The Four Million
by
by O Henry
Part 2 out of 4
daily wanderings?"
"I think I know whom you mean," she answered, with a gentle smile.
"We see them in the same places night after night. They are the
devil's body guard, and if the soldiers of any army are as faithful
as they are, their commanders are well served. We go among them,
diverting a few pennies from their wickedness to the Lord's service."
She shook the box again and I dropped a dime into it.
In front of a glittering hotel a friend of mine, a critic, was
climbing from a cab. He seemed at leisure; and I put my question to
him. He answered me conscientiously, as I was sure he would.
"There is a type of 'Man About Town' in New York," he answered. "The
term is quite familiar to me, but I don't think I was ever called
upon to define the character before. It would be difficult to point
you out an exact specimen. I would say, offhand, that it is a man
who had a hopeless case of the peculiar New York disease of wanting
to see and know. At 6 o'clock each day life begins with him. He
follows rigidly the conventions of dress and manners; but in the
business of poking his nose into places where he does not belong he
could give pointers to a civet cat or a jackdaw. He is the man who
has chased Bohemia about the town from rathskeller to roof garden and
from Hester street to Harlem until you can't find a place in the city
where they don't cut their spaghetti with a knife. Your 'Man About
Town' has done that. He is always on the scent of something new. He
is curiosity, impudence and omnipresence. Hansoms were made for him,
and gold-banded cigars; and the curse of music at dinner. There are
not so many of him; but his minority report is adopted everywhere.
"I'm glad you brought up the subject; I've felt the influence of this
nocturnal blight upon our city, but I never thought to analyse it
before. I can see now that your 'Man About Town' should havc been
classified long ago. In his wake spring up wine agents and cloak
models; and the orchestra 'p1ays 'Let's All Go Up to Maud's' for him,
by request, instead of Handel. He makes his rounds every evening;
while you and I see the elephant once a week. When the cigar store
is raided, he winks at the officer, familiar with his ground, and
walks away immune, while you and I search among the Presidents for
names, and among the stars for addresses to give the desk sergeant."
My friend, the critic, paused to acquire breath for fresh eloquence.
I seized my advantage.
"You have classified him," I cried with joy. "You have painted his
portrait in the gallery of city types. But I must meet one face to
face. I must study the Man About Town at first hand. Where shall I
find him? How shall I know him?"
Without seeming to hear me, the critic went on. And his cab-driver
was waiting for his fare, too.
"He is the sublimated essence of Butt-in; the refined, intrinsic
extract of Rubber; the concentrated, purified, irrefutable,
unavoidable spirit of Curiosity and Inquisitiveness. A new sensation
is the breath in his nostrils; when his experience is exhausted he
explores new fields with the indefatigability of a--"
"Excuse me," I interrupted, "but can you produce one of this type?
It is a new thing to me. I must study it. I will search the town
over until I find one. Its habitat must be here on Broadway."
"I am about to dine here," said my friend. "Come inside, and if
there is a Man About Town present I will point him out to you. I
know most of the regular patrons here."
"I am not dining yet," I said to him. "You will excuse me. I am
going to find my Man About Town this night if I have to rake New
York from the Battery to Little Coney Island."
I left the hotel and walked down Broadway. The pursuit of my type
gave a pleasant savour of life and interest to the air I breathed.
I was glad to be in a city so great, so complex and diversified.
Leisurely and with something of an air I strolled along with my heart
expanding at the thought that I was a citizen of great Gotham, a
sharer in its magnificence and pleasures, a partaker in its glory and
prestige.
I turned to cross the street. I heard something buzz like a bee, and
then I took a long, pleasant ride with Santos-Dumont.
When I opened my eyes I remembered a smell of gasoline, and I said
aloud: "Hasn't it passed yet?"
A hospital nurse laid a hand that was not particularly soft upon my
brow that was not at all fevered. A young doctor came along,
grinned, and handed me a morning newspaper.
"Want to see how it happened?" he asked cheerily. I read the
article. Its headlines began where I heard the buzzing leave off
the night before. It closed with these lines:
Bellevue Hospital, where it was said that his injuries were not
serious. He appeared to be a typica1 Man About Town."
THE COP AND THE ANTHEM
On his bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese
honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind
to their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the
park, you may know that winter is near at hand.
A dead leaf fell in Soapy's lap. That was Jack Frost's card. Jack
is kind to the regular denizens of Madison Square, and gives fair
warning of his annual call. At the corners of four streets he hands
his pasteboard to the North Wind, footman of the mansion of All
Outdoors, so that the inhabitants thereof may make ready.
Soapy's mind became cognisant of the fact that the time had come for
him to resolve himself into a singular Committee of Ways and Means to
provide against the coming rigour. And therefore he moved uneasily
on his bench.
The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In
them there were no considerations of Mediterranean cruises, of
soporific Southern skies drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months
on the Island was what his soul craved. Three months of assured
board and bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats,
seemed to Soapy the essence of things desirable.
For years the hospitable Blackwell's had been his winter quarters.
Just as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their
tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made
his humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now
the time was come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers,
distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles and over his lap, had
failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting
fountain in the ancient square. So the Island loomed big and timely
in Soapy's mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of
charity for the city's dependents. In Soapy's opinion the Law was
more benign than Philanthropy. There was an endless round of
institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might set out
and receive lodging and food accordant with the simple life. But to
one of Soapy's proud spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If
not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit
received at the hands of philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus,
every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of
bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition.
Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which though
conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman's private
affairs.
Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about
accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this.
The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant;
and then, after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and
without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do
the rest.
Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the
level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together.
Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering cafe, where are
gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the
silkworm and the protoplasm.
Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest
upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black,
ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady
missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the
restaurant unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him that
would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter's mind.
A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing--with
a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demi-tasse and a cigar.
One dollar for the cigar would be enough. The total would not be so
high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from the
cafe management; and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy
for the journey to his winter refuge.
But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter's
eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and
ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to
the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.
Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted
island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering
limbo must be thought of.
At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed
wares behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took
a cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came running
around the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still, with
his hands in his pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons.
"Where's the man that done that?" inquired the officer excitedly.
"Don't you figure out that I might have had something to do with it?"
said Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good
fortune.
The policeman's mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who
smash windows do not remain to parley with the law's minions. They
take to their heels. The policeman saw a man half way down the block
running to catch a car. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit.
Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed along, twice unsuccessful.
On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great
pretensions. It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its
crockery and atmosphere were thick; its soup and napery thin. Into
this place Soapy took his accusive shoes and telltale trousers
without challenge. At a table he sat and consumed beefsteak,
flapjacks, doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter be betrayed the
fact that the minutest coin and himself were strangers.
"Now, get busy and call a cop," said Soapy. "And don't keep a
gentleman waiting."
"No cop for youse," said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes
and an eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. "Hey, Con!"
Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched
Soapy. He arose, joint by joint, as a carpenter's rule opens, and
beat the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The
Island seemed very far away. A policeman who stood before a drug
store two doors away laughed and walked down the street.
Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted him to woo
capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he fatuously
termed to himself a "cinch." A young woman of a modest and pleasing
guise was standing before a show window gazing with sprightly
interest at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards
from the window a large policeman of severe demeanour leaned against
a water plug.
It was Soapy's design to assume the role of the despicable and
execrated "masher." The refined and elegant appearance of his victim
and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe
that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm
that would insure his winter quarters on the right little, tight
little isle.
Soapy straightened the lady missionary's readymade tie, dragged his
shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and
sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with
sudden coughs and "hems," smiled, smirked and went brazenly through
the impudent and contemptible litany of the "masher." With half an
eye Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him fixedly. The young
woman moved away a few steps, and again bestowed her absorbed
attention upon the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to
her side, raised his hat and said:
"Ah there, Bedelia! Don't you want to come and play in my yard?"
The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but
to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his
insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cozy warmth of
the station-house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a
hand, caught Soapy's coat sleeve.
Sure, Mike," she said joyfully, "if you'll blow me to a pail of suds.
I'd have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching."
With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked
past the policeman overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty.
