The Voice of the City
by O Henry
THE VOICE OF THE CITY
Twenty-five years ago the school children used
to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery
was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an
Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill.
I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and
sawdust.
I remember one beautiful and instructive little
lyric that emanated from the physiology class. The
most striking line of it was this:
"The shin-bone is the long-est bone in the hu-man
bod-y."
What an inestimable boon it would have been if
all the corporeal and spiritual facts pertaining to
man bad thus been tunefully and logically inculcated
in our youthful minds! But what we gained in
anatomy, music and philosophy was meagre.
The other day I became confused. I needed a
ray of light. I turned back to those school days for
aid. But in all the nasal harmonies we whined forth
from those bard benches I could not recall one that
treated of the voice of agglomerated mankind.
In other words, of the composite vocal message of
massed humanity.
In other words, of the Voice of a Big City.
Now, the individual voice is not lacking. We can
understand the song of the poet, the ripple of the
brook, the meaning of the man who wants $5 until
next Monday, the inscriptions on the tombs of the
Pharaohs, the language of flowers, the "step lively"
of the conductor, and the prelude of the milk cans at
4 A. M. Certain large-eared ones even assert that
they are wise to the vibrations of the tympanum pro-
need by concussion of the air emanating from Mr.
H. James. But who can comprehend the meaning
of the voice of the city?
I went out for to see.
First, I asked Aurelia. She wore white Swiss and a
bat with flowers on it, and ribbons and ends of things
fluttered here and there.
"Tell me," I said, stammeringly, for I have no
voice of my own, "what does this big - er -
enormous - er - whopping city say? It must have
a voice of some kind. Does it ever speak to you?
How do you interpret its meaning? It is a tremen-
dous mass, but it must have a key:'
"Like a Saratoga trunk?" asked Aurelia.
"No," said I. "Please do not refer to the lid. I
have a fancy that every city has a voice. Each one
has something to say to the one who can hear it.
What does the big one say to you? "
"All cities," said Aurelia, judicially, "say the
same thing. When they get through saying it
there is an echo from Philadelphia. So, they are
unanimous."
"Here are 4,000,000 people," said I, scholastic-
ally, "compressed upon an island, which is mostly
lamb surrounded by Wall Street water. The conjunc-
tion of so many units into so small a space must
result in an identity - or, or rather a homogeneity
that finds its oral expression through a common chan-
nel. It is, as you might say, a consensus of transla-
tion, concentrating in a crystallized, general idea
which reveals itself in what may be termed the Voice
of the City. Can you tell me what it is?
Aurelia smiled wonderfully. She sat on the high
stoop. A spray of insolent ivy bobbed against her
right ear. A ray of impudent moonlight flickered
upon her nose. But I was adamant, nickel-
plated.
"I must go and find out," I said, "what is the
Voice of this city. Other cities have voices. It is an
assignment. I must have it. New York," I con-
tinned, in a rising tone, "had better not hand me a
cigar and say: ' Old man, I can't talk for publication.'
No other city acts in that way. Chicago says, unhes-
itatingly, 'I will;' I Philadelphia says, 'I should;'
New Orleans says, ' I used to;' Louisville says,
'Don't care if I do;' St. Louis says, 'Excuse me;'
Pittsburg says, 'Smoke up.' Now, New York - "
Aurelia smiled.
"Very well," said I, "I must go elsewhere and find
out."
I went into a palace, tile-floored, cherub-ceilinged
and square with the cop. I put my foot on the brass
rail and said to Billy Magnus, the best bartender in
the diocese:
Billy, you've lived in New York a long time
what kind of a song-and-dance does this old town give
you? What I mean is, doesn't the gab of it seem to
kind of bunch up and slide over the bar to you in a
sort of amalgamated tip that bits off the burg in a
kind of an epigram with a dash of bitters and a slice
of - "
"Excuse me a minute," said Billy, "somebody's
punching the button at the side door."
He went away; came back with an empty tin
bucket; again vanished with it full; returned and
said to me:
"That was Mame. She rings twice. She likes a
glass of beer for supper. Her and the kid. If you
ever saw that little skeesicks of mine brace up in his
high chair and take his beer and - But, say, what
was yours? I get kind of excited when I bear them
two rings -was it the baseball score or gin fizz you
asked for?"
"Ginger ale," I answered.
I walked up to Broadway. I saw a cop on the cor-
ner. The cops take kids up, women across, and men
in. I went up to him.
If I'm not exceeding the spiel limit," I said, "let
me ask you. You see New York during its vocative
hours. It is the function of you and your brother
cops to preserve the acoustics of the city. There must
be a civic voice that is intelligible to you. At night
during your lonely rounds you must have beard it.
What is the epitome of its turmoil and shouting?
What does the city say to you?
"Friend," said the policeman, spinning his club,
"it don't say nothing. I get my orders from the
man higher up. Say, I guess you're all right. Stand
here for a few minutes and keep an eye open for the
roundsman."
The cop melted into the darkness of the side street.
In ten minutes be had returned.
"Married last Tuesday," be said, half gruffly.
"You know bow they are. She comes to that corner
at nine every night for a - comes to say ' hello! ' I
generally manage to be there. Say, what was it you
asked me a bit ago - what's doing in the city? Oh,
there's a roof-garden or two just opened, twelve
blocks up."
I crossed a crow's-foot of street-car tracks, and
skirted the edge of an umbrageous park. An
artificial Diana, gilded, heroic, poised, wind-ruled,
on the tower, shimmered in the clear light of her
namesake in the sky. Along came my poet, hurry-
ing, hatted, haired, emitting dactyls, spondees and
dactylis. I seized him.
"Bill," said I (in the magazine he is Cleon), "give
me a lift. I am on an assignment to find out the
Voice of the city. You see, it's a special order. Ordi-
narily a symposium comprising the views of Henry
Clews, John L. Sullivan, Edwin Markham, May Ir-
win and Charles Schwab would be about all. But this
is a different matter. We want a broad, poetic,
mystic vocalization of the city's soul and meaning.
You are the very chap to give me a hint. Some years
ago a man got at the Niagara Falls and gave us its
pitch. The note was about two feet below the lowest
G on the piano. Now, you can't put New York into
a note unless it's better indorsed than that. But give
me an idea of what it would say if it should speak. It
is bound to be a mighty and far-reaching utterance.
To arrive at it we must take the tremendous crash of
the chords of the day's traffic, the laughter and music
of the night, the solemn tones of Dr. Parkhurst, the
rag-time, the weeping, the stealthy bum of cab-wbeels,
the shout of the press agent, the tinkle of fountains
on the roof gardens, the hullabaloo of the strawberry
vender and the covers of Everybody's Magazine, the
whispers of the lovers in the parks - all these sounds,
must go into your Voice - not combined, but mixed,
and of the mixture an essence made; and of the es-
sence an extract - an audible extract, of which one
drop shall form the thing we seek."
