applauded below he
+placed it on the queen’s brow.
+
+“You are a gallant knight,” said Miss Mary.
+
+“If I could be your true knight always,” began Gaines, but Miss Mary
+laughed him dumb, for Compton scrambled over the edge of the rock one
+minute behind time.
+
+What a twilight that was when they drove back to the hotel! The opal of
+the valley turned slowly to purple, the dark woods framed the lake as a
+mirror, the tonic air stirred the very soul in one. The first pale
+stars came out over the mountain tops where yet a faint glow of—
+
+
+“I beg your pardon, Mr. Gaines,” said Adkins.
+
+The man who believed New York to be the finest summer resort in the
+world opened his eyes and kicked over the mucilage bottle on his desk.
+
+“I—I believe I was asleep,” he said.
+
+“It’s the heat,” said Adkins. “It’s something awful in the city these”—
+
+“Nonsense!” said the other. “The city beats the country ten to one in
+summer. Fools go out tramping in muddy brooks and wear themselves out
+trying to catch little fish as long as your finger. Stay in town and
+keep comfortable—that’s my idea.”
+
+“Some letters just came,” said Adkins. “I thought you might like to
+glance at them before you go.”
+
+Let us look over his shoulder and read just a few lines of one of them:
+
+My Dear, Dear Husband: Just received your letter ordering us to stay
+another month. … Rita’s cough is almost gone. … Johnny has simply gone
+wild like a little Indian … Will be the making of both children … work
+so hard, and I know that your business can hardly afford to keep us
+here so long … best man that ever … you always pretend that you like
+the city in summer … trout fishing that you used to be so fond of … and
+all to keep us well and happy … come to you if it were not doing the
+babies so much good. … I stood last evening on Chimney Rock in exactly
+the same spot where I was when you put the wreath of roses on my head …
+through all the world … when you said you would be my true knight …
+fifteen years ago, dear, just think! … have always been that to me …
+ever and ever,
+
+
+Mary.
+
+
+The man who said he thought New York the finest summer resort in the
+country dropped into a café on his way home and had a glass of beer
+under an electric fan.
+
+“Wonder what kind of a fly old Harding used,” he said to himself.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST LEAF
+
+
+In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run
+crazy and broken themselves into small strips called “places.” These
+“places” make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a
+time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this
+street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas
+should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back,
+without a cent having been paid on account!
+
+So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling,
+hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch
+attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing
+dish or two from Sixth avenue, and became a “colony.”
+
+At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their
+studio. “Johnsy” was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other
+from California. They had met at the _table d’hôte_ of an Eighth street
+“Delmonico’s,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop
+sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.
+
+That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors
+called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there
+with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly,
+smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the
+maze of the narrow and moss-grown “places.”
+
+Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A
+mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was
+hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But
+Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron
+bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank
+side of the next brick house.
+
+One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy,
+gray eyebrow.
+
+“She has one chance in—let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the
+mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to
+want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the side of the
+undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady
+has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well. Has she anything
+on her mind?”
+
+“She—she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,” said Sue.
+
+“Paint?—bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice—a
+man, for instance?”
+
+“A man?” said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice. “Is a man
+worth—but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”
+
+“Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that
+science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish.
+But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral
+procession I subtract 50 per cent. from the curative power of
+medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter
+styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for
+her, instead of one in ten.”
+
+After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a
+Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with
+her drawing board, whistling ragtime.
+
+Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her
+face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
+
+She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a
+magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing
+pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their
+way to Literature.
+
+As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a
+monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low
+sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
+
+Johnsy’s eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and
+counting—counting backward.
+
+“Twelve,” she said, and a little later “eleven;” and then “ten,” and
+“nine;” and then “eight” and “seven,” almost together.
+
+Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to count? There
+was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the
+brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed
+at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of
+autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton
+branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
+
+“What is it, dear?” asked Sue.
+
+“Six,” said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. “They’re falling faster now.
+Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to
+count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only
+five left now.”
+
+“Five what, dear. Tell your Sudie.”
+
+“Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I’ve
+known that for three days. Didn’t the doctor tell you?”
+
+“Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” complained Sue, with magnificent
+scorn. “What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you
+used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don’t be a goosey. Why,
+the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real
+soon were—let’s see exactly what he said—he said the chances were ten
+to one! Why, that’s almost as good a chance as we have in New York when
+we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take
+some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell
+the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork
+chops for her greedy self.”
+
+“You needn’t get any more wine,” said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed
+out the window. “There goes another. No, I don’t want any broth. That
+leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark.
+Then I’ll go, too.”
+
+“Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me to
+keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done
+working? I must hand those drawings in by to-morrow. I need the light,
+or I would draw the shade down.”
+
+“Couldn’t you draw in the other room?” asked Johnsy, coldly.
+
+“I’d rather be here by you,” said Sue. “Besides I don’t want you to
+keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.”
+
+“Tell me as soon as you have finished,” said Johnsy, closing her eyes,
+and lying white and still as a fallen statue, “because I want to see
+the last one fall. I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I want
+to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just
+like one of those poor, tired leaves.”
+
+“Try to sleep,” said Sue. “I must call Behrman up to be my model for
+the old hermit miner. I’ll not be gone a minute. Don’t try to move
+’till I come back.”
+
+Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them.
+He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo’s Moses beard curling down
+from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a
+failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting
+near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always
+about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several
+years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of
+commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to
+those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a
+professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming
+masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed
+terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as especial
+mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio
+above.
+
+Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly
+lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that
+had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line
+of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy’s fancy, and how she feared
+she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away when
+her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.
+
+Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his contempt
+and derision for such idiotic imaginings.
+
+“Vass!” he cried. “Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to
+die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard
+of such a thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool
+hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der
+prain of her? Ach, dot poor lettle Miss Johnsy.”
+
+“She is very ill and weak,” said Sue, “and the fever has left her mind
+morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman, if you do
+not care to pose for me, you needn’t. But I think you are a horrid
+old—old flibbertigibbet.”
+
+“You are just like a woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I will not bose?
+Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I
+am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as
+Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve
+shall all go away. Gott! yes.”
+
+Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down
+to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there
+they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked
+at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain
+was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took
+his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.
+
+When Sue awoke from an hour’s sleep the next morning she found Johnsy
+with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
+
+“Pull it up; I want to see,” she ordered, in a whisper.
+
+Wearily Sue obeyed.
+
+But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had
+endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the
+brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green
+near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of
+dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet
+above the ground.
+
+“It is the last one,” said Johnsy. “I thought it would surely fall
+during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall
+die at the same time.”
+
+“Dear, dear!” said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow,
+“think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would I do?”
+
+But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a
+soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The
+fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that
+bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.
+
+The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the
+lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the
+coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain
+still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch
+eaves.
+
+When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the
+shade be raised.
+
+The ivy leaf was still there.
+
+Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue,
+who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
+
+“I’ve been a bad girl, Sudie,” said Johnsy. “Something has made that
+last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want
+to die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk with a
+little port in it, and—no; bring me a hand-mirror first, and then pack
+some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you cook.”
+
+An hour later she said.
+
+“Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.”
+
+The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the
+hallway as he left.
+
+“Even chances,” said the doctor, taking Sue’s thin, shaking hand in
+his. “With good nursing you’ll win. And now I must see another case I
+have downstairs. Behrman, his name is—some kind of an artist, I
+believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is
+acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital to-day to
+be made more comfortable.”
+
+The next day the doctor said to Sue: “She’s out of danger. You’ve won.
+Nutrition and care now—that’s all.”
+
+And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly
+knitting a very blue and very useless woolen shoulder scarf, and put
+one arm around her, pillows and all.
+
+“I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “Mr. Behrman
+died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The
+janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room
+downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through
+and icy cold. They couldn’t imagine where he had been on such a
+dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a
+ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered
+brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it,
+and—look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn’t
+you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah,
+darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece—he painted it there the night that
+the last leaf fell.”
+
+
+
+
+THE COUNT AND THE WEDDING GUEST
+
+
+One evening when Andy Donovan went to dinner at his Second Avenue
+boarding-house, Mrs. Scott introduced him to a new boarder, a young
+lady, Miss Conway. Miss Conway was small and unobtrusive. She wore a
+plain, snuffy-brown dress, and bestowed her interest, which seemed
+languid, upon her plate. She lifted her diffident eyelids and shot one
+perspicuous, judicial glance at Mr. Donovan, politely murmured his
+name, and returned to her mutton. Mr. Donovan bowed with the grace and
+beaming smile that were rapidly winning for him social, business and
+political advancement, and erased the snuffy-brown one from the tablets
+of his consideration.