At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in
the district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts,
vows and librettos.
Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry air. A
sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had rendered
him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of panic upon it,
and when he came upon another policeman lounging grandly in front of
a transplendent theatre he caught at the immediate straw of
"disorderly conduct."
On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of
his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise disturbed
the welkin.
The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked
to a citizen.
"'Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin' the goose egg they give to
the Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We've instructions to
lave them be."
Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a
policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an
unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling
wind.
In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a
swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on
entering. Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered
off with it slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily.
"My umbrella," he said, sternly.
"Oh, is it?" sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. "Well,
why don't you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why
don't you call a cop? There stands one on the corner."
The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a
presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman
looked at the two curiously.
"Of course," said the umbrella man--"that is--well, you know how
these mistakes occur--I--if it's your umbrella I hope you'll excuse
me--I picked it up this morning in a restaurant--If you recognise it
as yours, why--I hope you'll--"
"Of course it's mine," said Soapy, viciously.
The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a
tall blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street
car that was approaching two blocks away.
Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He
hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered
against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted
to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who
could do no wrong.
At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the
glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward
Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home
is a park bench.
But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here
was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one
violet-stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the
organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the
coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy's ears sweet
music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of
the iron fence.
The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians
were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves--for a little
while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem
that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had
known it well in the days when his life contained such things as
mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts
and collars.
The conjunction of Soapy's receptive state of mind and the influences
about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his
soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled,
the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties
and base motives that made up his existence.
And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel
mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with
his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would
make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken
possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet;
he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without
faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a
revolution in him. To-morrow he would go into the roaring downtown
district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place
as driver. He would find him to-morrow and ask for the position. He
would be somebody in the world. He would--
Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the
broad face of a policeman.
"What are you doin' here?" asked the officer.
"Nothin'," said Soapy.
"Then come along," said the policeman.
"Three months on the Island," said the Magistrate in the Police Court
the next morning.
AN ADJUSTMENT OF NATURE
In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had been
sold for $5,000. The painter was a young scrub out of the West named
Kraft, who had a favourite food and a pet theory. His pabulum was an
unquenchable belief in the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature.
His theory was fixed around corned-beef hash with poached egg. There
was a story behind the picture, so I went home and let it drip out of
a fountain-pen. The idea of Kraft--but that is not the beginning of
the story.
Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took our meals at
Cypher's, on Eighth Avenue. I say "took." When we had money, Cypher
got it "off of" us, as he expressed it. We had no credit; we went
in, called for food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had
confidence in Cypher's sullenness end smouldering ferocity. Deep
down in his sunless soul he was either a prince, a fool or an artist.
He sat at a worm-eaten desk, covered with files of waiters' checks so
old that I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that Hendrik
Hudson had eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power, in common with
Napoleon III. and the goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a film over his
eyes, rendering opaque the windows of his soul. Once when we left
him unpaid, with egregious excuses, I looked back and saw him shaking
with inaudible laughter behind his film. Now and then we paid up
back scores.
But the chief thing at Cypher's was Milly. Milly was a waitress.
She was a grand example of Kraft's theory of the artistic adjustment
of nature. She belonged, largely, to waiting, as Minerva did to the
art of scrapping, or Venus to the science of serious flirtation.
Pedestalled and in bronze she might have stood with the noblest of
her heroic sisters as "Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World." She
belonged to Cypher's. You expected to see her colossal figure loom
through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you
expect the Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog.
There amid the steam of vegetables and the vapours of acres of "ham
and," the crash of crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of
"short orders," the cries of the hungering and all the horrid tumult
of feeding man, surrounded by swarms of the buzzing winged beasts
bequeathed us by Pharaoh, Milly steered her magnificent way like some
great liner cleaving among the canoes of howling savages.
Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they could be
followed only with awe. Her sleeves were always rolled above her
elbows. She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands
and dropped us out of the window. She had seen fewer years than any
of us, but she was of such superb Evehood and simplicity that she
mothered us from the beginning. Cypher's store of eatables she
poured out upon us with royal indifference to price and quantity, as
from a cornucopia that knew no exhaustion. Her voice rang like a
great silver bell; her smile was many-toothed and frequent; she
seemed like a yellow sunrise on mountain tops. I never saw her but I
thought of the Yosemite. And yet, somehow, I could never think of
her as existing outside of Cypher's. There nature had placed her,
and she had taken root and grown mightily. She seemed happy, and
took her few poor dollars on Saturday nights with the flushed
pleasure of a child that receives an unexpected donation.
It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held
latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art
at which we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing
between a Haydn symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite
congruity between Milly and Cypher's.
"There is a certain fate hanging over Milly," said Kraft, "and if it
overtakes her she is lost to Cypher's and to us."
"She will grow fat? "asked Judkins, fearsomely.
"She will go to night school and become refined?" I ventured
anxiously.
"It is this," said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee
with a stiff forefinger. "Caesar had his Brutus--the cotton has its
boliworm, the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has
his poison ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan,
the rose has its--"
"Speak," I interrupted, much perturbed. "You do not think that Milly
will begin to lace?"
"One day," concluded Kraft, solemnly, "there will come to Cypher's
for a plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and he
will marry Milly."
"Never!" exclaimed Judkins and T, in horror.
"A lumberman," repeated Kraft, hoarsely.
"And a millionaire lumberman!" I sighed, despairingly.
"From Wisconsin!" groaned Judkins.
We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few things were
less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods,
was made to catch the lumberman's eye. And well we knew the habits
of the Badgers, once fortune smiled upon them. Straight to New York
they hie, and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them
beans in a beanery. Why, the alphabet itself connives. The Sunday
newspaper's headliner's work is cut for him.
"Winsome Waitress Wins Wealthy Wisconsin Woodsman.
For a while we felt that Milly was on the verge of being lost to us.
It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that
inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly
accursed by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of
Milly, with her voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea
in the marble teepee of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher's she
belonged--in the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand,
Wagnerian chorus of hurled ironstone china and rattling casters.
Our fears must have been prophetic, for on that same evening the
wildwood discharged upon us Milly's preordained confiscator--our fee
to adjustment and order. But Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the
burden of the visitation.
We were at our supper of beef stew and dried apples when he trotted
in as if on the heels of a dog team, and made one of the mess at our
table. With the freedom of the camps he assaulted our ears and
claimed the fellowship of men lost in the wilds of a hash house. We
embraced him as a specimen, and in three minutes we had all but died
for one another as friends.
He was rugged and bearded and wind-dried. He had just come off the
"trail," he said, at one of the North River ferries. I fancied I
could see the snow dust of Chilcoot yet powdering his shoulders. And
then he strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead
work and seal pelts of the returned Kiondiker, and began to prate to
us of his millions.
"Bank drafts for two millions," was his summing up, "and a thousand
a day piling up from my claims. And now I want some beef stew and
canned peaches. I never got off the train since I mushed out of
Seattle, and I'm hungry. The stuff the niggers feed you on Pullmans
don't count. You gentlemen order what you want."
And then Milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare arm--
loomed up big and white and pink and awful as Mount Saint Elias--with
a smile like day breaking in a gulch. And the Kiondiker threw down
his pelts and nuggets as dross, and let his jaw fall half-way, and
stared at her. You could almost see the diamond tiaras on Milly's
brow and the hand-embroidered silk Paris gowns that he meant to buy
for her.
At last the bollworm had attacked the cotton--the poison ivy was
reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer boarder--the
millionaire lumberman, thinly disguised as the Alaskan miner, was
about to engulf our Milly and upset Nature's adjustment.
Kraft was the first to act. He leaped up and pounded the Klondiker's
back. "Come out and drink," he shouted. "Drink first and eat
afterward." Judkins seized one arm and I the other. Gaily,
roaringly, irresistibly, in jolly-good-fellow style, we dragged him
from the restaurant to a cafe, stuffing his pockets with his embalmed
birds and indigestible nuggets.
There he rumbled a roughly good-humoured protest. "That's the girl
for my money," he declared. "She can eat out of my skillet the rest
of her life. Why, I never see such a fine girl. I'm going back
there and ask her to marry me. I guess she won't want to sling hash
any more when she sees the pile of dust I've got."