"Do you remember," asked the poet, with a
chuckle, "that California girl we met at Stiver's
studio last week? Well, I'm on my way to see her.
She repeated that poem of mine, ' The Tribute of
Spring,' word for word. She's the smartest proposi-
tion in this town just at present. Say, how does this
confounded tie look? I spoiled four before I got one
to set right."
"And the Voice that I asked you about?" I in-
quired.
"Oh, she doesn't sing," said Cleon. "But you
ought to bear her recite my 'Angel of the Inshore
Wind.'"
I passed on. I cornered a newsboy and be flashed
at me prophetic pink papers that outstripped the
news by two revolutions of the clock's longest hand.
"Son," I said, while I pretended to chase coins in
my penny pocket, "doesn't it sometimes seem to you
as if the city ought to be able to talk? All these ups
and downs and funny business and queer things hap-
pening every daywhat would it say, do you think,
if it could speak?
"Quit yer kiddin'," said the boy. "Wot paper yer
want? I got no time to waste. It's Mag's birthday,
and I want thirty cents to git her a present."
Here was no interpreter of the city's mouthpiece.
I bought a paper, and consigned its undeclared
treaties, its premeditated murders and unfought bat-
tles to an ash can.
Again I repaired to the park and sat in the moon
shade. I thought and thought, and wondered why
none could tell me what I asked for.
And then, as swift as light from a fixed star, the
answer came to me. I arose and hurried - hurried
as so many reasoners must, back around my circle.
I knew the answer and I bugged it in my breast as I
flew, fearing lest some one would stop me and demand
my secret.
Aurelia was still on the stoop. The moon was
higher and the ivy shadows were deeper. I sat at her
side and we watched a little cloud tilt at the drifting
moon and go asunder, quite pale and discomfited.
And then, wonder of wonders and delight of de-
lights! our hands somehow touched, and our fingers
closed together and did not part.
After half an hour Aurelia said, with that smile
of hers:
"Do you know, you haven't spoken a word since
you came back! "
"That," said I, nodding wisely, "is the Voice of
the City."
THE COMPLETE LIFE OF JOHN HOPKINS
There is a saying that no man has tasted the full
flavor of life until he has known poverty, love and
war. The justness of this reflection commends it to
the lover of condensed philosophy. The three condi-
tions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing.
A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be
added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a
long-bidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through
a rip into his vest lining, be sounds the pleasure of
life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can
hope to cast.
It seems that the wise executive power that rules
life has thought best to drill man in these three con-
ditions; and none may escape all three. In rural
places the terms do not mean so much. Poverty is
less pinching; love is temperate; war shrinks to con-
tests about boundary lines and the neighbors' hens.
It is in the cities that our epigram gains in truth and
vigor; and it has remained for one John Hopkins to
crowd the experience into a rather small space of
time.
The Hopkins flat was like a thousand others.
There was a rubber plant in one window; a flea-
bitten terrier sat in the other, wondering when he
was to have his day.
John Hopkins was like a thousand others. He
worked at $20 per week in a nine-story, red-brick
building at either Insurance, Buckle's Hoisting En-
gines, Chiropody, Loans, Pulleys, Boas Renovated,
Waltz Guaranteed in Five Lessons, or Artificial
Limbs. It is not for us to wring Mr. Hopkins's avo-
cation from these outward signs that be.
Mrs. Hopkins was like a thousand others. The
auriferous tooth, the sedentary disposition, the Sun-
day afternoon wanderlust, the draught upon the
delicatessen store for home-made comforts, the
furor for department store marked-down sales, the
feeling of superiority to the lady in the third-floor
front who wore genuine ostrich tips and had two
names over her bell, the mucilaginous hours during
which she remained glued to the window sill, the vigi-
lant avoidance of the instalment man, the tireless
patronage of the acoustics of the dumb-waiter shaft
- all the attributes of the Gotham flat-dweller were
hers.
One moment yet of sententiousness and the story
moves.
In the Big City large and sudden things happen.
You round a corner and thrust the rib of your um-
brella into the eye of your old friend from Kootenai
Falls. You stroll out to pluck a Sweet William in the
park - and lo! bandits attack you - you are am-
bulanced to the hospital - you marry your nurse;
are divorced - get squeezed while short on U. P. S.
and D. 0. W. N. S. - stand in the bread line - marry
an heiress, take out your laundry and pay your club
dues - seemingly all in the wink of an eye. You
travel the streets, and a finger beckons to you, a
handkerchief is dropped for you, a brick is dropped
upon you, the elevator cable or your bank breaks, a
table d'hote or your wife disagrees with you, and Fate
tosses you about like cork crumbs in wine opened by
an un-feed waiter. The City is a sprightly young-
ster, and you are red paint upon its toy, and you get
licked off.
John Hopkins sat, after a compressed dinner, in
his glove-fitting straight-front flat. He sat upon a
hornblende couch and gazed, with satiated eyes, at
Art Brought Home to the People in the shape of
"The Storm " tacked against the wall. Mrs. Hop-
kins discoursed droningly of the dinner smells from
the flat across the ball. The flea-bitten terrier gave
Hopkins a look of disgust, and showed a man-hating
tooth.
Here was neither poverty, love, nor war; but upon
such barren stems may be grafted those essentials of
a complete life.
John Hopkins sought to inject a few raisins of
conversation into the tasteless dough of existence.
"Putting a new elevator in at the office," he said,
discarding the nominative noun, "and the boss has
turned out his whiskers."
"You don't mean it! commented Mrs. Hopkins.
"Mr. Whipples," continued John, "wore his new
spring suit down to-day. I liked it fine It's a gray
with - " He stopped, suddenly stricken by a need
that made itself known to him. "I believe I'll walk
down to the corner and get a five-cent cigar,"he
concluded.
John Hopkins took his bat aid picked his way
down the musty halls and stairs of the flat-house
The evening air was mild, and the streets shrill
with the careless cries of children playing games con-
trolled by mysterious rhythms and phrases. Their
elders held the doorways and steps with leisurely pipe
and gossip. Paradoxically, the fire-escapes sup-
ported lovers in couples who made no attempt to fly
the mounting conflagration they were there to fan.
The corner cigar store aimed at by John Hopkins
was kept by a man named Freshmayer, who looked
upon the earth as a sterile promontory.
Hopkins, unknown in the store, entered and called
genially for his "bunch of spinach, car-fare grade."