+
+Two weeks later Andy was sitting on the front steps enjoying his cigar.
+There was a soft rustle behind and above him, and Andy turned his
+head—and had his head turned.
+
+Just coming out the door was Miss Conway. She wore a night-black dress
+of _crêpe de_—_crêpe de_—oh, this thin black goods. Her hat was black,
+and from it drooped and fluttered an ebon veil, filmy as a spider’s
+web. She stood on the top step and drew on black silk gloves. Not a
+speck of white or a spot of color about her dress anywhere. Her rich
+golden hair was drawn, with scarcely a ripple, into a shining, smooth
+knot low on her neck. Her face was plain rather than pretty, but it was
+now illuminated and made almost beautiful by her large gray eyes that
+gazed above the houses across the street into the sky with an
+expression of the most appealing sadness and melancholy.
+
+Gather the idea, girls—all black, you know, with the preference for
+_crêpe de_—oh, _crêpe de Chine_—that’s it. All black, and that sad,
+faraway look, and the hair shining under the black veil (you have to be
+a blonde, of course), and try to look as if, although your young life
+had been blighted just as it was about to give a hop-skip-and-a-jump
+over the threshold of life, a walk in the park might do you good, and
+be sure to happen out the door at the right moment, and—oh, it’ll fetch
+’em every time. But it’s fierce, now, how cynical I am, ain’t it?—to
+talk about mourning costumes this way.
+
+Mr. Donovan suddenly reinscribed Miss Conway upon the tablets of his
+consideration. He threw away the remaining inch-and-a-quarter of his
+cigar, that would have been good for eight minutes yet, and quickly
+shifted his center of gravity to his low cut patent leathers.
+
+“It’s a fine, clear evening, Miss Conway,” he said; and if the Weather
+Bureau could have heard the confident emphasis of his tones it would
+have hoisted the square white signal, and nailed it to the mast.
+
+“To them that has the heart to enjoy it, it is, Mr. Donovan,” said Miss
+Conway, with a sigh.
+
+Mr. Donovan, in his heart, cursed fair weather. Heartless weather! It
+should hail and blow and snow to be consonant with the mood of Miss
+Conway.
+
+“I hope none of your relatives—I hope you haven’t sustained a loss?”
+ventured Mr. Donovan.
+
+“Death has claimed,” said Miss Conway, hesitating—“not a relative, but
+one who—but I will not intrude my grief upon you, Mr. Donovan.”
+
+“Intrude?” protested Mr. Donovan. “Why, say, Miss Conway, I’d be
+delighted, that is, I’d be sorry—I mean I’m sure nobody could
+sympathize with you truer than I would.”
+
+Miss Conway smiled a little smile. And oh, it was sadder than her
+expression in repose.
+
+“‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and they give you the
+laugh,’” she quoted. “I have learned that, Mr. Donovan. I have no
+friends or acquaintances in this city. But you have been kind to me. I
+appreciate it highly.”
+
+He had passed her the pepper twice at the table.
+
+“It’s tough to be alone in New York—that’s a cinch,” said Mr. Donovan.
+“But, say—whenever this little old town does loosen up and get friendly
+it goes the limit. Say you took a little stroll in the park, Miss
+Conway—don’t you think it might chase away some of your mullygrubs? And
+if you’d allow me—”
+
+“Thanks, Mr. Donovan. I’d be pleased to accept of your escort if you
+think the company of one whose heart is filled with gloom could be
+anyways agreeable to you.”
+
+Through the open gates of the iron-railed, old, downtown park, where
+the elect once took the air, they strolled, and found a quiet bench.
+
+There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old
+age: youth’s burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares;
+old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.
+
+“He was my fiance,” confided Miss Conway, at the end of an hour. “We
+were going to be married next spring. I don’t want you to think that I
+am stringing you, Mr. Donovan, but he was a real Count. He had an
+estate and a castle in Italy. Count Fernando Mazzini was his name. I
+never saw the beat of him for elegance. Papa objected, of course, and
+once we eloped, but papa overtook us, and took us back. I thought sure
+papa and Fernando would fight a duel. Papa has a livery business—in
+P’kipsee, you know.”
+
+“Finally, papa came ’round, all right, and said we might be married
+next spring. Fernando showed him proofs of his title and wealth, and
+then went over to Italy to get the castle fixed up for us. Papa’s very
+proud, and when Fernando wanted to give me several thousand dollars for
+my trousseau he called him down something awful. He wouldn’t even let
+me take a ring or any presents from him. And when Fernando sailed I
+came to the city and got a position as cashier in a candy store.”
+
+“Three days ago I got a letter from Italy, forwarded from P’kipsee,
+saying that Fernando had been killed in a gondola accident.”
+
+“That is why I am in mourning. My heart, Mr. Donovan, will remain
+forever in his grave. I guess I am poor company, Mr. Donovan, but I
+cannot take any interest in no one. I should not care to keep you from
+gayety and your friends who can smile and entertain you. Perhaps you
+would prefer to walk back to the house?”
+
+Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick
+and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow’s
+grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature. Ask any widow. Something
+must be done to restore that missing organ to weeping angels in _crêpe
+de Chine_. Dead men certainly get the worst of it from all sides.
+
+“I’m awfully sorry,” said Mr. Donovan, gently. “No, we won’t walk back
+to the house just yet. And don’t say you haven’t no friends in this
+city, Miss Conway. I’m awful sorry, and I want you to believe I’m your
+friend, and that I’m awful sorry.”
+
+“I’ve got his picture here in my locket,” said Miss Conway, after
+wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. “I never showed it to anybody;
+but I will to you, Mr. Donovan, because I believe you to be a true
+friend.”
+
+Mr. Donovan gazed long and with much interest at the photograph in the
+locket that Miss Conway opened for him. The face of Count Mazzini was
+one to command interest. It was a smooth, intelligent, bright, almost a
+handsome face—the face of a strong, cheerful man who might well be a
+leader among his fellows.
+
+“I have a larger one, framed, in my room,” said Miss Conway. “When we
+return I will show you that. They are all I have to remind me of
+Fernando. But he ever will be present in my heart, that’s a sure
+thing.”
+
+A subtle task confronted Mr. Donovan,—that of supplanting the
+unfortunate Count in the heart of Miss Conway. This his admiration for
+her determined him to do. But the magnitude of the undertaking did not
+seem to weigh upon his spirits. The sympathetic but cheerful friend was
+the rôle he essayed; and he played it so successfully that the next
+half-hour found them conversing pensively across two plates of
+ice-cream, though yet there was no diminution of the sadness in Miss
+Conway’s large gray eyes.
+
+Before they parted in the hall that evening she ran upstairs and
+brought down the framed photograph wrapped lovingly in a white silk
+scarf. Mr. Donovan surveyed it with inscrutable eyes.
+
+“He gave me this the night he left for Italy,” said Miss Conway. “I had
+the one for the locket made from this.”
+
+“A fine-looking man,” said Mr. Donovan, heartily. “How would it suit
+you, Miss Conway, to give me the pleasure of your company to Coney next
+Sunday afternoon?”
+
+A month later they announced their engagement to Mrs. Scott and the
+other boarders. Miss Conway continued to wear black.
+
+A week after the announcement the two sat on the same bench in the
+downtown park, while the fluttering leaves of the trees made a dim
+kinetoscopic picture of them in the moonlight. But Donovan had worn a
+look of abstracted gloom all day. He was so silent to-night that love’s
+lips could not keep back any longer the questions that love’s heart
+propounded.
+
+“What’s the matter, Andy, you are so solemn and grouchy to-night?”
+
+“Nothing, Maggie.”
+
+“I know better. Can’t I tell? You never acted this way before. What is
+it?”
+
+“It’s nothing much, Maggie.”
+
+“Yes it is; and I want to know. I’ll bet it’s some other girl you are
+thinking about. All right. Why don’t you go get her if you want her?
+Take your arm away, if you please.”
+
+“I’ll tell you then,” said Andy, wisely, “but I guess you won’t
+understand it exactly. You’ve heard of Mike Sullivan, haven’t you? ‘Big
+Mike’ Sullivan, everybody calls him.”
+
+“No, I haven’t,” said Maggie. “And I don’t want to, if he makes you act
+like this. Who is he?”
+
+“He’s the biggest man in New York,” said Andy, almost reverently. “He
+can about do anything he wants to with Tammany or any other old thing
+in the political line. He’s a mile high and as broad as East River. You
+say anything against Big Mike, and you’ll have a million men on your
+collarbone in about two seconds. Why, he made a visit over to the old
+country awhile back, and the kings took to their holes like rabbits.