"You'll take another whiskey and milk now," Kraft persuaded, with
Satan's smile. "I thought you up-country fellows were better
sports."
Kraft spent his puny store of coin at the bar and then gave Judkins
and me such an appealing look that we went down to the last dime we
had in toasting our guest.
Then, when our ammunition was gone and the Klondiker, still somewhat
sober, began to babble again of Milly, Kraft whispered into his ear
such a polite, barbed insult relating to people who were miserly with
their funds, that the miner crashed down handful after handful of
silver and notes, calling for all the fluids in the world to drown
the imputation.
Thus the work was accomplished. With his own guns we drove him from
the field. And then we had him carted to a distant small hotel and
put to bed with his nuggets and baby seal-skins stuffed around him.
"He will never find Cypher's again," said Kraft. "He will propose to
the first white apron he sees in a dairy restaurant to-morrow. And
Milly--I mean the Natural Adjustment--is saved!"
And back to Cypher's went we three, and, finding customers scarce, we
joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly in the centre.
This, I say, happened three years ago. And about that time a little
luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and
less wholesome food than Cypher's. Our paths separated, and I saw
Kraft no more and Judkins seldom.
But, as I said, I saw a painting the other day that was sold for
$5,000. The title was "Boadicea," and the figure seemed to fill all
out-of-doors. But of all the picture's admirers who stood before it,
I believe I was the only one who longed for Boadicea to stalk from
her frame, bringing me corned-beef hash with poached egg.
I hurried away to see Kraft. His satanic eyes were the same, his
hair was worse tangled, but his clothes had been made by a tailor.
"I didn't know," I said to him.
"We've bought a cottage in the Bronx with the money," said he. "Any
evening at 7."
"Then," said I, "when you led us against the lumberman--the--
Klondiker--it wasn't altogether on account of the Unerring Artistic
Adjustment of Nature?"
"Well, not altogether," said Kraft, with a grin.
MEMOIRS OF A YELLOW DOG
I don't suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to
read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many
others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves
in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays
without an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that
are still running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pelee horror.
But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as
Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger,
talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog that's spent most of his life
in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen
underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady
Longshoremen's banquet), mustn't be expcctcd to perform any tricks
with the art of speech.
I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown.
The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at
Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old
Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine
Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox
terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros
grain flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave
up. From that moment I was a pet--a mamma's own wootsey squidlums.
Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a
flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau d'Espagne pick you up and wallop
her nose all over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone
of voice: "Oh, oo's um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-
witsy skoodlums?"
>From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur
looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But
my mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups
that Noah chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my
ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her from entering me at the
Madison Square Garden for the Siberian bloodhound prize.
I'll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in
New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and
cobblestones above the first floor. Our fiat was three--well, not
flights--climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in
the regular things--1903 antique unholstered parlour set, oil chromo
of geishas in a Harlem tea house, rubber plant and husband.
By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man
with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked?--
well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him.
He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap,
ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second
floor hung out on her line to dry. And every evening while she was
getting supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a
walk.
If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they'd never
marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on
the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour's talk with the
iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two
bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the
window shade into the flat across the air-shaft--that's about all
there is to it. Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from
work she straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it won't show,
and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.
I led a dog's life in that flat. 'Most all day I lay there in my
corner watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had
pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling
at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then
she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver
and kiss me on the nose--but what could I do? A dog can't chew
cloves.
I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We looked
so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook
the streets that Morgan's cab drives down, and took to climbing the
piles of last December's snow on the streets where cheap people live.
One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look
like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he
wouldn't have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play
Mendelssohn's wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:
"What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She
don't kiss you. You don't have to sit on her lap and listen to talk
that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of
Epictetus. You ought to be thankful you're not a dog. Brace up,
Benedick, and bid the blues begone."
The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine
intelligence in his face.
"Why, doggie," says he, "good doggie. You almost look like you could
speak. What is it, doggie--Cats?"
Cats! Could speak!
But, of course, he couldn't understand. Humans were denied the
speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon
which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.
In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan
terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he
always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses
with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an
elucidation.
"See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip," I says, "you know that it ain't the
nature of a real man to play dry nurse to a dog in public. I never
saw one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn't look like he'd like to
lick every other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in
every day as perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing the
egg trick. How does he do it? Don't tell me he likes it."
"Him?" says the black-and-tan. "Why, he uses Nature's Own Remedy.
He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he's as shy as the man
on the steamer who would rather play pedro when they make 'em all
jackpots. By the time we've been in eight saloons he don't care
whether the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a catfish. I've
lost two inches of my tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors."
The pointer I got from that terrier--vaudeville please copy--set me
to thinking.
One evening about 6 o'clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and
do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that
is what she called me. The black-and-tan was called "Tweetness." I
consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you could chase a
rabbit. Still "Lovey" is something of a nomenclatural tin can on the
tail of one's self respect.
At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my
custodian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-
ahead scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the press
despatches that lets the family know that little Alice is bogged
while gathering lilies in the brook.
"Why, darn my eyes," says the old man, with a grin; "darn my eyes if
the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain't asking me in to
take a drink. Lemme see--how long's it been since I saved shoe
leather by keeping one foot on the foot-rest? I believe I'll--"
I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an
hour he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the
waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat
never equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store
eight minutes before papa comes home.
When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread
the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like
a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and
threw it into the street.
"Poor doggie," says he; "good doggie. She shan't kiss you any more.
'S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street
car and be happy."
I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man's legs
happy as a pug on a rug.
"You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser," I said to him--"you moon-
baying, rabbit-pointing, eggstealing old beagle, can't you see that I
don't want to leave you? Can't you see that we're both Pups in the
Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle after you with the dish towel
and me with the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why
not cut that all out and be pards forever more?"
Maybe you'll say he didn't understand--maybe he didn't. But he kind
of got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute,
thinking.
"Doggie," says he, finally, "we don't live more than a dozen lives on
this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever
see that flat any more I'm a flat, and if you do you're flatter; and
that's no flattery. I'm offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out
by the length of a dachshund."
There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the
Twenty-third street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to
give thanks that prehensile claws had been given them.
On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood eating a
currant bun:
"Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains."
But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my ears
until I howled, and said:
"You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured son of a
door mat, do you know what I'm going to call you?"
I thought of "Lovey," and I whined dolefully.
"I'm going to call you 'Pete,'" says my master; and if I'd had five
tails I couldn't have done enough wagging to do justice to the
occasion.
THE LOVE-PHILTRE OF IKEY SCHOENSTEIN
The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First
Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest.
The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-
brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for pain-killer it
will not give you a bonbon.
The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It
macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric.
To this day pills are made behind its tall prcscription desk--pills
rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with
the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in
little round pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about
which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become
candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them
inside.
Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend
of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of
pharmacy is not g1ace. There, as it should be, the druggist is a
counsellor, a confessor, an adviser, an able and willing missionary
and mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is
venerated and whose medicine is often poured, untasted, into the
gutter. Therefore Ikey's corniform, be-spectacled nose and narrow,
knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue
Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.
Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle's two squares away. Mrs.
Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in
vain--you must have guessed it--Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all
his thoughts; she was the compound extract of all that was chemically
pure and officinal--the dispensatory contained nothing equal to her.
But Ikey was timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum
of his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he was a superior
being, calmly conscious of special knowledge and worth; outside he
was a weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting
clothes stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and
valerianate of ammonia.
The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk
McGowan.
Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed about
by Rosy. But he was no outfielder as Ikey was; he picked them off
the bat. At the same time he was Ikey's friend and customer, and
often dropped in at the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise
painted with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant
evening spent along the Bowery.
One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way, and sat,
comely, smooth-faced, hard, indomitable, good-natured, upon a stool.
"Ikey," said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat
opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, "get busy with your ear.
It's drugs for me if you've got the line I need."
Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr. McGowan for the usual evidences
of conflict, but found none.
"Take your coat off," he ordered. "I guess already that you have
been stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you
those Dagoes would do you up."