This imputation deepened the pessimism of Fresh-
mayer; but be set out a brand that came perilously
near to filling the order. Hopkins bit off the roots of
his purchase, and lighted up at the swinging gas
jet. Feeling in his pockets to make payment, he
found not a penny there.
"Say, my friend," he explained, frankly, "I've
come out without any change. Hand you that nickel
first time I pass."
Joy surged in Freshmayer's heart. Here was cor-
roboration of his belief that the world was rotten and
man a peripatetic evil. Without a word he rounded
the end of his counter and made earnest onslaught
upon his customer. Hopkins was no man to serve as
a punching-bag for a pessimistic tobacconist. He
quickly bestowed upon Freshmayer a Colorado-
maduro eye in return for the ardent kick that be
received from that dealer in goods for cash only.
The impetus of the enemy's attack forced the
Hopkins line back to the sidewalk. There the con-
flict raged; the pacific wooden Indian, with his
carven smile, was overturned, and those of the street
who delighted in carnage pressed round to view the
zealous joust.
But then came the inevitable cop and imminent
convenience for both the attacker and attacked.
John Hopkins was a peaceful citizen, who worked at
rebuses of nights in a flat, but be was not without the
fundamental spirit of resistance that comes with the
battle-rage. He knocked the policeman into a gro-
cer's sidewalk display of goods and gave Freshmayer
a punch that caused him temporarily to regret that
he had not made it a rule to extend a five-cent line
of credit to certain customers. Then Hopkins took
spiritedly to his heels down the sidewalk, closely fol-
lowed by the cigar-dealer and the policeman, whose
uniform testified to the reason in the grocer's sign
that read: "Eggs cheaper than anywhere else in
the city."
As Hopkins ran he became aware of a big, low,
red, racing automobile that kept abreast of him in
the street. This auto steered in to the side of the
sidewalk, and the man guiding it motioned to Hopkins
to jump into it. He did so without slackening his
speed, and fell into the turkey-red upholstered seat
beside the chauffeur. The big machine, with a dimin-
uendo cough, flew away like an albatross down the
avenue into which the street emptied.
The driver of the auto sped his machine without a
word. He was masked beyond guess in the goggles
and diabolic garb of the chauffeur.
"Much obliged, old man," called Hopkins, grate-
fully. "I guess you've got sporting blood in you,
all right, and don't admire the sight of two men
trying to soak one. Little more and I'd have been
pinched."
The chauffeur made no sign that he had heard.
Hopkins shrugged a shoulder and chewed at his
cigar, to which his teeth had clung grimly through-
out the melee.
Ten minutes and the auto turned into the open
carriage entrance of a noble mansion of brown stone,
and stood still. The chauffeur leaped out, and said:
"Come quick. The lady, she will explain. It is
the great honor you will have, monsieur. Ah, that
milady could call upon Armand to do this thing!
But, no, I am only one chauffeur."
With vehement gestures the chauffeur conducted
Hopkins into the house. He was ushered into a small
but luxurious reception chamber. A lady, young, and
possessing the beauty of visions, rose from a chair.
In her eyes smouldered a becoming anger. Her high-
arched, threadlike brows were ruffled into a delicious
frown.
"Milady," said the chauffeur, bowing low, "I have
the honor to relate to you that I went to the house of
Monsieur Long and found him to be not at home. As
I came back I see this gentleman in combat against
bow you say - greatest odds. He is fighting with
five - ten - thirty men - gendarmes, aussi. Yes,
milady, he what you call 'swat' one - three - eight
policemans. If that Monsieur Long is out I say to
myself this Gentleman be will serve milady so well, and
I bring him here."
"Very well, Armand," said the lady, "you may
go." She turned to Hopkins.
"I sent my chauffeur," she said, "to bring my
cousin, Walter Long. There is a man in this house
who has treated me with insult and abuse. I have
complained to my aunt, and she laughs at me. Ar-
mand says you are brave. In these prosaic days men
who are both brave and chivalrous are few. May I
count upon your assistance?"
John Hopkins thrust the remains of his cigar into
his coat pocket. He looked upon this winning
creature and felt his first thrill of romance. It was a
knightly love, and contained no disloyalty to the flat
with the flea-bitten terrier and the lady of his choice.
He bad married her after a picnic of the Lady Label
Stickers' Union, Lodge No. 2, on a dare and a bet of
new hats and chowder all around with his friend, Billy
McManus. This angel who was begging him to
come to her rescue was something too heavenly for
chowder, and as for hats - golden, jewelled crowns
for her!
"Say," said John Hopkins, "just show me the guy
that you've got the grouch at. I've neglected my
talents as a scrapper heretofore, but this is my busy
night."
"He is in there," said the lady, pointing to a
closed door. "Come. Are you sure that you do not
falter or fear?"
"Me?" said John Hopkins. "Just give me one of
those roses in the bunch you are wearing, will you?"
The lady gave him a red, red rose. John Hopkins
kissed it, stuffed it into his vest pocket, opened the
door and walked into the room. It was a handsome
library, softly but brightly lighted. A young man
was there, reading.
"Books on etiquette is what you want to study,"
said John Hopkins, abruptly. "Get up here, and I'll
give you some lessors. Be rude to a lady, will you?"
The young man looked mildly surprised. Then he
arose languidly, dextrously caught the arms of John
Hopkins and conducted him irresistibly to the front
door of the house.
"Beware, Ralph Branscombe," cried the lady, who
had followed, "what you do to the gallant man who
has tried to protect me."
The young man shoved John Hopkins gently out
the door and then closed it.
"Bess," he said calmly, "I wish you would quit
reading historical novels. How in the world did that
fellow get in here?"
"Armand brought him," said the young lady. "I
think you are awfully mean not to let me have that
St. Bernard. I sent Armand for Walter. I was so
angry with you."
"Be sensible, Bess," said the young man, taking
her arm. "That dog isn't safe. He has bitten two
or three people around the kennels. Come now, let's
go tell auntie we are in good humor again."
Arm in arm, they moved away.
John Hopkins walked to his flat. The janitor's
five-year-old daughter was playing on the steps'
Hopkins gave her a nice, red rose and walked up-
stairs.
Mrs. Hopkins was philandering with curl-papers.
"Get your cigar?" she asked, disinterestedly.
"Sure," said Hopkins, "and I knocked around a
while outside. It's a nice night."
He sat upon the hornblende sofa, took out the
stump of his cigar, lighted it, and gazed at the grace-
ful figures in "The Storm" on the opposite wall.
"I was telling you," said he, "about Mr.
Whipple's suit. It's a gray, with an invisible check,
and it looks fine."
A LICKPENNY LOVER
There, were 3,000 girls in the Biggest Store.