+
+“Well, Big Mike’s a friend of mine. I ain’t more than deuce-high in the
+district as far as influence goes, but Mike’s as good a friend to a
+little man, or a poor man as he is to a big one. I met him to-day on
+the Bowery, and what do you think he does? Comes up and shakes hands.
+‘Andy,’ says he, ‘I’ve been keeping cases on you. You’ve been putting
+in some good licks over on your side of the street, and I’m proud of
+you. What’ll you take to drink?” He takes a cigar, and I take a
+highball. I told him I was going to get married in two weeks. ‘Andy,’
+says he, ‘send me an invitation, so I’ll keep in mind of it, and I’ll
+come to the wedding.’ That’s what Big Mike says to me; and he always
+does what he says.
+
+“You don’t understand it, Maggie, but I’d have one of my hands cut off
+to have Big Mike Sullivan at our wedding. It would be the proudest day
+of my life. When he goes to a man’s wedding, there’s a guy being
+married that’s made for life. Now, that’s why I’m maybe looking sore
+to-night.”
+
+“Why don’t you invite him, then, if he’s so much to the mustard?” said
+Maggie, lightly.
+
+“There’s a reason why I can’t,” said Andy, sadly. “There’s a reason why
+he mustn’t be there. Don’t ask me what it is, for I can’t tell you.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t care,” said Maggie. “It’s something about politics, of
+course. But it’s no reason why you can’t smile at me.”
+
+“Maggie,” said Andy, presently, “do you think as much of me as you did
+of your—as you did of the Count Mazzini?”
+
+He waited a long time, but Maggie did not reply. And then, suddenly she
+leaned against his shoulder and began to cry—to cry and shake with
+sobs, holding his arm tightly, and wetting the _crêpe de Chine_ with
+tears.
+
+“There, there, there!” soothed Andy, putting aside his own trouble.
+“And what is it, now?”
+
+“Andy,” sobbed Maggie. “I’ve lied to you, and you’ll never marry me, or
+love me any more. But I feel that I’ve got to tell. Andy, there never
+was so much as the little finger of a count. I never had a beau in my
+life. But all the other girls had; and they talked about ’em; and that
+seemed to make the fellows like ’em more. And, Andy, I look swell in
+black—you know I do. So I went out to a photograph store and bought
+that picture, and had a little one made for my locket, and made up all
+that story about the Count, and about his being killed, so I could wear
+black. And nobody can love a liar, and you’ll shake me, Andy, and I’ll
+die for shame. Oh, there never was anybody I liked but you—and that’s
+all.”
+
+But instead of being pushed away, she found Andy’s arm folding her
+closer. She looked up and saw his face cleared and smiling.
+
+“Could you—could you forgive me, Andy?”
+
+“Sure,” said Andy. “It’s all right about that. Back to the cemetery for
+the Count. You’ve straightened everything out, Maggie. I was in hopes
+you would before the wedding-day. Bully girl!”
+
+“Andy,” said Maggie, with a somewhat shy smile, after she had been
+thoroughly assured of forgiveness, “did you believe all that story
+about the Count?”
+
+“Well, not to any large extent,” said Andy, reaching for his cigar
+case, “because it’s Big Mike Sullivan’s picture you’ve got in that
+locket of yours.”
+
+
+
+
+THE COUNTRY OF ELUSION
+
+
+The cunning writer will choose an indefinable subject, for he can then
+set down his theory of what it is; and next, at length, his conception
+of what it is not—and lo! his paper is covered. Therefore let us follow
+the prolix and unmapable trail into that mooted country, Bohemia.
+
+Grainger, sub-editor of _Doc’s Magazine_, closed his roll-top desk, put
+on his hat, walked into the hall, punched the “down” button, and waited
+for the elevator.
+
+Grainger’s day had been trying. The chief had tried to ruin the
+magazine a dozen times by going against Grainger’s ideas for running
+it. A lady whose grandfather had fought with McClellan had brought a
+portfolio of poems in person.
+
+Grainger was curator of the Lion’s House of the magazine. That day he
+had “lunched” an Arctic explorer, a short-story writer, and the famous
+conductor of a slaughter-house exposé. Consequently his mind was in a
+whirl of icebergs, Maupassant, and trichinosis.
+
+But there was a surcease and a recourse; there was Bohemia. He would
+seek distraction there; and, let’s see—he would call by for Mary
+Adrian.
+
+Half an hour later he threaded his way like a Brazilian orchid-hunter
+through the palm forest in the tiled entrance hall of the “Idealia”
+apartment-house. One day the christeners of apartment-houses and the
+cognominators of sleeping-cars will meet, and there will be some
+jealous and sanguinary knifing.
+
+The clerk breathed Grainger’s name so languidly into the house
+telephone that it seemed it must surely drop, from sheer inertia, down
+to the janitor’s regions. But, at length, it soared dilatorily up to
+Miss Adrian’s ear. Certainly, Mr. Grainger was to come up immediately.
+
+A colored maid with an Eliza-crossing-the-ice expression opened the
+door of the apartment for him. Grainger walked sideways down the narrow
+hall. A bunch of burnt umber hair and a sea-green eye appeared in the
+crack of a door. A long, white, undraped arm came out, barring the way.
+
+“So glad you came, Ricky, instead of any of the others,” said the eye.
+“Light a cigarette and give it to me. Going to take me to dinner? Fine.
+Go into the front room till I finish dressing. But don’t sit in your
+usual chair. There’s pie in it—Meringue. Kappelman threw it at Reeves
+last evening while he was reciting. Sophy has just come to straighten
+up. Is it lit? Thanks. There’s Scotch on the mantel—oh, no, it
+isn’t,—that’s chartreuse. Ask Sophy to find you some. I won’t be long.”
+
+Grainger escaped the meringue. As he waited his spirits sank still
+lower. The atmosphere of the room was as vapid as a zephyr wandering
+over a Vesuvian lava-bed. Relics of some feast lay about the room,
+scattered in places where even a prowling cat would have been surprised
+to find them. A straggling cluster of deep red roses in a marmalade jar
+bowed their heads over tobacco ashes and unwashed goblets. A
+chafing-dish stood on the piano; a leaf of sheet music supported a
+stack of sandwiches in a chair.
+
+Mary came in, dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black
+fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon
+visions ranging between the extremes of man’s experience. Spelled with
+an “ê” it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an “a”
+it drapes lamentation and woe.
+
+That evening they went to the Café André. And, as people would confide
+to you in a whisper that André’s was the only truly Bohemian restaurant
+in town, it may be well to follow them.
+
+André began his professional career as a waiter in a Bowery ten-cent
+eating-house. Had you seen him there you would have called him tough—to
+yourself. Not aloud, for he would have “soaked” you as quickly as he
+would have soaked his thumb in your coffee. He saved money and started
+a basement _table d’hôte_ in Eighth (or Ninth) Street. One afternoon
+André drank too much absinthe. He announced to his startled family that
+he was the Grand Llama of Thibet, therefore requiring an empty audience
+hall in which to be worshiped. He moved all the tables and chairs from
+the restaurant into the back yard, wrapped a red table-cloth around
+himself, and sat on a step-ladder for a throne. When the diners began
+to arrive, madame, in a flurry of despair, laid cloths and ushered
+them, trembling, outside. Between the tables clothes-lines were
+stretched, bearing the family wash. A party of Bohemia hunters greeted
+the artistic innovation with shrieks and acclamations of delight. That
+week’s washing was not taken in for two years. When André came to his
+senses he had the menu printed on stiffly starched cuffs, and served
+the ices in little wooden tubs. Next he took down his sign and darkened
+the front of the house. When you went there to dine you fumbled for an
+electric button and pressed it. A lookout slid open a panel in the
+door, looked at you suspiciously, and asked if you were acquainted with
+Senator Herodotus Q. McMilligan, of the Chickasaw Nation. If you were,
+you were admitted and allowed to dine. If you were not, you were
+admitted and allowed to dine. There you have one of the abiding
+principles of Bohemia. When André had accumulated $20,000 he moved
+up-town, near Broadway, in the fierce light that beats upon the
+thrown-down. There we find him and leave him, with customers in pearls
+and automobile veils, striving to catch his excellently graduated nod
+of recognition.
+
+There is a large round table in the northeast corner of André’s at
+which six can sit. To this table Grainger and Mary Adrian made their
+way. Kappelman and Reeves were already there. And Miss Tooker, who
+designed the May cover for the _Ladies’ Notathome Magazine_. And Mrs.