Mr. McGowan smiled. "Not them," he said. "Not any Dagoes. But
you've located the diagnosis all right enough--it's under my coat,
near the ribs. Say! Ikey--Rosy and me are goin' to run away and get
married to-night."
Ikey's left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar,
holding it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt
it not. Meanwhile Mr. McGowan's smile faded to a look of perplexed
gloom.
"That is," he continued, "if she keeps in the notion until the time
comes. We've been layin' pipes for the getaway for two weeks. One
day she says she will; the same evenin' she says nixy. We've agreed
on to-night, and Rosy's stuck to the affirmative this time for two
whole days. But it's five hours yet till the time, and I'm afraid
she'll stand me up when it comes to the scratch."
"You said you wanted drugs," remarked Ikey.
Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed--a condition opposed to
his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine almanac into
a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.
"I wouldn't have this double handicap make a false start to-night for
a million," he said. "I've got a little flat up in Harlem all ready,
with chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And
I've engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at
9.30. It's got to come off. And if Rosy don't change her mind
again!"--Mr. McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.
"I don't see then yet," said Ikey, shortly, "what makes it that you
talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it."
"Old man Riddle don't like me a little bit," went on the uneasy
suitor, bent upon marshalling his arguments. "For a week he hasn't
let Rosy step outside the door with me. If it wasn't for losin' a
boarder they'd have bounced me long ago. I'm makin' $20 a week and
she'll never regret flyin' the coop with Chunk McGowan."
"You will excuse me, Chunk," said Ikey. "I must make a prescription
that is to be called for soon."
"Say," said McGowan, looking up suddenly, "say, Ikey, ain't there a
drug of some kind--some kind of powders that'11 make a girl like you
better if you give 'em to her?"
Ikey's lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior
enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:
"Tim Lacy told me he got some once from a croaker uptown and fed 'em
to his girl in soda water. From the very first dose he was ace-high
and everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They was married
in less than two weeks."
Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men than
Ikey was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon fine
wires. Like a good general who was about to invade the enemy's
territory he was seeking to guard every point against possible
failure.
"I thought," went on Chunk hopefully, "that if I had one of them
powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper to-night it might brace
her up and keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I
guess she don't need a mule team to drag her away, but women are
better at coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff'll
work just for a couple of hours it'll do the trick."
"When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?" asked
Ikey.
"Nine o'clock," said Mr. McGowan. "Supper's at seven. At eight Rosy
goes to bed with a headache. At nine old Parvenzano lets me through
to his back yard, where there's a board off Riddle's fence, next
door. I go under her window and help her down the fire-escape.
We've got to make it early on the preacher's account. It's all dead
easy if Rosy don't balk when the flag drops. Can you fix me one of
them powders, Ikey?"
Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.
"Chunk," said he, "it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists
must have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I
intrust a powder like that. But for you I shall make it, and you
shall see how it makes Rosy to think of you."
Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a powder
two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia.
To them he added a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk, and
folded the mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an adult this
powder would insure several hours of heavy slumber without danger to
the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to
administer it in a liquid if possible, and received the hearty thanks
of the backyard Lochinvar.
The subtlety of Ikey's action becomes apparent upon recital of his
subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle and disclosed
the plans of Mr. McGowan for eloping with Rosy. Mr. Riddle was a
stout man, brick-dusty of complexion and sudden in action.
"Much obliged," he said, briefly, to Ikey. "The lazy Irish loafer!
My own room's just above Rosy's. I'll just go up there myself after
supper and load the shot-gun and wait. If he comes in my back yard
he'll go away in a ambulance instead of a bridal chaise."
With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many-hours deep
slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned,
Ikey felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.
All night in the Blue Light Drug Store he waited at his duties for
chance news of the tragedy, but none came.
At eight o'clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey
started hurriedly for Mrs. Riddle's to learn the outcome. And, lo!
as he stepped out of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a
passing street car and grasped his hand--Chunk McGowan with a
victor's smile and flushed with joy.
"Pulled it off," said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. "Rosy bit the
fire-escape on time to a second, and we was under the wire at the
Reverend's at 9.3O 1/4. She's up at the flat--she cooked eggs this
mornin' in a blue kimono--Lord! how lucky I am! You must pace up
some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I've got a job down near the
bridge, and that's where I'm heading for now."
"The--the--powder?" stammered Ikey.
"Oh, that stuff you gave me!" said Chunk, broadening his grin; "well,
it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at
Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, 'Chunk, if you
get the girl get her on the square--don't try any hocus-pocus with a
thoroughbred like her.' And I keeps the paper you give me in my
pocket. And then my lamps fall on another party present, who, I says
to myself, is failin' in a proper affection toward his comin' son-in-
law, so I watches my chance and dumps that powder in old man Riddle's
coffee--see?"
MAMMON AND THE ARCHER
Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of
Rockwall's Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth
Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right--the
aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones--came out to
his waiting motor-car, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual,
at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace's front
elevation.
"Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!" commented the ex-Soap
King. "The Eden Musee'll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he
don't watch out. I'll have this house painted red, white, and blue
next summer and see if that'll make his Dutch nose turn up any
higher."
And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the
door of his library and shouted "Mike!" in the same voice that had
once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.
"Tell my son," said Anthony to the answering menial, "to come in here
before he leaves the house."
When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his
newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth,
ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and
rattled the keys in his pocket with the other.
"Richard," said Anthony Rockwail, "what do you pay for the soap that
you use?"
Richard, only six months home from college, was startled a little.
He had not yet taken the measure of this sire of his, who was as full
of unexpectednesses as a girl at her first party.
"Six dollars a dozen, I think, dad."
"And your clothes?"
"I suppose about sixty dollars, as a rule."
"You're a gentleman," said Anthony, decidedly. "I've heard of these
young bloods spending $24 a dozen for soap, and going over the
hundred mark for clothes. You've got as much money to waste as any
of 'em, and yet you stick to what's decent and moderate. Now I use
the old Eureka--not only for sentiment, but it's the purest soap
made. Whenever you pay more than 10 cents a cake for soap you buy
bad perfumes and labels. But 50 cents is doing very well for a young
man in your generation, position and condition. As I said, you're a
gentleman. They say it takes three generations to make one. They're
off. Money'll do it as slick as soap grease. It's made you one. By
hokey! it's almost made one of me. I'm nearly as impolite and
disagreeable and ill-mannered as these two old Knickerbocker gents on
each side of me that can't sleep of nights because I bought in
between 'em."
"There are some things that money can't accomplish," remarked young
Rockwall, rather gloomily.
"Now, don't say that," said old Anthony, shocked. "I bet my money on
money every time. I've been through the encyc1opaedia down to Y
looking for something you can't buy with it; and I expect to have to
take up the appendix next week. I'm for money against the field.
Tell me something money won't buy."
"For one thing," answered Richard, rankling a little, "it won't buy
one into the exclusive circles of society."
"Oho! won't it?" thundered the champion of the root of evil. "You
tell me where your exclusive circles would be if the first Astor
hadn't had the money to pay for his steerage passage over?"
Richard sighed.
"And that's what I was coming to," said the old man, less
boisterously. "That's why I asked you to come in. There's something
going wrong with you, boy. I've been noticing it for two weeks. Out
with it. I guess I could lay my hands on eleven millions within
twenty-four hours, besides the real estate. If it's your liver,
there's the Rambler down in the bay, coaled, and ready to steam down
to the Bahamas in two days."
"Not a bad guess, dad; you haven't missed it far."
"Ah," said Anthony, keenly; "what's her name?"
Richard began to walk up and down the library floor. There was
enough comradeship and sympathy in this crude old father of his to
draw his confidence.
"Why don't you ask her?" demanded old Anthony. "She'll jump at you.
You've got the money and the looks, and you're a decent boy. Your
hands are clean. You've got no Eureka soap on 'em. You've been to
college, but she'll overlook that."
"I haven't had a chance," said Richard.
"Make one," said Anthony. "Take her for a walk in the park, or a
straw ride, or walk home with her from church Chance! Pshaw!"