Masie was one of them. She was eighteen and a
selleslady in the gents' gloves. Here she became
versed in two varieties of human beings - the kind of
gents who buy their gloves in department stores and
the kind of women who buy gloves for unfortunate
gents. Besides this wide knowledge of the human
species, Masie had acquired other information. She
had listened to the promulgated wisdom of the 2,999
other girls and had stored it in a brain that was as
secretive and wary as that of a Maltese cat. Per-
haps nature, foreseeing that she would lack wise
counsellors, had mingled the saving ingredient of
shrewdness along with her beauty, as she has endowed
the silver fox of the priceless fur above the other
animals with cunning.
For Masie was beautiful. She was a deep-tinted
blonde, with the calm poise of a lady who cooks butter
cakes in a window. She stood behind her counter in
the Biggest Store; and as you closed your band over
the tape-line for your glove measure you thought
of Hebe; and as you looked again you wondered how
she had come by Minerva's eyes.
When the floorwalker was not looking Masie
chewed tutti frutti; when he was looking she gazed
up as if at the clouds and smiled wistfully.
That is the shopgirl smile, and I enjoin you to
shun it unless you are well fortified with callosity of
the heart, caramels and a congeniality for the capers
of Cupid. This smile belonged to Masie's recreation
hours and not to the store; but the floorwalker must
have his own. He is the Shylock of the stores.
When be comes nosing around the bridge of his nose
is a toll-bridge. It is goo-goo eyes or "git" when
be looks toward a pretty girl. Of course not all floor-
walkers are thus. Only a few days ago the papers
printed news of one over eighty years of age.
One day Irving Carter, painter, millionaire, trav-
eller, poet, automobilist, happened to enter the Big-
gest Store. It is due to him to add that his visit was
not voluntary. Filial duty took him by the collar and
dragged him inside, while his mother philandered
among the bronze and terra-cotta statuettes.
Carter strolled across to the glove counter in order
to shoot a few minutes on the wing. His need for
gloves was genuine; be had forgotten to bring a pair
with him. But his action hardly calls for apology, be-
cause be had never heard of glove-counter flirtations.
As he neared the vicinity of his fate be hesitated,
suddenly conscious of this unknown phase of Cupid's
less worthy profession.
Three or four cheap fellows, sonorously garbed,
were leaning over the counters, wrestling with the
mediatorial hand-coverings, while giggling girls
played vivacious seconds to their lead upon the
strident string of coquetry. Carter would have re-
treated, but he had gone too far. Masie confronted
him behind her counter with a questioning look in
eyes as coldly, beautifully, warmly blue as the glint
of summer sunshine on an iceberg drifting in Southern
seas.
And then Irving Carter, painter, millionaire, etc.,
felt a warm flush rise to his aristocratically pale face.
But not from diffidence. The blush was intellectual
in origin. He knew in a moment that he stood in the
ranks of the ready-made youths who wooed the gig-
gling girls at other counters. Himself leaned against
the oaken trysting place of a cockney Cupid with a
desire in his heart for the favor of a glove salesgirl.
He was no more than Bill and Jack and Mickey.
And then be felt a sudden tolerance for them, and
an elating, courageous contempt for the conventions
upon which he had fed, and an unhesitating deter-
mination to have this perfect creature for his own.
When the gloves were paid for and wrapped the
Carter lingered for a moment. The dimples at
corners of Masie's damask mouth deepened. All gen-
tlemen who bought gloves lingered in just that way.
She curved an arm, showing like Psyche's through
her shirt-waist sleeve, and rested an elbow upon the
show-case edge.
Carter had never before encountered a situation of
which he had not been perfect master. But now he
stood far more awkward than Bill or Jack or Mickey.
He had no chance of meeting this beautiful girl so-
cially. His mind struggled to recall the nature and
habits of shopgirls as be had read or heard of them.
Somehow be had received the idea that they some-
times did not insist too strictly upon the regular
channels of introduction. His heart beat loudly at
the thought of proposing an unconventional meeting
with this lovely and virginal being. But the tumult
in his heart gave him courage.
After a few friendly and well-received remarks on
general subjects, he laid his card by her hand on the
counter.
"Will you please pardon me," he said, "if I seem
too bold; but I earnestly hope you will allow me the
pleasure of seeing you again. There is my name; I
assure you that it is with the greatest respect that
I ask the favor of becoming one of your --
acquaintances. May I not hope for the privilege?"
Masie knew men - especially men who buy gloves.
Without hesitation she looked him frankly and smil-
ingly in the eyes, and said:
"Sure. I guess you're all right. I don't usually
go out with strange gentlemen, though. It ain't
quite ladylike. When should you want to see me
again?"
"As soon as I may," said Carter. "If you would
allow me to call at your home, I -- "
Masie laughed musically. "Oh, gee, no!" she
said, emphatically. "If you could see our flat once!
There's five of us in three rooms. I'd just like to see
ma's face if I was to bring a gentleman friend
there!"
"Anywhere, then," said the enamored Carter,
"that will be convenient to you."
"Say," suggested Masie, with a bright-idea look
in her peach-blow face; "I guess Thursday night will
about suit me. Suppose you come to the corner of
Eighth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street at 7:30. I
live right near the corner. But I've got to be back
home by eleven. Ma never lets me stay out after
eleven."
Carter promised gratefully to keep the tryst, and
then hastened to his mother, who was looking about
for him to ratify her purchase of a bronze Diana.
A salesgirl, with small eyes and an obtuse nose,
strolled near Masie, with a friendly leer.
"Did you make a hit with his nobs, Mase?" she
asked, familiarly.
"The gentleman asked permission to call." an-
swered Masie, with the grand air, as she slipped Car-
ter's card into the bosom of her waist.
"Permission to call!" echoed small eyes, with a
snigger. "Did he say anything about dinner in the
Waldorf and a spin in his auto afterward?"
"Oh, cheese it!" said Masie, wearily. "You've
been used to swell things, I don't think. You've had
a swelled bead ever since that hose-cart driver took
you out to a chop suey joint. No, be never mentioned
the Waldorf; but there's a Fifth Avenue address on
his card, and if be buys the supper you can bet your
life there won't be no pigtail on the waiter what takes
the order."
As Carter glided away from the Biggest Store
with his mother in his electric runabout, he bit his lip
with a dull pain at his heart. He knew that love had
come to him for the first time in all the twenty-nine
years of his life. And that the object of it should
make so readily an appointment with him at a street
corner, though it was a step toward his desires, tor-
tured him with misgivings.
Carter did not know the shopgirl. He did not
know that her home is often either a scarcely habit-
able tiny room or a domicile filled to overflowing with
kith and kin. The street-corner is her parlor, the
park is her drawing-room; the avenue is her garden
walk; yet for the most part she is as inviolate mis-
tress of herself in them as is my lady inside her
tapestried chamber.