+Pothunter, who never drank anything but black and white highballs,
+being in mourning for her husband, who—oh, I’ve forgotten what he
+did—died, like as not.
+
+Spaghetti-weary reader, wouldst take one penny-in-the-slot peep into
+the fair land of Bohemia? Then look; and when you think you have seen
+it you have not. And it is neither thimbleriggery nor astigmatism.
+
+The walls of the Café André were covered with original sketches by the
+artists who furnished much of the color and sound of the place. Fair
+woman furnished the theme for the bulk of the drawings. When you say
+“sirens and siphons” you come near to estimating the alliterative
+atmosphere of André’s.
+
+First, I want you to meet my friend, Miss Adrian. Miss Tooker and Mrs.
+Pothunter you already know. While she tucks in the fingers of her elbow
+gloves you shall have her daguerreotype. So faint and uncertain shall
+the portrait be:
+
+Age, somewhere between twenty-seven and highneck evening dresses.
+Camaraderie in large bunches—whatever the fearful word may mean.
+Habitat—anywhere from Seattle to Tierra del Fuego. Temperament
+uncharted—she let Reeves squeeze her hand after he recited one of his
+poems; but she counted the change after sending him out with a dollar
+to buy some pickled pig’s feet. Deportment 75 out of a possible 100.
+Morals 100.
+
+Mary was one of the princesses of Bohemia. In the first place, it was a
+royal and a daring thing to have been named Mary. There are twenty
+Fifines and Heloises to one Mary in the Country of Elusion.
+
+Now her gloves are tucked in. Miss Tooker has assumed a June poster
+pose; Mrs. Pothunter has bitten her lips to make the red show; Reeves
+has several times felt his coat to make sure that his latest poem is in
+the pocket. (It had been neatly typewritten; but he has copied it on
+the backs of letters with a pencil.) Kappelman is underhandedly
+watching the clock. It is ten minutes to nine. When the hour comes it
+is to remind him of a story. Synopsis: A French girl says to her
+suitor: “Did you ask my father for my hand at nine o’clock this
+morning, as you said you would?” “I did not,” he replies. “At nine
+o’clock I was fighting a duel with swords in the Bois de Boulogne.”
+“Coward!” she hisses.
+
+The dinner was ordered. You know how the Bohemian feast of reason keeps
+up with the courses. Humor with the oysters; wit with the soup;
+repartee with the entrée; brag with the roast; knocks for Whistler and
+Kipling with the salad; songs with the coffee; the slapsticks with the
+cordials.
+
+Between Miss Adrian’s eyebrows was the pucker that shows the intense
+strain it requires to be at ease in Bohemia. Pat must come each sally,
+_mot_, and epigram. Every second of deliberation upon a reply costs you
+a bay leaf. Fine as a hair, a line began to curve from her nostrils to
+her mouth. To hold her own not a chance must be missed. A sentence
+addressed to her must be as a piccolo, each word of it a stop, which
+she must be prepared to seize upon and play. And she must always be
+quicker than a Micmac Indian to paddle the light canoe of conversation
+away from the rocks in the rapids that flow from the Pierian spring.
+For, plodding reader, the handwriting on the wall in the banquet hall
+of Bohemia is “_Laisser faire_.” The gray ghost that sometimes peeps
+through the rings of smoke is that of slain old King Convention.
+Freedom is the tyrant that holds them in slavery.
+
+As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather than for
+the shaker of Attic salt. Miss Tooker, with an elbow to business,
+leaned across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her glass of wine.
+
+“Now while you are fed and in good humor,” she said, “I want to make a
+suggestion to you about a new cover.”
+
+“A good idea,” said Grainger, mopping the tablecloth with his napkin.
+“I’ll speak to the waiter about it.”
+
+Kappelman, the painter, was the cut-up. As a piece of delicate Athenian
+wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter.
+That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, tax-paying,
+art-despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter,
+carried his professional smile back to the dumb-waiter and dropped it
+down the shaft to eternal oblivion. Reeves began to make Keats turn in
+his grave. Mrs. Pothunter told the story of the man who met the widow
+on the train. Miss Adrian hummed what is still called a _chanson_ in
+the cafés of Bridgeport. Grainger edited each individual effort with
+his assistant editor’s smile, which meant: “Great! but you’ll have to
+send them in through the regular channels. If I were the chief now—but
+you know how it is.”
+
+And soon the head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that
+the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out
+all trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with gay
+laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the
+dull inhabitants of an uninspired world.
+
+Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of the
+Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small
+hand-bag, ’phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station,
+boarded a 12.55 commuter’s train, rode four hours with her burnt-umber
+head bobbing against the red-plush back of the seat, and landed during
+a fresh, stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted station, the size of
+a peach crate, called Crocusville.
+
+She walked a mile and clicked the latch of a gate. A bare, brown
+cottage stood twenty yards back; an old man with a pearl-white,
+Calvinistic face and clothes dyed blacker than a raven in a coal-mine
+was washing his hands in a tin basin on the front porch.
+
+“How are you, father?” said Mary timidly.
+
+“I am as well as Providence permits, Mary Ann. You will find your
+mother in the kitchen.”
+
+In the kitchen a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the
+forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for
+breakfast. Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with a
+thrill in her heart.
+
+For breakfast there were grace, cold bread, potatoes, bacon, and tea.
+
+“You are pursuing the same avocation in the city concerning which you
+have advised us from time to time by letter, I trust,” said her father.
+
+“Yes,” said Mary, “I am still reviewing books for the same
+publication.”
+
+After breakfast she helped wash the dishes, and then all three sat in
+straight-back chairs in the bare-floored parlor.
+
+“It is my custom,” said the old man, “on the Sabbath day to read aloud
+from the great work entitled the ‘Apology for Authorized and Set Forms
+of Liturgy,’ by the ecclesiastical philosopher and revered theologian,
+Jeremy Taylor.”
+
+“I know it,” said Mary blissfully, folding her hands.
+
+For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the
+notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello. Mary sat gloating in
+the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden chair
+brought her. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the
+martyr’s. Jeremy’s minor chords soothed her like the music of a
+tom-tom. “Why, oh why,” she said to herself, “does some one not write
+words to it?”
+
+At eleven they went to church in Crocusville. The back of the pine
+bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would have
+brought St. Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar. The preacher
+singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head the damnation of
+the world. At each side of her an adamant parent held her rigidly to
+the bar of judgment. An ant crawled upon her neck, but she dared not
+move. She lowered her eyes before the congregation—a hundred-eyed
+Cerberus that watched the gates through which her sins were fast
+thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic
+joy. For she was out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom. Dogma and
+creed pinioned her with beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind the
+feet of a crippled child. She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up,
+strait-jacketed, silenced, ordered. When they came out the minister
+stopped to greet them. Mary could only hang her head and answer “Yes,
+sir,” and “No, sir,” to his questions. When she saw that the other
+women carried their hymn-books at their waists with their left hands,
+she blushed and moved hers there, too, from her right.
+
+She took the three-o’clock train back to the city. At nine she sat at
+the round table for dinner in the Café André. Nearly the same crowd was
+there.
+
+“Where have you been to-day?” asked Mrs. Pothunter. “I ’phoned to you
+at twelve.”
+
+“I have been away in Bohemia,” answered Mary, with a mystic smile.
+
+There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax. For I was to
+have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in
+which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once
+the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move
+away beyond the hills. It is a hillside that you turn your head to peer
+at from the windows of the Through Express.
+
+At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness and
+slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her.
+Instantly she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that he
+shrank down, sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across his
+leering features. And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of great
+wings come upon a flock of chattering sparrows. One had broken the
+paramount law of sham-Bohemia—the law of “_Laisser faire_.” The shock
+came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received. With the
+effect of a schoolmaster entering the play-room of his pupils was that
+blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands
+against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at their watches. There
+was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it; it was purely the still
+panic produced by the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience
+hammering at the gambling-house doors of the Heart.
+
+With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exaggerated
+pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange of
+unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a light-hearted exit
+I must take leave of my Bohemian party. Mary has robbed me of my
+climax; and she may go.
+
+But I am not defeated. Somewhere there exists a great vault miles broad
+and miles long—more capacious than the champagne caves of France. In
+that vault are stored the anticlimaxes that should have been tagged to
+all the stories that have been told in the world. I shall cheat that
+vault of one deposit.
+
+Minnie Brown, with her aunt, came from Crocusville down to the city to
+see the sights. And because she had escorted me to fishless trout
+streams and exhibited to me open-plumbed waterfalls and broken my
+camera while I Julyed in her village, I must escort her to the hives
+containing the synthetic clover honey of town.