"You don't know the social mill, dad. She's part of the stream that
turns it. Every hour and minute of her time is arranged for days in
advance. I must have that girl, dad, or this town is a blackjack
swamp forevermore. And I can't write it--I can't do that."
"Tut!" said the old man. "Do you mean to tell me that with all the
money I've got you can't get an hour or two of a girl's time for
yourself?"
"I've put it off too late. She's going to sail for Europe at noon
day after to-morrow for a two years' stay. I'm to see her alone
to-morrow evening for a few minutes. She's at Larchmont now at her
aunt's. I can't go there. But I'm allowed to meet her with a cab at
the Grand Central Station to-morrow evening at the 8.30 train. We
drive down Broadway to Wallack's at a gallop, where her mother and a
box party will be waiting for us in the lobby. Do you think she
would listen to a declaration from me during that six or eight
minutes under those circumstances? No. And what chance would I have
in the theatre or afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that
your money can't unravel. We can't buy one minute of time with cash;
if we could, rich people would live longer. There's no hope of
getting a talk with Miss Lantry before she sails."
"All right, Richard, my boy," said old Anthony, cheerfully. "You may
run along down to your club now. I'm glad it ain't your liver. But
don't forget to burn a few punk sticks in the joss house to the great
god Mazuma from time to time. You say money won't buy time? Well,
of course, you can't order eternity wrapped up and delivered at your
residence for a price, but I've seen Father Time get pretty bad stone
bruises on his heels when he walked through the gold diggings."
That night came Aunt Ellen, gentle, sentimental, wrinkled, sighing,
oppressed by wealth, in to Brother Anthony at his evening paper, and
began discourse on the subject of lovers' woes.
"He told me all about it," said brother Anthony, yawning. "I told
him my bank account was at his service. And then he began to knock
money. Said money couldn't help. Said the rules of society couldn't
be bucked for a yard by a team of ten-millionaires."
"Oh, Anthony," sighed Aunt Ellen, "I wish you would not think so much
of money. Wealth is nothing where a true affection is concerned.
Love is all-powerful. If he only had spoken earlier! She could not
have refused our Richard. But now I fear it is too late. He will
have no opportunity to address her. All your gold cannot bring
happiness to your son."
At eight o'clock the next evening Aunt Ellen took a quaint old gold
ring from a moth-eaten case and gave it to Richard.
"Wear it to-night, nephew," she begged. "Your mother gave it to me.
Good luck in love she said it brought. She asked me to give it to
you when you had found the one you loved."
Young Rockwall took the ring reverently and tried it on his smallest
finger. It slipped as far as the second joint and stopped. He took
it off and stuffed it into his vest pocket, after the manner of man.
And then he 'phoned for his cab.
At the station he captured Miss Lantry out of the gadding mob at
eight thirty-two.
"We mustn't keep mamma and the others waiting," said she.
"To Wallack's Theatre as fast as you can drive!" said Richard
loyally.
They whirled up Forty-second to Broadway, and then down the white-
starred lane that leads from the soft meadows of sunset to the rocky
hills of morning.
At Thirty-fourth Street young Richard quickly thrust up the trap and
ordered the cabman to stop.
"I've dropped a ring," he apo1ogised, as he climbed out. "It was my
mother's, and I'd hate to lose it. I won't detain you a minute--I
saw where it fell."
In less than a minute he was back in the cab with the ring.
But within that minute a crosstown car had stopped directly in front
of the cab. The cabman tried to pass to the left, but a heavy
express wagon cut him off. He tried the right, and had to back away
from a furniture van that had no business to be there. He tried to
back out, but dropped his reins and swore dutifully. He was
blockaded in a tangled mess of vehicles and horses.
One of those street blockades had occurred that sometimes tie up
commerce and movement quite suddenly in the big city.
"Why don't you drive on?" said Miss Lantry, impatiently. "We'll be
late."
Richard stood up in the cab and looked around. He saw a congested
flood of wagons, trucks, cabs, vans and street cars filling the vast
space where Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirly-fourth street cross one
another as a twenty-six inch maiden fills her twenty-two inch girdle.
And still from all the cross streets they were hurrying and rattling
toward the converging point at full speed, and hurling thcmselves
into the struggling mass, locking wheels and adding their drivers'
imprecations to the clamour. The entire traffic of Manhattan seemed
to have jammed itself around them. The oldest New Yorker among the
thousands of spectators that lined the sidewalks had not witnessed a
street blockade of the proportions of this one.
"I'm very sorry," said Richard, as he resumed his seat, "but it looks
as if we are stuck. They won't get this jumble loosened up in an
hour. It was my fault. If I hadn't dropped the ring we--"Let me see
the ring," said Miss Lantry. "Now that it can't be helped, I don't
care. I think theatres are stupid, anyway."
At 11 o'clock that night somebody tapped lightly on Anthony
Rockwall's door.
"Come in," shouted Anthony, who was in a red dressing-gown, reading a
book of piratical adventures.
Somebody was Aunt Ellen, looking like a grey-haired angel that had
been left on earth by mistake.
"They're engaged, Anthony," she said, softly. "She has promised to
marry our Richard. On their way to the theatre there was a street
blockade, and it was two hours before their cab could get out of it.
"And oh, brother Anthony, don't ever boast of the power of money
again. A little emblem of true love--a little ring that symbolised
unending and unmercenary affection--was the cause of our Richard
finding his happiness. He dropped it in the street, and got out to
recover it. And before they could continue the blockade occurred.
He spoke to his love and won her there while the cab was hemmed in.
Money is dross compared with true love, Anthony."
"All right," said old Anthony. "I'm glad the boy has got what he
wanted. I told him I wouldn't spare any expense in the matter if--"
"But, brother Anthony, what good could your money have done?"
"Sister," said Anthony Rockwall. "I've got my pirate in a devil of
a scrape. His ship has just been scuttled, and he's too good a judge
of the value of money to let drown. I wish you would let me go on
with this chapter."
The story should end here. I wish it would as heartily as you who
read it wish it did. But we must go to the bottom of the well for
truth.
The next day a person with red hands and a blue polka-dot necktie,
who called himself Kelly, called at Anthony Rockwall's house, and was
at once received in the library.
"Well," said Anthony, reaching for his chequebook, "it was a good
bilin' of soap. Let's see--you had $5,000 in cash."
"I paid out $3OO more of my own," said Kelly. "I had to go a little
above the estimate. I got the express wagons and cabs mostly for $5;
but the trucks and two-horse teams mostly raised me to $10. The
motormen wanted $10, and some of the loaded teams $20. The cops
struck me hardest--$50 I paid two, and the rest $20 and $25. But
didn't it work beautiful, Mr. Rockwall? I'm glad William A. Brady
wasn't onto that little outdoor vehicle mob scene. I wouldn't want
William to break his heart with jealousy. And never a rehearsal,
either! The boys was on time to the fraction of a second. It was
two hours before a snake could get below Greeley's statue."
"Thirteen hundred--there you are, Kelly," said Anthony, tearing off
a check. "Your thousand, and the $300 you were out. You don't
despise money, do you, Kelly?"
"Me?" said Kelly. "I can lick the man that invented poverty."
Anthony called Kelly when he was at the door.
"You didn't notice," said he, "anywhere in the tie-up, a kind of a
fat boy without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow,
did you?"
"Why, no," said Kelly, mystified. "I didn't. If he was like you
say, maybe the cops pinched him before I got there."
"I thought the little rascal wouldn't be on hand," chuckled Anthony.
"Good-by, Kelly."
SPRINGTIME A LA CARTE
It was a day in March.
Never, never begin a story this way when you write one. No opening
could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely
to consist of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For
the following paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative,
is too wildly extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face
of the reader without preparation.
Sarah was crying over her bill of fare.
Think of a New York girl shedding tears on the menu card!
To account for this you will be allowed to guess that the lobsters
were all out, or that she had sworn ice-cream off during Lent, or
that she had ordered onions, or that she had just come from a Hackett
matinee. And then, all these theories being wrong, you will please
let the story proceed.