One evening at dusk, two weeks after their first
meeting, Carter and Masie strolled arm-in-arm into a
little, dimly-lit park. They found a bench, tree-
shadowed and secluded, and sat there.
For the first time his arm stole gently around her.
Her golden-bronze head slid restfully against his
shoulder.
"Gee!" sighed Masie, thankfully. "Why didn't
you ever think of that before?"
"Masie," said Carter, earnestly, "you surely
know that I love you. I ask you sincerely to marry
me. You know me well enough by this time to have
no doubts of me. I want you, and I must have you.
I care nothing for the difference in our stations."
"What is the difference?" asked Masie, curi-
ously.
"Well, there isn't any," said Carter, quickly, "ex-
cept in the minds of foolish people. It is in my power
to give you a life of luxury. My social position is be-
yond dispute, and my means are ample."
"They all say that," remarked Masie. "It's the
kid they all give you. I suppose you really work in a
delicatessen or follow the races. I ain't as green as
I look."
"I can furnish you all the proofs you want," said
Carter, gently. "And I want you, Masie. I loved
you the first day I saw you."
"They all do," said Masie, with an amused laugh,
"to hear 'em talk. If I could meet a man that got
stuck on me the third time he'd seen me I think I'd
get mashed on him."
"Please don't say such things," pleaded Carter.
"Listen to me, dear. Ever since I first looked into
your eyes you have been the only woman in the world
for me."
"Oh, ain't you the kidder!" smiled Masie. "How
many other girls did you ever tell that?"
But Carter persisted. And at length be reached
the flimsy, fluttering little soul of the shopgirl that
existed somewhere deep down in her lovely bosom.
His words penetrated the heart whose very lightness
was its safest armor. She looked up at him with eyes
that saw. And a warm glow visited her cool cheeks.
Tremblingly, awfully, her moth wings closed, and
she seemed about to settle upon the flower of love.
Some faint glimmer of life and its possibilities on
the other side of her glove counter dawned upon her.
Carter felt the change and crowded the opportunity.
"Marry me, Masie," be whispered softly, "and we
will go away from this ugly city to beautiful ones.
We will forget work and business, and life will be one
long holiday. I know where I should take you - I
have been there often. Just think of a shore where
summer is eternal, where the waves are always rip-
pling on the lovely beach and the people are happy
and free as children. We will sail to those shores and
remain there as long as you please. In one of those
far-away cities there are grand and lovely palaces
and towers full of beautiful pictures and statues.
The streets of the city are water, and one travels
about in --"
"I know," said Masie, sitting up suddenly.
"Gondolas."
"Yes," smiled Carter.
"I thought so," said Masie.
"And then," continued Carter, "we will travel on
and see whatever we wish in the world. After the
European cities we will visit India and the ancient
cities there, and ride on elephants and see the wonder-
ful temples of the Hindoos and Brahmins and the
Japanese gardens and the camel trains and chariot
races in Persia, and all the queer sights of foreign
countries. Don't you think you would like it, Masie?
Masie rose to her feet.
"I think we had better be going home," she said,
coolly. "It's getting late."
Carter humored her. He had come to know her
varying, thistle-down moods, and that it was useless
to combat them. But he felt a certain happy triumph.
He had held for a moment, though but by a silken
thread, the soul of his wild Psyche, and hope was
stronger within him. Once she had folded her wings
and her cool band bad closed about his own.
At the Biggest Store the next day Masie's chum,
Lulu, waylaid her in an angle of the counter.
"How are you and your swell friend making it?
she asked.
"Oh, him?" said Masie, patting her side curls.
"He ain't in it any more. Say, Lu, what do you
think that fellow wanted me to do?"
"Go on the stage?" guessed Lulu, breathlessly.
"Nit; he's too cheap a guy for that. He wanted
me to marry him and go down to Coney Island for
a wedding tour!"
DOUGHERTY'S EYE-OPENER
Big Jim Dougherty was a sport. He belonged
to that race of men. In Manhattan it is a distinct
race. They are the Caribs of the North -- strong,
artful, self-sufficient, clannish, honorable within the
laws of their race, holding in lenient contempt neigh-
boring tribes who bow to the measure of Society's
tapeline. I refer, of course, to the titled nobility of
sportdom. There is a class which bears as a qualify-
ing adjective the substantive belonging to a wind in-
strument made of a cheap and base metal. But the
tin mines of Cornwall never produced the material
for manufacturing descriptive nomenclature for "Big
Jim" Dougherty.
The habitat of the sport is the lobby or the outside
corner of certain -hotels and combination restaurants
and cafes. They are mostly men of different sizes,
running from small to large; but they are unanimous
in the possession of a recently shaven, blue-black
cheek and chin and dark overcoats (in season) with
black velvet collars.
Of the domestic life of the sport little is known. It
has been said that Cupid and Hymen sometimes take
a band in the game and copper the queen of hearts to
lose. Daring theorists have averred - not content
with simply saying - that a sport often contracts a
spouse, and even incurs descendants. Sometimes he.
sits in the game of politics; and then at chowder
picnics there is a revelation of a Mrs. Sport and
little Sports in glazed hats with tin pails.
But mostly the sport is Oriental. He believes his
women-folk should not be too patent. Somewhere be-
bind grilles or flower-ornamented fire escapes they
await him. There, no doubt, they tread on rugs from
Teheran and are diverted by the bulbul and play
upon the dulcimer and feed upon sweetmeats. But
away from his home the sport is an integer. He does
not, as men of other races in Manhattan do, become
the convoy in his unoccupied hours of fluttering laces
and high heels that tick off delectably the happy
seconds of the evening parade. He herds with his
own race at corners, and delivers a commentary in his
Carib lingo upon the passing show.
"Big Jim" Dougherty had a wife, but be did not
wear a button portrait of her upon his lapel. He bad
a home in one of those brown-stone, iron-railed
streets on the west side that look like a recently ex-
cavated bowling alley of Pompeii.
To this home of his Mr. Dougherty repaired each
night when the hour was so late as to promise no
further diversion in the arch domains of sport. By
that time the occupant of the monogamistic harem
would be in dreamland, the bulbul silenced and the
hour propitious for slumber.
"Big Jim" always arose at twelve, meridian, for
breakfast, and soon afterward he would return to
the rendezvous of his "crowd."
He was always vaguely conscious that there was
a Mrs. Dougherty. He would have received without
denial the charge that the quiet, neat, comfortable
little woman across the table at home was his wife. In
fact, he remembered pretty well that they bad been
married for nearly four years. She would often tell
him about the cute tricks of Spot, the canary, and
the light-haired lady that lived in the window of the
flat across the street.