+
+Especially did the custom-made Bohemia charm her. The spaghetti wound
+its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her belief in
+the existence of commercialism in the world; she was dared and
+enchanted by the rugose wit that can be churned out of California
+claret.
+
+But one evening I got her away from the smell of halibut and linoleum
+long enough to read to her the manuscript of this story, which then
+ended before her entrance into it. I read it to her because I knew that
+all the printing-presses in the world were running to try to please her
+and some others. And I asked her about it.
+
+“I didn’t quite catch the trains,” said she. “How long was Mary in
+Crocusville?”
+
+“Ten hours and five minutes,” I replied.
+
+“Well, then, the story may do,” said Minnie. “But if she had stayed
+there a week Kappelman would have got his kiss.”
+
+
+
+
+THE FERRY OF UNFULFILMENT
+
+
+At the street corner, as solid as granite in the “rush-hour” tide of
+humanity, stood the Man from Nome. The Arctic winds and sun had stained
+him berry-brown. His eye still held the azure glint of the glaciers.
+
+He was as alert as a fox, as tough as a caribou cutlet and as
+broad-gauged as the aurora borealis. He stood sprayed by a Niagara of
+sound—the crash of the elevated trains, clanging cars, pounding of
+rubberless tires and the antiphony of the cab and truck-drivers
+indulging in scarifying repartee. And so, with his gold dust cashed in
+to the merry air of a hundred thousand, and with the cakes and ale of
+one week in Gotham turning bitter on his tongue, the Man from Nome
+sighed to set foot again in Chilkoot, the exit from the land of street
+noises and Dead Sea apple pies.
+
+Up Sixth avenue, with the tripping, scurrying, chattering, bright-eyed,
+homing tide came the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s. The Man from Nome looked
+and saw, first, that she was supremely beautiful after his own
+conception of beauty; and next, that she moved with exactly the steady
+grace of a dog sled on a level crust of snow. His third sensation was
+an instantaneous conviction that he desired her greatly for his own.
+This quickly do men from Nome make up their minds. Besides, he was
+going back to the North in a short time, and to act quickly was no less
+necessary.
+
+A thousand girls from the great department store of Sieber-Mason flowed
+along the sidewalk, making navigation dangerous to men whose feminine
+field of vision for three years has been chiefly limited to Siwash and
+Chilkat squaws. But the Man from Nome, loyal to her who had resurrected
+his long cached heart, plunged into the stream of pulchritude and
+followed her.
+
+Down Twenty-third street she glided swiftly, looking to neither side;
+no more flirtatious than the bronze Diana above the Garden. Her fine
+brown hair was neatly braided; her neat waist and unwrinkled black
+skirt were eloquent of the double virtues—taste and economy. Ten yards
+behind followed the smitten Man from Nome.
+
+Miss Claribel Colby, the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s, belonged to that sad
+company of mariners known as Jersey commuters. She walked into the
+waiting-room of the ferry, and up the stairs, and by a marvellous
+swift, little run, caught the ferry-boat that was just going out. The
+Man from Nome closed up his ten yards in three jumps and gained the
+deck close beside her.
+
+Miss Colby chose a rather lonely seat on the outside of the
+upper-cabin. The night was not cold, and she desired to be away from
+the curious eyes and tedious voices of the passengers. Besides, she was
+extremely weary and drooping from lack of sleep. On the previous night
+she had graced the annual ball and oyster fry of the West Side
+Wholesale Fish Dealers’ Assistants’ Social Club No. 2, thus reducing
+her usual time of sleep to only three hours.
+
+And the day had been uncommonly troublous. Customers had been
+inordinately trying; the buyer in her department had scolded her
+roundly for letting her stock run down; her best friend, Mamie Tuthill,
+had snubbed her by going to lunch with that Dockery girl.
+
+The Girl from Sieber-Mason’s was in that relaxed, softened mood that
+often comes to the independent feminine wage-earner. It is a mood most
+propitious for the man who would woo her. Then she has yearnings to be
+set in some home and heart; to be comforted, and to hide behind some
+strong arm and rest, rest. But Miss Claribel Colby was also very
+sleepy.
+
+There came to her side a strong man, browned and dressed carelessly in
+the best of clothes, with his hat in his hand.
+
+“Lady,” said the Man from Nome, respectfully, “excuse me for speaking
+to you, but I—I—I saw you on the street, and—and—”
+
+“Oh, gee!” remarked the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s, glancing up with the
+most capable coolness. “Ain’t there any way to ever get rid of you
+mashers? I’ve tried everything from eating onions to using hatpins. Be
+on your way, Freddie.”
+
+“I’m not one of that kind, lady,” said the Man from Nome—“honest, I’m
+not. As I say, I saw you on the street, and I wanted to know you so bad
+I couldn’t help followin’ after you. I was afraid I wouldn’t ever see
+you again in this big town unless I spoke; and that’s why I done so.”
+
+Miss Colby looked once shrewdly at him in the dim light on the
+ferry-boat. No; he did not have the perfidious smirk or the brazen
+swagger of the lady-killer. Sincerity and modesty shone through his
+boreal tan. It seemed to her that it might be good to hear a little of
+what he had to say.
+
+“You may sit down,” she said, laying her hand over a yawn with
+ostentatious politness; “and—mind—don’t get fresh or I’ll call the
+steward.”
+
+The Man from Nome sat by her side. He admired her greatly. He more than
+admired her. She had exactly the looks he had tried so long in vain to
+find in a woman. Could she ever come to like him? Well, that was to be
+seen. He must do all in his power to stake his claim, anyhow.
+
+“My name’s Blayden,” said he—“Henry Blayden.”
+
+“Are you real sure it ain’t Jones?” asked the girl, leaning toward him,
+with delicious, knowing raillery.
+
+“I’m down from Nome,” he went on with anxious seriousness. “I scraped
+together a pretty good lot of dust up there, and brought it down with
+me.”
+
+“Oh, say!” she rippled, pursuing persiflage with engaging lightness,
+“then you must be on the White Wings force. I thought I’d seen you
+somewhere.”
+
+“You didn’t see me on the street to-day when I saw you.”
+
+“I never look at fellows on the street.”
+
+“Well, I looked at you; and I never looked at anything before that I
+thought was half as pretty.”
+
+“Shall I keep the change?”
+
+“Yes, I reckon so. I reckon you could keep anything I’ve got. I reckon
+I’m what you would call a rough man, but I could be awful good to
+anybody I liked. I’ve had a rough time of it up yonder, but I beat the
+game. Nearly 5,000 ounces of dust was what I cleaned up while I was
+there.”
+
+“Goodness!” exclaimed Miss Colby, obligingly sympathetic. “It must be
+an awful dirty place, wherever it is.”
+
+And then her eyes closed. The voice of the Man from Nome had a monotony
+in its very earnestness. Besides, what dull talk was this of brooms and
+sweeping and dust? She leaned her head back against the wall.
+
+“Miss,” said the Man from Nome, with deeper earnestness and monotony,
+“I never saw anybody I liked as well as I do you. I know you can’t
+think that way of me right yet; but can’t you give me a chance? Won’t
+you let me know you, and see if I can’t make you like me?”
+
+The head of the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s slid over gently and rested
+upon his shoulder. Sweet sleep had won her, and she was dreaming
+rapturously of the Wholesale Fish Dealers’ Assistants’ ball.
+
+The gentleman from Nome kept his arms to himself. He did not suspect
+sleep, and yet he was too wise to attribute the movement to surrender.
+He was greatly and blissfully thrilled, but he ended by regarding the
+head upon his shoulder as an encouraging preliminary, merely advanced
+as a harbinger of his success, and not to be taken advantage of.
+
+One small speck of alloy discounted the gold of his satisfaction. Had
+he spoken too freely of his wealth? He wanted to be liked for himself.
+
+“I want to say, Miss,” he said, “that you can count on me. They know me
+in the Klondike from Juneau to Circle City and down the whole length of
+the Yukon. Many a night I’ve laid in the snow up there where I worked
+like a slave for three years, and wondered if I’d ever have anybody to
+like me. I didn’t want all that dust just myself. I thought I’d meet
+just the right one some time, and I done it to-day. Money’s a mighty
+good thing to have, but to have the love of the one you like best is
+better still. If you was ever to marry a man, Miss, which would you
+rather he’d have?”
+
+“Cash!”
+
+The word came sharply and loudly from Miss Colby’s lips, giving
+evidence that in her dreams she was now behind her counter in the great
+department store of Sieber-Mason.