The gentleman who announced that the world was an oyster which he
with his sword would open made a larger hit than he deserved. It is
not difficult to open an oyster with a sword. But did you ever
notice any one try to open the terrestrial bivalve with a typewriter?
Like to wait for a dozen raw opened that way?
Sarah had managed to pry apart the shells with her unhandy weapon far
enough to nibble a wee bit at the cold and clammy world within. She
knew no more shorthand than if she had been a graduate in stenography
just let slip upon the world by a business college. So, not being
able to stenog, she could not enter that bright galaxy of office
talent. She was a free-lance typewriter and canvassed for odd jobs
of copying.
The most brilliant and crowning feat of Sarah's battle with the world
was the deal she made with Schulenberg's Home Restaurant. The
restaurant was next door to the old red brick in which she ball-
roomed. One evening after dining at Schulenberg's 40-cent, five-
course ~table d'hote~ (served as fast as you throw the five baseballs
at the coloured gentleman's head) Sarah took away with her the bill
of fare. It was written in an almost unreadable script neither
English nor German, and so arranged that if you were not careful you
began with a toothpick and rice pudding and ended with soup and the
day of the week.
The next day Sarah showed Schulenberg a neat card on which the menu
was beautifully typewritten with the viands temptingly marshalled
under their right and proper heads from "hors d'oeuvre" to "not
responsible for overcoats and umbrellas."
Schulenberg became a naturalised citizen on the spot. Before Sarah
left him she had him willingly committed to an agreement. She was to
furnish typewritten bills of fare for the twenty-one tables in the
restaurant--a new bill for each day's dinner, and new ones for
breakfast and lunch as often as changes occurred in the food or as
neatness required.
In return for this Schulenberg was to send three meals per diem to
Sarah's hall room by a waiter--an obsequious one if possible--and
furnish her each afternoon with a pencil draft of what Fate had in
store for Schulenberg's customers on the morrow.
Mutual satisfaction resulted from the agreement. Schulenberg's
patrons now knew what the food they ate was called even if its nature
sometimes puzzled them. And Sarah had food during a cold, dull
winter, which was the main thing with her.
And then the almanac lied, and said that spring had come. Spring
comes when it comes. The frozen snows of January still lay like
adamant in the crosstown streets. The hand-organs still played "In
the Good Old Summertime," with their December vivacity and
expression. Men began to make thirty-day notes to buy Easter
dresses. Janitors shut off steam. And when these things happen one
may know that the city is still in the clutches of winter.
One afternoon Sarah shivered in her elegant hall bedroom; "house
heated; scrupulously clean; conveniences; seen to be appreciated."
She had no work to do except Schulenberg's menu cards. Sarah sat in
her squeaky willow rocker, and looked out the window. The calendar
on the wall kept crying to her: "Springtime is here, Sarah--
springtime is here, I tell you. Look at me, Sarah, my figures show
it. You've got a neat figure yourself, Sarah--a--nice springtime
figure--why do you look out the window so sadly?"
Sarah's room was at the back of the house. Looking out the window
she could see the windowless rear brick wall of the box factory on
the next street. But the wall was clearest crystal; and Sarah was
looking down a grassy lane shaded with cherry trees and elms and
bordered with raspberry bushes and Cherokee roses.
Spring's real harbingers are too subtle for the eye and ear. Some
must have the flowering crocus, the wood-starring dogwood, the voice
of bluebird--even so gross a reminder as the farewell handshake of
the retiring buckwheat and oyster before they can welcome the Lady in
Green to their dull bosoms. But to old earth's choicest kin there
come straight, sweet messages from his newest bride, telling them
they shall be no stepchildren unless they choose to be.
On the previous summer Sarah had gone into the country and loved a
farmer.
(In writing your story never hark back thus. It is bad art, and
cripples interest. Let it march, march.)
Sarah stayed two weeks at Sunnybrook Farm. There she learned to love
old Farmer Franklin's son Walter. Farmers have been loved and wedded
and turned out to grass in less time. But young Walter Franklin was
a modern agriculturist. He had a telephone in his cow house, and he
could figure up exactly what effect next year's Canada wheat crop
would have on potatoes planted in the dark of the moon.
It was in this shaded and raspberried lane that Walter had wooed and
won her. And together they had sat and woven a crown of dandelions
for her hair. He had immoderately praised the effect of the yellow
blossoms against her brown tresses; and she had left the chaplet
there, and walked back to the house swinging her straw sailor in her
hands.
They were to marry in the spring--at the very first signs of spring,
Walter said. And Sarah came back to the city to pound her
typewriter.
A knock at the door dispelled Sarah's visions of that happy day. A
waiter had brought the rough pencil draft of the Home Restaurant's
next day fare in old Schulenberg's angular hand.
Sarah sat down to her typewriter and slipped a card between the
rollers. She was a nimble worker. Generally in an hour and a half
the twenty-one menu cards were written and ready.
To-day there were more changes on the bill of fare than usual. The
soups were lighter; pork was eliminated from the entrees, figuring
only with Russian turnips among the roasts. The gracious spirit of
spring pervaded the entire menu. Lamb, that lately capered on the
greening hillsides, was becoming exploited with the sauce that
commemorated its gambols. The song of the oyster, though not
silenced, was ~diminuendo con amore~. The frying-pan seemed to be
held, inactive, behind the beneficent bars of the broiler. The pie
list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his
drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis
with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.
Sarah's fingers danced like midgets above a summer stream. Down
through the courses she worked, giving each item its position
according to its length with an accurate eye. Just above the
desserts came the list of vegetables. Carrots and peas, asparagus on
toast, the perennial tomatoes and corn and succotash, lima beans,
cabbage--and then--
Sarah was crying over her bill of fare. Tears from the depths of
some divine despair rose in her heart and gathered to her eyes. Down
went her head on the little typewriter stand; and the keyboard
rattled a dry accompaniment to her moist sobs.
For she had received no letter from Walter in two weeks, and the next
item on the bill of fare was dandelions--dandelions with some kind of
egg--but bother the egg!--dandelions, with whose golden blooms Walter
had crowned her his queen of love and future bride--dandelions, the
harbingers of spring, her sorrow's crown of sorrow--reminder of her
happiest days.
Madam, I dare you to smile until you suffer this test: Let the
Marechal Niel roses that Percy brought you on the night you gave him
your heart be served as a salad with French dressing before your eyes
at a Schulenberg ~table d'hote~. Had Juliet so seen her love tokens
dishonoured the sooner would she have sought the lethean herbs of the
good apothecary.
But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and
iron a message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the
little hardy courier of the fields with his rough green coat and
modest air. He is a true soldier of fortune, this ~dent-de-lion~--
this lion's tooth, as the French chefs call him. Flowered, he will
assist at love-making, wreathed in my lady's nut-brown hair; young
and callow and unblossomed, he goes into the boiling pot and delivers
the word of his sovereign mistress.
By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written.
But, still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she
fingered the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her
mind and heart in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon
she came swiftly back to the rock-bound lanes of Manhattan, and the
typewriter began to rattle and jump like a strike-breaker's motor
car.
At 6 o'clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the
typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh,
the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As
this dark mass had been transformed from a bright and love-indorsed
flower to be an ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted
and perished. Love may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but
Sarah could not bring herself to eat the dandelions that had graced,
as ornaments, the first spiritual banquet of her heart's true
affection.
At 7:30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel: the man in the
room above sought for A on his flute; the gas went a little lower;
three coal wagons started to unload--the only sound of which the
phonograph is jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated
toward Mukden. By these signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to
read. She got out "The Cloister and the Hearth," the best non-
selling book of the month, settled her feet on her trunk, and began
to wander with Gerard.
The front door bell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left
Gerard and Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would,
just as she did!
And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped
for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round
easily the bear's. You have guessed it. She reached the top of the
stairs just as her farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and
garnered her, with nothing left for the gleaners.
"Why haven't you written--oh, why?" cried Sarah.
"New York is a pretty large town," said Walter Franklin. "I came in
a week ago to your old address. I found that you went away on a
Thursday. That consoled some; it eliminated the possible Friday bad
luck. But it didn't prevent my hunting for you with police and
otherwise ever since!