"Big Jim" Dougherty even listened to this con-
versation of hers sometimes. He knew that she would
have a nice dinner ready for him every evening at
seven when he came for it. She sometimes went to
matinees, and she bad a talking machine with six
dozen records. Once when her Uncle Amos blew in on
a wind from up-state, she went with him to the Eden
Musee. Surely these things were diversions enough
for any woman.
One afternoon Mr. Dougherty finished his break-
fast, put on his bat and got away fairly for the door.
When his hand was on the knob be heard his wife's
voice.
"Jim," she said, firmly, "I wish you would take
me out to dinner this evening. It has been three years
since you have been outside the door with me."
"Big Jim" was astounded. She bad never asked
anything like this before. It had the flavor of a
totally new proposition. But he was a game sport.
"All right," be said. "You be ready when I come
at seven. None of this 'wait two minutes till I primp
an hour or two' kind of business, now, Dele."
"I'll be ready," said his wife, calmly.
At seven she descended the stone steps in the Pom-
peian bowling alley at the side of "Big Jim" Dough-
erty. She wore a dinner gown made of a stuff that
the spiders must have woven, and of a color that a
twilight sky must have contributed. A light coat with
many admirably unnecessary capes and adorably
inutile ribbons floated downward from her shoulders.
Fine feathers do make fine birds; and the only re-
proach in the saying is for the man who refuses to
give up his earnings to the ostrich-tip industry.
"Big Jim" Dougherty was troubled. There was
a being at his side whom be did not know. He
thought of the sober-hued plumage that this bird of
paradise was accustomed to wear in her cage, and
this winged revelation puzzled him. In some way she
reminded him of the Delia Cullen that be had married
four years before. Shyly and rather awkwardly he
stalked at her right band.
"After dinner I'll take you back home, Dele," said
Mr. Dougherty, "and then I'll drop back up to Selt-
zer's with the boys. You can have swell chuck to-
night if you want it. I made a winning on Anaconda
yesterday; so you can go as far as you like."
Mr. Dougherty had intended to make the outing
with his unwonted wife an inconspicuous one. Uxori-
ousness was a weakness that the precepts of the
Caribs did not countenance. If any of his friends of
the track, the billiard cloth or the square circle had
wives they had never complained of the fact in public.
There were a number of table d'hote places on the
cross streets near the broad and shining way; and to
one of these he had purposed to escort her, so that the
bushel might not be removed from the light of his
domesticity.
But while on the way Mr. Dougherty altered those
intentions. He had been casting stealthy glances at
his attractive companion and he was seized with the
conviction that she was no selling plater. He re-
solved to parade with his wife past Seltzer's cafe,
where at this time a number of his tribe would be
gathered to view the daily evening procession. Yes;
and he would take her to dine at Hoogley's, the swell-
est slow-lunch warehouse on the line, he said to
himself.
The congregation of smooth-faced tribal gentle-
men were on watch at Seltzer's. As Mr. Dougherty
and his reorganized Delia passed they stared, mo-
mentarily petrified, and then removed their hats - a
performance as unusual to them as was the astonish-
ing innovation presented to their gaze by "Big Jim".
On the latter gentleman's impassive face there ap-
peared a slight flicker of triumph - a faint flicker,
no more to be observed than the expression called
there by the draft of little casino to a four-card spade
flush.
Hoogley's was animated. Electric lights shone
as, indeed, they were expected to do. And the napery,
the glassware and the flowers also meritoriously per-
formed the spectacular duties required of them. The
guests were numerous, well-dressed and gay.
A waiter - not necessarily obsequious - conducted
"Big Jim" Dougherty and his wife to a table.
"Play that menu straight across for what you like,
Dele," said "Big Jim." "It's you for a trough of
the gilded oats to-night. It strikes me that maybe
we've been sticking too fast to home fodder."
"Big Jim's" wife gave her order. He looked at
her with respect. She had mentioned truffles; and be
bad not known that she knew what truffles were. From
the wine list she designated an appropriate and de-
sirable brand. He looked at her with some admiration.
She was beaming with the innocent excitement that
woman derives from the exercise of her gregarious-
ness. She was talking to him about a hundred things
with animation and delight. And as the meal pro-
gressed her cheeks, colorless from a life indoors, took
on a delicate flush. "Big Jim" looked around the
room and saw that none of the women there had her
charm. And then he thought of the three years she
had suffered immurement, uncomplaining, and a flush
of shame warmed him, for he carried fair play as an
item in his creed.
But when the Honorable Patrick Corrigan, leader
in Dougherty's district and a friend of his, saw them
and came over to the table, matters got to the three-
quarter stretch. The Honorable Patrick was a gal-
lant man, both in deeds and words. As for the Blar-
ney stone, his previous actions toward it must have
been pronounced. Heavy damages for breach of
promise could surely have been obtained had the
Blarney stone seen fit to sue the Honorable Patrick.
"Jimmy, old man!" he called; he clapped Dough-
erty on the back; be shone like a midday sun upon
Delia.
"Honorable Mr. Corrigan - Mrs. Dougherty,"
said "Big Jim."
The Honorable Patrick became a fountain of en-
tertainment and admiration. The waiter had to
fetch a third chair for him; he made another at the
table, and the wineglasses were refilled.
"You selfish old rascal!" he exclaimed, shaking an
arch finger at "Big Jim," "to have kept Mrs.
Dougherty a secret from us."
And then "Big Jim" Dougherty, who was no
talker, sat dumb, and saw the wife who had dined
every evening for three years at home, blossom like
a fairy flower. Quick, witty, charming, full of light
and ready talk, she received the experienced attack
of the Honorable Patrick on the field of repartee and
surprised, vanquished, delighted him. She unfolded
her long-closed petals and around her the room
became a garden. They tried to include "Big
Jim" in the conversation, but he was without a
vocabulary.
And then a stray bunch of politicians and good
fellows who lived for sport came into the room. They
saw "Big Jim" and the leader, and over they came
and were made acquainted with Mrs. Dougherty. And
in a few minutes she was holding a salon. Half a
dozen men surrounded her, courtiers all, and six
found her capable of charming. "Big Jim" sat,
grim, and kept saying to himself: "Three years,
three years!"
The dinner came to an end. The Honorable Pat-
rick reached for Mrs. Dougherty's cloak; but that
was a matter of action instead of words, and Dough-
erty's big band got it first by two seconds.
While the farewells were being said at the door
the Honorable Patrick smote Dougherty mightily
between the shoulders.
"Jimmy, me boy," he declared, in a giant whis-
per, "the madam is a jewel of the first water. Ye're
a lucky dog."
"Big Jim" walked homeward with his wife. She
seemed quite as pleased with the lights and show
windows in the streets as with the admiration of the
men in Hoogley's. As they passed Seltzer's they
heard the sound of many voices in the cafe. The
boys would be starting the drinks around now and
discussing past performances.