+
+Her head suddenly bobbed over sideways. She awoke, sat straight, and
+rubbed her eyes. The Man from Nome was gone.
+
+“Gee! I believe I’ve been asleep,” said Miss Colby. “Wonder what became
+of the White Wings!”
+
+
+
+
+THE TALE OF A TAINTED TENNER
+
+
+Money talks. But you may think that the conversation of a little old
+ten-dollar bill in New York would be nothing more than a whisper. Oh,
+very well! Pass up this _sotto voce_ autobiography of an X if you like.
+If you are one of the kind that prefers to listen to John D’s checkbook
+roar at you through a megaphone as it passes by, all right. But don’t
+forget that small change can say a word to the point now and then. The
+next time you tip your grocer’s clerk a silver quarter to give you
+extra weight of his boss’s goods read the four words above the lady’s
+head. How are they for repartee?
+
+I am a ten-dollar Treasury note, series of 1901. You may have seen one
+in a friend’s hand. On my face, in the centre, is a picture of the
+bison Americanus, miscalled a buffalo by fifty or sixty millions of
+Americans. The heads of Capt. Lewis and Capt. Clark adorn the ends. On
+my back is the graceful figure of Liberty or Ceres or Maxine Elliot
+standing in the centre of the stage on a conservatory plant. My
+references is—or are—Section 3,588, Revised Statutes. Ten cold, hard
+dollars—I don’t say whether silver, gold, lead or iron—Uncle Sam will
+hand you over his counter if you want to cash me in.
+
+I beg you will excuse any conversational breaks that I make—thanks, I
+knew you would—got that sneaking little respect and agreeable feeling
+toward even an X, haven’t you? You see, a tainted bill doesn’t have
+much chance to acquire a correct form of expression. I never knew a
+really cultured and educated person that could afford to hold a
+ten-spot any longer than it would take to do an Arthur Duffy to the
+nearest That’s All! sign or delicatessen store.
+
+For a six-year-old, I’ve had a lively and gorgeous circulation. I guess
+I’ve paid as many debts as the man who dies. I’ve been owned by a good
+many kinds of people. But a little old ragged, damp, dingy five-dollar
+silver certificate gave me a jar one day. I was next to it in the fat
+and bad-smelling purse of a butcher.
+
+“Hey, you Sitting Bull,” says I, “don’t scrouge so. Anyhow, don’t you
+think it’s about time you went in on a customs payment and got
+reissued? For a series of 1899 you’re a sight.”
+
+“Oh, don’t get crackly just because you’re a Buffalo bill,” says the
+fiver. “You’d be limp, too, if you’d been stuffed down in a thick
+cotton-and-lisle-thread under an elastic all day, and the thermometer
+not a degree under 85 in the store.”
+
+“I never heard of a pocketbook like that,” says I. “Who carried you?”
+
+“A shopgirl,” says the five-spot.
+
+“What’s that?” I had to ask.
+
+“You’ll never know till their millennium comes,” says the fiver.
+
+Just then a two-dollar bill behind me with a George Washington head,
+spoke up to the fiver:
+
+“Aw, cut out yer kicks. Ain’t lisle thread good enough for yer? If you
+was under all cotton like I’ve been to-day, and choked up with factory
+dust till the lady with the cornucopia on me sneezed half a dozen
+times, you’d have some reason to complain.”
+
+That was the next day after I arrived in New York. I came in a $500
+package of tens to a Brooklyn bank from one of its Pennsylvania
+correspondents—and I haven’t made the acquaintance of any of the five
+and two spot’s friends’ pocketbooks yet. Silk for mine, every time.
+
+I was lucky money. I kept on the move. Sometimes I changed hands twenty
+times a day. I saw the inside of every business; I fought for my
+owner’s every pleasure. It seemed that on Saturday nights I never
+missed being slapped down on a bar. Tens were always slapped down,
+while ones and twos were slid over to the bartenders folded. I got in
+the habit of looking for mine, and I managed to soak in a little
+straight or some spilled Martini or Manhattan whenever I could. Once I
+got tied up in a great greasy roll of bills in a pushcart peddler’s
+jeans. I thought I never would get in circulation again, for the future
+department store owner lived on eight cents’ worth of dog meat and
+onions a day. But this peddler got into trouble one day on account of
+having his cart too near a crossing, and I was rescued. I always will
+feel grateful to the cop that got me. He changed me at a cigar store
+near the Bowery that was running a crap game in the back room. So it
+was the Captain of the precinct, after all, that did me the best turn,
+when he got his. He blew me for wine the next evening in a Broadway
+restaurant; and I really felt as glad to get back again as an Astor
+does when he sees the lights of Charing Cross.
+
+A tainted ten certainly does get action on Broadway. I was alimony
+once, and got folded in a little dogskin purse among a lot of dimes.
+They were bragging about the busy times there were in Ossining whenever
+three girls got hold of one of them during the ice cream season. But
+it’s Slow Moving Vehicles Keep to the Right for the little Bok tips
+when you think of the way we bison plasters refuse to stick to anything
+during the rush lobster hour.
+
+The first I ever heard of tainted money was one night when a good thing
+with a Van to his name threw me over with some other bills to buy a
+stack of blues.
+
+About midnight a big, easy-going man with a fat face like a monk’s and
+the eye of a janitor with his wages raised took me and a lot of other
+notes and rolled us into what is termed a “wad” among the money
+tainters.
+
+“Ticket me for five hundred,” said he to the banker, “and look out for
+everything, Charlie. I’m going out for a stroll in the glen before the
+moonlight fades from the brow of the cliff. If anybody finds the roof
+in their way there’s $60,000 wrapped in a comic supplement in the upper
+left-hand corner of the safe. Be bold; everywhere be bold, but be not
+bowled over. ’Night.”
+
+I found myself between two $20 gold certificates. One of ’em says to
+me:
+
+“Well, old shorthorn, you’re in luck to-night. You’ll see something of
+life. Old Jack’s going to make the Tenderloin look like a hamburg
+steak.”
+
+“Explain,” says I. “I’m used to joints, but I don’t care for filet
+mignon with the kind of sauce you serve.”
+
+“’Xcuse me,” said the twenty. “Old Jack is the proprietor of this
+gambling house. He’s going on a whiz to-night because he offered
+$50,000 to a church and it refused to accept it because they said his
+money was tainted.”
+
+“What is a church?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, I forgot,” says the twenty, “that I was talking to a tenner. Of
+course you don’t know. You’re too much to put into the contribution
+basket, and not enough to buy anything at a bazaar. A church is—a large
+building in which penwipers and tidies are sold at $20 each.”
+
+I don’t care much about chinning with gold certificates. There’s a
+streak of yellow in ’em. All is not gold that’s quitters.
+
+Old Jack certainly was a gild-edged sport. When it came his time to
+loosen up he never referred the waiter to an actuary.
+
+By and by it got around that he was smiting the rock in the wilderness;
+and all along Broadway things with cold noses and hot gullets fell in
+on our trail. The third Jungle Book was there waiting for somebody to
+put covers on it. Old Jack’s money may have had a taint to it, but all
+the same he had orders for his Camembert piling up on him every minute.
+First his friends rallied round him; and then the fellows that his
+friends knew by sight; and then a few of his enemies buried the
+hatchet; and finally he was buying souvenirs for so many Neapolitan
+fisher maidens and butterfly octettes that the head waiters were
+’phoning all over town for Julian Mitchell to please come around and
+get them into some kind of order.
+
+At last we floated into an uptown café that I knew by heart. When the
+hod-carriers’ union in jackets and aprons saw us coming the chief goal
+kicker called out: “Six—eleven—forty-two—nineteen—twelve” to his men,
+and they put on nose guards till it was clear whether we meant Port
+Arthur or Portsmouth. But Old Jack wasn’t working for the furniture and
+glass factories that night. He sat down quiet and sang “Ramble” in a
+half-hearted way. His feelings had been hurt, so the twenty told me,
+because his offer to the church had been refused.
+
+But the wassail went on; and Brady himself couldn’t have hammered the
+thirst mob into a better imitation of the real penchant for the stuff
+that you screw out of a bottle with a napkin.
+
+Old Jack paid the twenty above me for a round, leaving me on the
+outside of his roll. He laid the roll on the table and sent for the
+proprietor.
+
+“Mike,” says he, “here’s money that the good people have refused. Will
+it buy of your wares in the name of the devil? They say it’s tainted.”
+
+“It will,” says Mike, “and I’ll put it in the drawer next to the bills
+that was paid to the parson’s daughter for kisses at the church fair to
+build a new parsonage for the parson’s daughter to live in.”