"I wrote!" said Sarah, vehemently.
"Never got it!"
"Then how did you find me?"
The young farmer smiled a springtime smile.
"I dropped into that Home Restaurant next door this evening," said
he. "I don't care who knows it; I like a dish of some kind of greens
at this time of the year. I ran my eye down that nice typewritten
bill of fare looking for something in that line. When I got below
cabbage I turned my chair over and hollered for the proprietor. He
told me where you lived."
"I remember," sighed Sarah, happily. "That was dandelions below
cabbage."
"I'd know that cranky capital W 'way above the line that your
typewriter makes anywhere in the world," said Franklin.
"Why, there's no W in dandelions," said Sarah, in surprise.
The young man drew the bill of fare from his pocket, and pointed to
a line.
Sarah recognised the first card she had typewritten that afternoon.
There was still the rayed splotch in the upper right-hand corner
where a tear had fallen. But over the spot where one should have
read the name of the meadow plant, the clinging memory of their
golden blossoms had allowed her fingers to strike strange keys.
Between the red cabbage and the stuffed green peppers was the item:
"DEAREST WALTER, WITH HARD-BOILED EGG."
THE GREEN DOOR
Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten
minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are
choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way
of vaudeville. Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to
look into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in
diamonds and Russian sables. She thrusts hurriedly into your hand
an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors,
snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates
the one word, "parallelogram!" and swiftly flies down a cross street,
looking back fearfully over her shoulder.
That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it? Not you. You
would flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll
and continue down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button.
This you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the
pure spirit of adventure is not dead.
True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in
print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented
methods. They have been out after the things they wanted--golden
fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The
true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and
greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son--when he
started back home.
Half-adventurers--brave and splendid figures--have been numerous.
>From the Crusades to the Palisades they have enriched the arts of
history and fiction and the trade of historical fiction. But each
of them had a prize to win, a goal to kick, an axe to grind, a race
to run, a new thrust in tierce to deliver, a name to carve, a crow to
pick--so they were not followers of true adventure.
In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always
abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep
at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing
why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to
belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping
thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and
shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cab-driver
deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for
us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to
our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of
instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the
passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain--and our umbrella may be
sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the
Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon,
eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the
mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped
into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them.
We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We
pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to
reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or
two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong
feud with a steam radiator.
Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on which
he did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the
unexpected and the egregious. The most interesting thing in life
seemed to him to be what might lie just around the next corner.
Sometimes his willingness to tempt fate led him into strange paths.
Twice he had spent the night in a station-house; again and again he
had found himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his
watch and money had been the price of one flattering allurement. But
with undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before him
into the merry lists of adventure.
One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the
older central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the
sidewalks--the home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that
abandons home for the specious welcome of the thousand-candle-power
~table d'hote~.
The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and
watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore
his tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick
pin; and once he had written to the editor of a magazine that
"Junie's Love Test" by Miss Libbey, had been the book that had most
influenced his life.
During his walk a violent chattering of teeth in a glass case on the
sidewalk seemed at first to draw his attention (with a qualm), to a
restaurant before which it was set; but a second glance revealed the
electric letters of a dentist's sign high above the next door. A
giant negro, fantastically dressed in a red embroidered coat, yellow
trousers and a military cap, discreetly distributed cards to those of
the passing crowd who consented to take them.
This mode of dentistic advertising was a common sight to Rudolf.
Usually he passed the dispenser of the dentist's cards without
reducing his store; but tonight the African slipped one into his hand
so deftly that he retained it there smiling a little at the
successful feat.
When he had travelled a few yards further he glanced at the card
indifferently. Surprised, he turned it over and looked again with
interest. One side of the card was blank; on the other was written
in ink three words, "The Green Door." And then Rudolf saw, three
steps in front of him, a man throw down the card the negro had given
him as he passed. Rudolf picked it up. It was printed with the
dentist's name and address and the usual schedule of "plate work" and
"bridge work" and specious promises of "painless" operations.
The adventurous piano salesman halted at the corner and considered.
Then he crossed the street, walked down a block, recrossed and joined
the upward current of people again. Without seeming to notice the
negro as he passed the second time, he carelessly took the card that
was handed him. Ten steps away he inspected it. In the same
handwriting that appeared on the first card "The Green Door" was
inscribed upon it. Three or four cards were tossed to the pavement
by pedestrians both following and leading him. These fell blank side
up. Rudolf turned them over. Every one bore the printed legend of
the dental "parlours."
Rarely did the arch sprite Adventure need to beckon twice to Rudolf
Steiner, his true follower. But twice it had been done, and the
quest was on.
Rudolf walked slowly back to where the giant negro stood by the case
of rattling teeth. This time as he passed he received no card. In
spite of his gaudy and ridiculous garb, the Ethiopian displayed a
natural barbaric dignity as he stood, offering the cards suavely to
some, allowing others to pass unmolested. Every half minute he
chanted a harsh, unintelligible phrase akin to the jabber of car
conductors and grand opera. And not only did he withhold a card this
time, but it seemed to Rudolf that he received from the shining and
massive black countenance a look of cold, almost contemptuous
disdain.
The look stung the adventurer. He read in it a silent accusation
that he had been found wanting. Whatever the mysterious written
words on the cards might mean, the black had selected him twice from
the throng for their recipient; and now seemed to have condemned him
as deficient in the wit and spirit to engage the enigma.
Standing aside from the rush, the young man made a rapid estimate of
the building in which he conceived that his adventure must lie. Five
stories high it rose. A small restaurant occupied the basement.
The first floor, now closed, seemed to house millinery or furs. The
second floor, by the winking electric letters, was the dentist's.
Above this a polyglot babel of signs struggled to indicate the abodes
of palmists, dressmakers, musicians and doctors. Still higher up
draped curtains and milk bottles white on the window sills proclaimed
the regions of domesticity.
After concluding his survey Rudolf walked briskly up the high flight
of stone steps into the house. Up two flights of the carpeted
stairway he continued; and at its top paused. The hallway there was
dimly lighted by two pale jets of gas one--far to his right, the
other nearer, to his left. He looked toward the nearer light and saw,
within its wan halo, a green door. For one moment he hesitated; then
he seemed to see the contumelious sneer of the African juggler of
cards; and then he walked straight to the green door and knocked
against it.
Moments like those that passed before his knock was answered measure
the quick breath of true adventure. What might not be behind those
green panels! Gamesters at play; cunning rogues baiting their traps
with subtle skill; beauty in love with courage, and thus planning to
be sought by it; danger, death, love, disappointment, ridicule--any
of these might respond to that temerarious rap.
A faint rustle was heard inside, and the door slowly opened. A girl
not yet twenty stood there, white-faced and tottering. She loosed
the knob and swayed weakly, groping with one hand. Rudolf caught her
and laid her on a faded couch that stood against the wall. He closed
the door and took a swift glance around the room by the light of a
flickering gas jet. Neat, but extreme poverty was the story that he
read.
The girl lay still, as if in a faint. Rudolf looked around the room
excitedly for a barrel. People must be rolled upon a barrel who--no,
no; that was for drowned persons. He began to fan her with his hat.
That was successful, for he struck her nose with the brim of his
derby and she opened her eyes. And then the young man saw that hers,
indeed, was the one missing face from his heart's gallery of intimate
portraits. The frank, grey eyes, the little nose, turning pertly
outward; the chestnut hair, curling like the tendrils of a pea vine,
seemed the right end and reward of all his wonderful adventures. But
the face was wofully thin and pale.
The girl looked at him calmly, and then smiled.
"Fainted, didn't I?" she asked, weakly. "Well, who wouldn't? You
try going without anything to eat for three days and see!"
"Himmel!" exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. "Wait till I come back."
He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes
he was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open
it. With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and
the restaurant. On the table he laid them--bread and butter, cold
meats, cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of
milk and one of redhot tea.
"This is ridiculous," said Rudolf, blusteringly, "to go without
eating. You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is
ready." He helped her to a chair at the table and asked: "Is there
a cup for the tea?" "On the shelf by the window," she answered.