At the door of their home Delia paused. The
pleasure of the outing radiated softly from her
countenance. She could not hope for Jim of evenings,
but the glory of this one would Tighten her lonely
hours for a long time.
"Thank you for taking me out, Jim," she said,
gratefully. "You'll be going back up to Seltzer's
now, of course."
"To -- with Seltzer's," said "Big Jim," em-
emphatically. "And d-- Pat Corrigan! Does
he think I haven't got any eyes?
And the door closed behind both of them.
LITTLE SPECK IN GARNERED FRUIT
The honeymoon was at its full. There was a flat
with the reddest of new carpets, tasselled portieres
and six steins with pewter lids arranged on a ledge
above the wainscoting of the dining-room. The won-
der of it was yet upon them. Neither of them had
ever seen a yellow primrose by the river's brim; but if
such a sight had met their eyes at that time it would
have seemed like - well, whatever the poet expected
the right kind of people to see in it besides a prim-
rose.
The bride sat in the rocker with her feet resting
upon the world. She was wrapt in rosy dreams and a
kimono of the same hue. She wondered what the peo-
ple in Greenland and Tasmania and Beloochistan
were saying one to another about her marriage to
Kid McGarry. Not that it made any difference.
There was no welter-weight from London to the
Southern Cross that could stand up four hours - no;
four rounds - with her bridegroom. And he had
been hers for three weeks; and the crook of her little
finger could sway him more than the fist of any 142-
pounder in the world.
Love, when it is ours, is the other name for self-
abnegation and sacrifice. When it belongs to people
across the airshaft it means arrogance and self-con-
ceit.
The bride crossed her oxfords and looked thought-
fully at the distemper Cupids on the ceiling.
"Precious," said she, with the air of Cleopatra
asking Antony for Rome done up in tissue paper and
delivered at residence, "I think I would like a peach."
Kid McGarry arose and put on his coat and hat.
He was serious, shaven, sentimental, and spry.
"All right," said he, as coolly as though be were
only agreeing to sign articles to fight the champion
of England. "I'll step down and cop one out for you
see?"
"Don't be long," said the bride. "I'll be lonesome
without my naughty boy. Get a nice, ripe one."
After a series of farewells that would have befitted
an imminent voyage to foreign parts, the Kid went
down to the street.
Here he not unreasonably hesitated, for the season
was yet early spring, and there seemed small chance
of wresting anywhere from those chill streets and
stores the coveted luscious guerdon of summer's
golden prime.
At the Italian's fruit-stand on the corner be
stopped and cast a contemptuous eye over the dis-
play of papered oranges, highly polished apples and
wan, sun-hungry bananas.
"Gotta da peach?" asked the Kid in the tongue of
Dante, the lover of lovers.
"Ah, no, - " sighed the vender. "Not for one mont
com-a da peach. Too soon. Gotta da nice-a orange.
Like-a da orange?"
Scornful, the Kid pursued his quest. He entered
the all-night chop-house, cafe, and bowling-alley of
his friend and admirer, Justus O'Callahan. The
O'Callahan was about in his institution, looking for
leaks.
"I want it straight," said the Kid to him. "The
old woman has got a hunch that she wants a peach.
Now, if you've got a peach, Cal, get it out quick. I
want it and others like it if you've got 'em in plural
quantities."
"The house is yours," said O'Callahan. "But
there's no peach in it. It's too soon. I don't sup-
pose you could even find 'em at one of the Broadway
joints. That's too bad. When a lady fixes her
mouth for a certain kind of fruit nothing else won't
do. It's too late now to find any of the first-class
fruiterers open. But if you think the missis would
like some nice oranges I've just got a box of fine ones
in that she might."
"Much obliged, Cal. It's a peach proposition
right from the ring of the gong. I'll try further."
The time was nearly midnight as the Kid walked
down the West-Side avenue. Few stores were open
and such as were practically hooted at the idea of a
peach.
But in her moated flat the bride confidently awaited
her Persian fruit. A champion welter-weight not find
a peach? - not stride triumphantly over the seasons
and the zodiac and the almanac to fetch an Amsden's
June or a Georgia cling to his owny-own?
The Kid's eye caught sight of a window that was
lighted and gorgeous with nature's most entrancing
colors. The light suddenly went out. The Kid
sprinted and caught the fruiterer locking his door.
"Peaches?" said he, with extreme deliberation.
"Well, no, Sir. Not for three or four weeks yet.
I haven't any idea where you might find some. There
may be a few in town from under the glass, but they'd
be bard to locate. Maybe at one of the more expen-
sive hotels - some place where there's plenty of
money to waste. I've got some very fine oranges,
though - from a shipload that came in to-day."
The Kid lingered on the corner for a moment,
and then set out briskly toward a pair of green lights
that flanked the steps of a building down a dark
side street.
"Captain around anywhere?" he asked of the desk
sergeant of the police station.
At that moment the captain came briskly forward
from the rear. He was in plain clothes and had a
busy air.
"Hello, Kid," he said to the pugilist. "Thought
you were bridal-touring?
"Got back yesterday. I'm a solid citizen now.
Think I'll take an interest in municipal doings. How
would it suit you to get into Denver Dick's place to-
night, Cap?
"Past performances," said the captain, twisting his
moustache. "Denver was closed up two months ago."
"Correct," said the Kid. "Rafferty chased him
out of the Forty-third. He's running in your pre-
cinct now, and his game's bigger than ever. I'm
down on this gambling business. I can put you
against his game."
"In my precinct?" growled the captain. "Are
you sure, Kid? I'll take it as a favor. Have you
got the entree? How is it to be done?"
"Hammers," said the Kid. "They haven't got
any steel on the doors yet. You'll need ten men.
No, they won't let me in the place. Denver has been
trying to do me. He thought I tipped him off for the
other raid. I didn't, though. You want to hurry.
I've got to get back home. The house is only three
blocks from here."
Before ten minutes had sped the captain with a
dozen men stole with their guide into the hallway of
a dark and virtuous-looking building in which many
businesses were conducted by day.
"Third floor, rear," said the Kid, softly. "I'll
lead the way."
Two axemen faced the door that he pointed out to
them.
"It seems all quiet," said the captain, doubtfully.
"Are you sure your tip is straight?"
"Cut away!" said the Kid. "It's on me if it
ain't."
The axes crashed through the as yet unprotected
door. A blaze of light from within poured through
the smashed panels. The door fell, and the raiders
rang into the room with their guns handy.