+
+At 1 o’clock when the hod-carriers were making ready to close up the
+front and keep the inside open, a woman slips in the door of the
+restaurant and comes up to Old Jack’s table. You’ve seen the kind—black
+shawl, creepy hair, ragged skirt, white face, eyes a cross between
+Gabriel’s and a sick kitten’s—the kind of woman that’s always on the
+lookout for an automobile or the mendicancy squad—and she stands there
+without a word and looks at the money.
+
+Old Jack gets up, peels me off the roll and hands me to her with a bow.
+
+“Madam,” says he, just like actors I’ve heard, “here is a tainted bill.
+I am a gambler. This bill came to me to-night from a gentleman’s son.
+Where he got it I do not know. If you will do me the favor to accept
+it, it is yours.”
+
+The woman took me with a trembling hand.
+
+“Sir,” said she, “I counted thousands of this issue of bills into
+packages when they were virgin from the presses. I was a clerk in the
+Treasury Department. There was an official to whom I owed my position.
+You say they are tainted now. If you only knew—but I won’t say any
+more. Thank you with all my heart, sir—thank you—thank you.”
+
+Where do you suppose that woman carried me almost at a run? To a
+bakery. Away from Old Jack and a sizzling good time to a bakery. And I
+get changed, and she does a Sheridan-twenty-miles-away with a dozen
+rolls and a section of jelly cake as big as a turbine water-wheel. Of
+course I lost sight of her then, for I was snowed up in the bakery,
+wondering whether I’d get changed at the drug store the next day in an
+alum deal or paid over to the cement works.
+
+A week afterward I butted up against one of the one-dollar bills the
+baker had given the woman for change.
+
+“Hallo, E35039669,” says I, “weren’t you in the change for me in a
+bakery last Saturday night?”
+
+“Yep,” says the solitaire in his free and easy style.
+
+“How did the deal turn out?” I asked.
+
+“She blew E17051431 for milk and round steak,” says the one-spot. “She
+kept me till the rent man came. It was a bum room with a sick kid in
+it. But you ought to have seen him go for the bread and tincture of
+formaldehyde. Half-starved, I guess. Then she prayed some. Don’t get
+stuck up, tenner. We one-spots hear ten prayers, where you hear one.
+She said something about ‘who giveth to the poor.’ Oh, let’s cut out
+the slum talk. I’m certainly tired of the company that keeps me. I wish
+I was big enough to move in society with you tainted bills.”
+
+“Shut up,” says I; “there’s no such thing. I know the rest of it.
+There’s a ‘lendeth to the Lord’ somewhere in it. Now look on my back
+and read what you see there.”
+
+“This note is a legal tender at its face value for all debts public and
+private.”
+
+“This talk about tainted money makes me tired,” says I.
+
+
+
+
+ELSIE IN NEW YORK
+
+
+No, bumptious reader, this story is not a continuation of the Elsie
+series. But if your Elsie had lived over here in our big city there
+might have been a chapter in her books not very different from this.
+
+Especially for the vagrant feet of youth are the roads of Manhattan
+beset “with pitfall and with gin.” But the civic guardians of the young
+have made themselves acquainted with the snares of the wicked, and most
+of the dangerous paths are patrolled by their agents, who seek to turn
+straying ones away from the peril that menaces them. And this will tell
+you how they guided my Elsie safely through all peril to the goal that
+she was seeking.
+
+Elsie’s father had been a cutter for Fox & Otter, cloaks and furs, on
+lower Broadway. He was an old man, with a slow and limping gait, so a
+pot-hunter of a newly licensed chauffeur ran him down one day when
+livelier game was scarce. They took the old man home, where he lay on
+his bed for a year and then died, leaving $2.50 in cash and a letter
+from Mr. Otter offering to do anything he could to help his faithful
+old employee. The old cutter regarded this letter as a valuable legacy
+to his daughter, and he put it into her hands with pride as the shears
+of the dread Cleaner and Repairer snipped off his thread of life.
+
+That was the landlord’s cue; and forth he came and did his part in the
+great eviction scene. There was no snowstorm ready for Elsie to steal
+out into, drawing her little red woollen shawl about her shoulders, but
+she went out, regardless of the unities. And as for the red shawl—back
+to Blaney with it! Elsie’s fall tan coat was cheap, but it had the
+style and fit of the best at Fox & Otter’s. And her lucky stars had
+given her good looks, and eyes as blue and innocent as the new shade of
+note paper, and she had $1 left of the $2.50. And the letter from Mr.
+Otter. Keep your eye on the letter from Mr. Otter. That is the clue. I
+desire that everything be made plain as we go. Detective stories are so
+plentiful now that they do not sell.
+
+And so we find Elsie, thus equipped, starting out in the world to seek
+her fortune. One trouble about the letter from Mr. Otter was that it
+did not bear the new address of the firm, which had moved about a month
+before. But Elsie thought she could find it. She had heard that
+policemen, when politely addressed, or thumbscrewed by an investigation
+committee, will give up information and addresses. So she boarded a
+downtown car at One Hundred and Seventy-seventh street and rode south
+to Forty-second, which she thought must surely be the end of the
+island. There she stood against the wall undecided, for the city’s roar
+and dash was new to her. Up where she had lived was rural New York, so
+far out that the milkmen awaken you in the morning by the squeaking of
+pumps instead of the rattling of cans.
+
+A kind-faced, sunburned young man in a soft-brimmed hat went past Elsie
+into the Grand Central Depot. That was Hank Ross, of the Sunflower
+Ranch, in Idaho, on his way home from a visit to the East. Hank’s heart
+was heavy, for the Sunflower Ranch was a lonesome place, lacking the
+presence of a woman. He had hoped to find one during his visit who
+would congenially share his prosperity and home, but the girls of
+Gotham had not pleased his fancy. But, as he passed in, he noted, with
+a jumping of his pulses, the sweet, ingenuous face of Elsie and her
+pose of doubt and loneliness. With true and honest Western impulse he
+said to himself that here was his mate. He could love her, he knew; and
+he would surround her with so much comfort, and cherish her so
+carefully that she would be happy, and make two sunflowers grow on the
+ranch where there grew but one before.
+
+Hank turned and went back to her. Backed by his never before questioned
+honesty of purpose, he approached the girl and removed his soft-brimmed
+hat. Elsie had but time to sum up his handsome frank face with one shy
+look of modest admiration when a burly cop hurled himself upon the
+ranchman, seized him by the collar and backed him against the wall. Two
+blocks away a burglar was coming out of an apartment-house with a bag
+of silverware on his shoulder; but that is neither here nor there.
+
+“Carry on yez mashin’ tricks right before me eyes, will yez?” shouted
+the cop. “I’ll teach yez to speak to ladies on me beat that ye’re not
+acquainted with. Come along.”
+
+Elsie turned away with a sigh as the ranchman was dragged away. She had
+liked the effect of his light blue eyes against his tanned complexion.
+She walked southward, thinking herself already in the district where
+her father used to work, and hoping to find some one who could direct
+her to the firm of Fox & Otter.
+
+But did she want to find Mr. Otter? She had inherited much of the old
+cutter’s independence. How much better it would be if she could find
+work and support herself without calling on him for aid!
+
+Elsie saw a sign “Employment Agency” and went in. Many girls were
+sitting against the wall in chairs. Several well-dressed ladies were
+looking them over. One white-haired, kind-faced old lady in rustling
+black silk hurried up to Elsie.
+
+“My dear,” she said in a sweet, gentle voice, “are you looking for a
+position? I like your face and appearance so much. I want a young woman
+who will be half maid and half companion to me. You will have a good
+home and I will pay you $30 a month.”
+
+Before Elsie could stammer forth her gratified acceptance, a young
+woman with gold glasses on her bony nose and her hands in her jacket
+pockets seized her arm and drew her aside.
+
+“I am Miss Ticklebaum,” said she, “of the Association for the
+Prevention of Jobs Being Put Up on Working Girls Looking for Jobs. We
+prevented forty-seven girls from securing positions last week. I am
+here to protect you. Beware of any one who offers you a job. How do you
+know that this woman does not want to make you work as a breaker-boy in
+a coal mine or murder you to get your teeth? If you accept work of any
+kind without permission of our association you will be arrested by one
+of our agents.”
+
+“But what am I to do?” asked Elsie. “I have no home or money. I must do
+something. Why am I not allowed to accept this kind lady’s offer?”