When he turned again with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining
rapturously, beginning upon a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted
out from the paper bags with a woman's unerring instinct. He took it
from her, laughingly, and poured the cup full of milk. "Drink that
first" he ordered, "and then you shall have some tea, and then a
chicken wing. If you are very good you shall have a pickle
to-morrow. And now, if you'll allow me to be your guest we'll have
supper."
He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl's eyes and
brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of
dainty ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemcd to regard
the young man's presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural
thing--not as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one
whose great stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for
the human. But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort,
came also a sense of the little conventions that belong; and she
began to tell him her little story. It was one of a thousand such as
the city yawns at every day--the shop girl's story of insufficient
wages, further reduced by "fines" that go to swell the store's
profits; of time lost through illness; and then of lost positions,
lost hope, and--the knock of the adventurer upon the green door.
But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis
in "Junie's Love Test."
"To think of you going through all that," he exclaimed.
"It was something fierce," said the girl, solemnly.
"And you have no relatives or friends in the city?"
"None whatever."
"I am all alone in the world, too," said Rudolf, after a pause.
"I am glad of that," said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased
the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.
Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.
"I'm awfully sleepy," she said, "and I feel so good."
Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. "I'll say good-night. A long
night's sleep will be fine for you."
He held out his hand, and she took it and said "good-night." But
her eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically
that he answered it with words.
"Oh, I'm coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting along. You
can't get rid of me so easily."
Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much
less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: "How did
you come to knock at my door?"
He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a
sudden jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as
adventurous as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the
truth. He would never let her know that he was aware of the strange
expedient to which she had been driven by her great distress.
"One of our piano tuners lives in this house," he said. "I knocked
at your door by mistake."
The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was
her smile.
At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him.
And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming
back, ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled
explorations. Every door that he found in the house was painted
green.
Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was
still there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.
"Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?"
he asked.
In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid
advertisement of his master's profession.
"Dar it is, boss," he said, pointing down the street. "But I 'spect
you is a little late for de fust act."
Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre
the blazing electric sign of its new play, "The Green Door."
"I'm informed dat it's a fust-rate show, sah," said the negro. "De
agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to
distribute a few of his cards along with de doctah's. May I offer
you one of de doctah's cards, sah?"
At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a
glass of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted
weed he buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to
the lamp post on the corner:
"All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the
way for me to find her."
Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf
Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.
FROM THE CABBY'S SEAT
The cabby has his point of view. It is more single-minded, perhaps,
than that of a follower of any other calling. From the high, swaying
seat of his hansom he looks upon his fellow-men as nomadic particles,
of no account except when possessed of migratory desires. He is
Jehu, and you are goods in transit. Be you President or vagabond, to
cabby you are only a Fare, he takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles
your vertebrae and sets you down.
When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with
legal rates you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you
have left your pocketbook behind you are made to realise the mildness
of Dante's imagination.
It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby's singleness of
purpose and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom's
peculiar construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter
on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of
inconstant leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a
toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap--you, before whom butlers
cringe on solid land--and must squeak upward through a slit in your
peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.
Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents. You
are a cargo at sea, and the "cherub that sits up aloft" has Davy
Jones's street and number by heart.
One night there were sounds of revelry in the big brick tenement-
house next door but one to McGary's Family Cafe. The sounds seemed
to emanate from the apartments of the Walsh family. The sidewalk was
obstructed by an assortment of interested neighbours, who opened a
lane from time to time for a hurrying messenger bearing from McGary's
goods pertinent to festivity and diversion. The sidewalk contingent
was engaged in comment and discussion from which it made no effort to
eliminate the news that Norah Walsh was being married.
In the fulness of time there was an eruption of the merry-makers to
the sidewalk. The uninvited guests enveloped and permeated them, and
upon the night air rose joyous cries, congratulations, laughter and
unclassified noises born of McGary's oblations to the hymeneal scene.
Close to the curb stood Jerry O'Donovan's cab. Night-hawk was Jerry
called; but no more lustrous or cleaner hansom than his ever closed
its doors upon point lace and November violets. And Jerry's horse!
I am within bounds when I tell you that he was stuffed with oats
until one of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home
and go about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled--yes,
smiled--to have seen him.
Among the shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of
Jerry's high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of
his nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny
of millionaires and by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned
green coat, admired in the vicinity of McGary's. It was plain that
Jerry had usurped the functions of his cab, and was carrying a
"load." Indeed, the figure may be extended and he be likened to a
bread-waggon if we admit the testimony of a youthful spectator, who
was heard to remark "Jerry has got a bun."
>From somewhere among the throng in the street or else out of the thin
stream of pedestrians a young woman tripped and stood by the cab.
The professional hawk's eye of Jerry caught the movement. He made a
lurch for the cab, overturning three or four onlookers and himself--
no! he caught the cap of a water-plug and kept his feet. Like a
sailor shinning up the ratlins during a squall Jerry mounted to his
professional seat. Once he was there McGary's liquids were baffled.
He seesawed on the mizzenmast of his craft as safe as a Steeple Jack
rigged to the flagpole of a skyscraper.
"Step in, lady," said Jerry, gathering his lines. The young woman
stepped into the cab; the doors shut with a bang; Jerry's whip
cracked in the air; the crowd in the gutter scattered, and the fine
hansom dashed away 'crosstown.
When the oat-spry horse had hedged a little his first spurt of speed
Jerry broke the lid of his cab and called down through the aperture
in the voice of a cracked megaphone, trying to please:
"Where, now, will ye be drivin' to?"
"Anywhere you please," came up the answer, musical and contented.
"'Tis drivin' for pleasure she is," thought Jerry. And then he
suggested as a matter of course:
"Take a thrip around in the park, lady. 'Twill be ilegant cool and
fine."
"Just as you like," answered the fare, pleasantly.
The cab headed for Fifth avenue and sped up that perfect street.
Jerry bounced and swayed in his seat. The potent fluids of McGary
were disquieted and they sent new fumes to his head. He sang an
ancient song of Killisnook and brandished his whip like a baton.
Inside the cab the fare sat up straight on the cushions, looking to
right and left at the lights and houses. Even in the shadowed hansom
her eyes shone like stars at twilight.
When they reached Fifty-ninth street Jerry's head was bobbing and his
reins were slack. But his horse turned in through the park gate and
began the old familiar nocturnal round. And then the fare leaned
back, entranced, and breathed deep the clean, wholesome odours of
grass and leaf and bloom. And the wise beast in the shafts, knowing
his ground, struck into his by-the-hour gait and kept to the right of
the road.
Habit also struggled successfully against Jerry's increasing torpor.
He raised the hatch of his storm-tossed vessel and made the inquiry
that cabbies do make in the park.
"Like shtop at the Cas-sino, lady? Gezzer r'freshm's, 'n lish'n the
music. Ev'body shtops."
"I think that would be nice," said the fare.
They reined up with a plunge at the Casino entrance. The cab doors
flew open. The fare stepped directly upon the floor. At once she
was caught in a web of ravishing music and dazzled by a panorama of
lights and colours. Some one slipped a little square card into her
hand on which was printed a number--34. She looked around and saw
her cab twenty yards away already lining up in its place among the
waiting mass of carriages, cabs and motor cars. And then a man who
seemed to be all shirt-front danced backward before her; and next she
was seated at a little table by a railing over which climbed a
jessamine vine.
There seemed to be a wordless invitation to purchase; she consulted
a collection of small coins in a thin purse, and received from them
license to order a glass of beer. There she sat, inhaling and
absorbing it all--the new-coloured, new-shaped life in a fairy palace
in an enchanted wood.
At fifty tables sat princes and queens clad in all the silks and gems
of the world. And now and then one of them would look curiously at
Jerry's fare. They saw a plain figure dressed in a pink silk of the
kind that is tempered by the word "foulard," and a plain face that
wore a look of love of life that the queens envied.
Twice the long hands of the clocks went round, Royalties thinned from
their ~al fresco~ thrones, and buzzed or clattered away in their
vehicles of state. The music retired into cases of wood and bags of
leather and baize. Waiters removed cloths pointedly near the plain
figure sitting almost alone.
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