+
+“I do not know,” said Miss Ticklebaum. “That is the affair of our
+Committee on the Abolishment of Employers. It is my duty simply to see
+that you do not get work. You will give me your name and address and
+report to our secretary every Thursday. We have 600 girls on the
+waiting list who will in time be allowed to accept positions as
+vacancies occur on our roll of Qualified Employers, which now comprises
+twenty-seven names. There is prayer, music and lemonade in our chapel
+the third Sunday of every month.”
+
+Elsie hurried away after thanking Miss Ticklebaum for her timely
+warning and advice. After all, it seemed that she must try to find Mr.
+Otter.
+
+But after walking a few blocks she saw a sign, “Cashier wanted,” in the
+window of a confectionery store. In she went and applied for the place,
+after casting a quick glance over her shoulder to assure herself that
+the job-preventer was not on her trail.
+
+The proprietor of the confectionery was a benevolent old man with a
+peppermint flavor, who decided, after questioning Elsie pretty closely,
+that she was the very girl he wanted. Her services were needed at once,
+so Elsie, with a thankful heart, drew off her tan coat and prepared to
+mount the cashier’s stool.
+
+But before she could do so a gaunt lady wearing steel spectacles and
+black mittens stood before her, with a long finger pointing, and
+exclaimed: “Young woman, hesitate!”
+
+Elsie hesitated.
+
+“Do you know,” said the black-and-steel lady, “that in accepting this
+position you may this day cause the loss of a hundred lives in
+agonizing physical torture and the sending as many souls to perdition?”
+
+“Why, no,” said Elsie, in frightened tones. “How could I do that?”
+
+“Rum,” said the lady—“the demon rum. Do you know why so many lives are
+lost when a theatre catches fire? Brandy balls. The demon rum lurking
+in brandy balls. Our society women while in theatres sit grossly
+intoxicated from eating these candies filled with brandy. When the fire
+fiend sweeps down upon them they are unable to escape. The candy stores
+are the devil’s distilleries. If you assist in the distribution of
+these insidious confections you assist in the destruction of the bodies
+and souls of your fellow-beings, and in the filling of our jails,
+asylums and almshouses. Think, girl, ere you touch the money for which
+brandy balls are sold.”
+
+“Dear me,” said Elsie, bewildered. “I didn’t know there was rum in
+brandy balls. But I must live by some means. What shall I do?”
+
+“Decline the position,” said the lady, “and come with me. I will tell
+you what to do.”
+
+After Elsie had told the confectioner that she had changed her mind
+about the cashiership she put on her coat and followed the lady to the
+sidewalk, where awaited an elegant victoria.
+
+“Seek some other work,” said the black-and-steel lady, “and assist in
+crushing the hydra-headed demon rum.” And she got into the victoria and
+drove away.
+
+“I guess that puts it up to Mr. Otter again,” said Elsie, ruefully,
+turning down the street. “And I’m sorry, too, for I’d much rather make
+my way without help.”
+
+Near Fourteenth street Elsie saw a placard tacked on the side of a
+doorway that read: “Fifty girls, neat sewers, wanted immediately on
+theatrical costumes. Good pay.”
+
+She was about to enter, when a solemn man, dressed all in black, laid
+his hand on her arm.
+
+“My dear girl,” he said, “I entreat you not to enter that dressing-room
+of the devil.”
+
+“Goodness me!” exclaimed Elsie, with some impatience. “The devil seems
+to have a cinch on all the business in New York. What’s wrong about the
+place?”
+
+“It is here,” said the solemn man, “that the regalia of Satan—in other
+words, the costumes worn on the stage—are manufactured. The stage is
+the road to ruin and destruction. Would you imperil your soul by
+lending the work of your hands to its support? Do you know, my dear
+girl, what the theatre leads to? Do you know where actors and actresses
+go after the curtain of the playhouse has fallen upon them for the last
+time?”
+
+“Sure,” said Elsie. “Into vaudeville. But do you think it would be
+wicked for me to make a little money to live on by sewing? I must get
+something to do pretty soon.”
+
+“The flesh-pots of Egypt,” exclaimed the reverend gentleman, uplifting
+his hands. “I beseech you, my child, to turn away from this place of
+sin and iniquity.”
+
+“But what will I do for a living?” asked Elsie. “I don’t care to sew
+for this musical comedy, if it’s as rank as you say it is; but I’ve got
+to have a job.”
+
+“The Lord will provide,” said the solemn man. “There is a free Bible
+class every Sunday afternoon in the basement of the cigar store next to
+the church. Peace be with you. Amen. Farewell.”
+
+Elsie went on her way. She was soon in the downtown district where
+factories abound. On a large brick building was a gilt sign, “Posey &
+Trimmer, Artificial Flowers.” Below it was hung a newly stretched
+canvas bearing the words, “Five hundred girls wanted to learn trade.
+Good wages from the start. Apply one flight up.”
+
+Elsie started toward the door, near which were gathered in groups some
+twenty or thirty girls. One big girl with a black straw hat tipped down
+over her eyes stepped in front of her.
+
+“Say, you’se,” said the girl, “are you’se goin’ in there after a job?”
+
+“Yes,” said Elsie; “I must have work.”
+
+“Now don’t do it,” said the girl. “I’m chairman of our Scab Committee.
+There’s 400 of us girls locked out just because we demanded 50 cents a
+week raise in wages, and ice water, and for the foreman to shave off
+his mustache. You’re too nice a looking girl to be a scab. Wouldn’t you
+please help us along by trying to find a job somewhere else, or would
+you’se rather have your face pushed in?”
+
+“I’ll try somewhere else,” said Elsie.
+
+She walked aimlessly eastward on Broadway, and there her heart leaped
+to see the sign, “Fox & Otter,” stretching entirely across the front of
+a tall building. It was as though an unseen guide had led her to it
+through the by-ways of her fruitless search for work.
+
+She hurried into the store and sent in to Mr. Otter by a clerk her name
+and the letter he had written her father. She was shown directly into
+his private office.
+
+Mr. Otter arose from his desk as Elsie entered and took both hands with
+a hearty smile of welcome. He was a slightly corpulent man of nearly
+middle age, a little bald, gold spectacled, polite, well dressed,
+radiating.
+
+“Well, well, and so this is Beatty’s little daughter! Your father was
+one of our most efficient and valued employees. He left nothing? Well,
+well. I hope we have not forgotten his faithful services. I am sure
+there is a vacancy now among our models. Oh, it is easy work—nothing
+easier.”
+
+Mr. Otter struck a bell. A long-nosed clerk thrust a portion of himself
+inside the door.
+
+“Send Miss Hawkins in,” said Mr. Otter. Miss Hawkins came.
+
+“Miss Hawkins,” said Mr. Otter, “bring for Miss Beatty to try on one of
+those Russian sable coats and—let’s see—one of those latest model black
+tulle hats with white tips.”
+
+Elsie stood before the full-length mirror with pink cheeks and quick
+breath. Her eyes shone like faint stars. She was beautiful. Alas! she
+was beautiful.
+
+I wish I could stop this story here. Confound it! I will. No; it’s got
+to run it out. I didn’t make it up. I’m just repeating it.
+
+I’d like to throw bouquets at the wise cop, and the lady who rescues
+Girls from Jobs, and the prohibitionist who is trying to crush brandy
+balls, and the sky pilot who objects to costumes for stage people
+(there are others), and all the thousands of good people who are at
+work protecting young people from the pitfalls of a great city; and
+then wind up by pointing out how they were the means of Elsie reaching
+her father’s benefactor and her kind friend and rescuer from poverty.
+This would make a fine Elsie story of the old sort. I’d like to do
+this; but there’s just a word or two to follow.
+
+While Elsie was admiring herself in the mirror, Mr. Otter went to the
+telephone booth and called up some number. Don’t ask me what it was.
+
+“Oscar,” said he, “I want you to reserve the same table for me this
+evening. … What? Why, the one in the Moorish room to the left of the
+shrubbery. … Yes; two. … Yes, the usual brand; and the ’85
+Johannisburger with the roast. If it isn’t the right temperature I’ll
+break your neck. … No; not her … No, indeed … A new one—a peacherino,
+Oscar, a peacherino!”
+
+Tired and tiresome reader, I will conclude, if you please, with a
+paraphrase of a few words that you will remember were written by him—by
+him of Gad’s Hill, before whom, if you doff not your hat, you shall
+stand with a covered pumpkin—aye, sir, a pumpkin.
+
+Lost, Your Excellency. Lost, Associations and Societies. Lost, Right
+Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Lost, Reformers and
+Lawmakers, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts, but with the
+reverence of money in your souls. And lost thus around us every day.
+
+
+
+
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