The big room was furnished with the gaudy mag-
nificence dear to Denver Dick's western ideas. Vari-
ous well-patronized games were in progress. About
fifty men who were in the room rushed upon the police
in a grand break for personal liberty. The plain-
clothes men had to do a little club-swinging. More
than half the patrons escaped.
Denver Dick had graced his game with his own
presence that night. He led the rush that was in-
tended to sweep away the smaller body of raiders,
But when be saw the Kid his manner became personal.
Being in the heavyweight class be cast himself joy-
fully upon his slighter enemy, and they rolled down
a flight of stairs in each others arms. On the land-
ing they separated and arose, and then the Kid was
able to use some of his professional tactics, which had
been useless to him while in the excited clutch of a
200-pound sporting gentleman who was about to lose
$20,000 worth of paraphernalia.
After vanquishing his adversary the Kid hurried
upstairs and through the gambling-room into a
smaller apartment connecting by an arched doorway.
Here was a long table set with choicest chinaware
and silver, and lavishly furnished with food of that
expensive and spectacular sort of which the devotees
of sport are supposed to be fond. Here again was to
be perceived the liberal and florid taste of the gen-
tleman with the urban cognomenal prefix.
A No. 10 patent leather shoe protruded a few of
its inches outside the tablecloth along the floor. The
Kid seized this and plucked forth a black man in a
white tie and the garb of a servitor.
"Get up!" commanded the Kid. "Are you in
charge of this free lunch?"
"Yes, sah, I was. Has they done pinched us ag'in,
boss?"
"Looks that way. Listen to me. Are there any
peaches in this layout? If there ain't I'll have to
throw up the sponge."
"There was three dozen, sah, when the game
opened this evenin'; but I reckon the gentlemen done
eat 'em all up. If you'd like to eat a fust-rate
orange, sah, I kin find you some."
"Get busy," ordered the Kid, sternly, and move
whatever peach crop you've got quick or there'll be
trouble. If anybody oranges me again to-night, I'll
knock his face off."
The raid on Denver Dick's high-priced and prodi-
gal luncheon revealed one lone, last peach that had
escaped the epicurean jaws of the followers of
chance. Into the Kid's pocket it went, and that in-
defatigable forager departed immediately with his
prize. With scarcely a glance at the scene on the
sidewalk below, where the officers were loading their
prisoners into the patrol wagons, be moved homeward
with long, swift strides.
His heart was light as be went. So rode the
knights back to Camelot after perils and high deeds
done for their ladies fair. The Kid's lady had com-
manded him and be had obeyed. True, it was but a
peach that she had craved; but it had been no small
deed to glean a peach at midnight from that wintry
city where yet the February snows lay like iron.
She had asked for a peach; she was his bride; in his
pocket the peach was warming in his band that held it
for fear that it might fall out and be lost.
On the way the Kid turned in at an all-night drug
store and said to the spectacled clerk:
"Say, sport, I wish you'd size up this rib of mine
and see if it's broke. I was in a little scrap and
bumped down a flight or two of stairs."
The druggist made an examination.
"It isn't broken," was his diagnosis, "but you have
a bruise there that looks like you'd fallen off the
Flatiron twice."
"That's all right," said the Kid. "Let's have
your clothesbrush, please."
The bride waited in the rosy glow of the pink lamp
shade. The miracles were not all passed away. By
breathing a desire for some slight thing - a flower,
a pomegranate, a - oh, yes, a peach - she could
send forth her man into the night, into the world
which could not withstand him, and he would do her
bidding.
And now be stood by her chair and laid the peach
in her band.
"Naughty boy!" she said, fondly. "Did I say a
peach? I think I would much rather have had an
orange."
Blest be the bride.
THE HARBINGER
Long before the springtide is felt in the dull bosom
of the yokel does the city man know that the grass-
green goddess is upon her throne. He sits at his
breakfast eggs and toast, begirt by stone walls, opens
his morning paper and sees journalism leave vernal-
ism at the post.
For, whereas, spring's couriers were once the evi-
dence of our finer senses, now the Associated Press
does the trick.
The warble of the first robin in Hackensack, the
stirring of the maple sap in Bennington, the bud-
ding of the pussy willows along Main Street in Syra-
cuse, the first chirp of the bluebird, the swan song
of the Blue Point, the annual tornado in St. Louis,
the plaint of the peach pessimist from Pompton, N.
J., the regular visit of the tame wild goose with a
broken leg to the pond near Bilgewater Junction,
the base attempt of the Drug Trust to boost the
price of quinine foiled in the House by Congressman
Jinks, the first tall poplar struck by lightning and
the usual stunned picknickers who had taken refuge,
the first crack of the ice jam in the Allegheny River,
the finding of a violet in its mossy bed by
the correspondent at Round Corners - these are the
advance signs of the burgeoning season that are wired
into the wise city, while the farmer sees nothing but
winter upon his dreary fields.
But these be mere externals. The true harbinger
is the heart. When Strephon seeks his Chloe and
Mike his Maggie, then only is spring arrived and the
newspaper report of the five-foot rattler killed in
Squire Pettigrew's pasture confirmed.
Ere the first violet blew, Mr. Peters, Mr. Ragsdale
and Mr. Kidd sat together on a bench in Union
Square and conspired. Mr. Peters was the D'Artag-
nan of the loafers there. He was the dingiest, the
laziest, the sorriest brown blot against the green back-
ground of any bench in the park. But just then he
was the most important of the trio.
Mr. Peters had a wife. This had not heretofore
affected his standing with Ragsy and Kidd. But to-
day it invested him with a peculiar interest. His
friends, having escaped matrimony, had shown a
disposition to deride Mr. Peters for his venture on
that troubled sea. But at last they had been forced
to acknowledge that either he had been gifted with
a large foresight or that he was one of Fortune's
lucky sons.
For, Mrs. Peters had a dollar. A whole dollar bill,
good and receivable by the Government for customs,
taxes and all public dues. How to get possession of
that dollar was the question up for discussion by the
three musty musketeers.
"How do you know it was a dollar?" asked Ragsy,
the immensity of the sum inclining him to scepticism.
"The coalman seen her have it," said Mr. Peters.
"She went out and done some washing yesterday.
And look what she give me for breakfast - the heel
of a loaf and a cup of coffee, and her with a dollar!"
"It's fierce," said Ragsy.
"Say we go up and punch 'er and stick a towel
in 'er mouth and cop the coin" suggested Kidd,
Viciously. "Y' ain't afraid of a woman, are you?"
"She might holler and have us pinched," demurred
Ragsy. "I don't believe in slugging no woman in a
houseful of people."
"Gent'men," said Mr. Peters, severely, through
his russet stubble, "remember that you are speaking
of my wife. A man who would lift his hand to a
lady except in the way of -- "
"Maguire," said Ragsy, pointedly, "has got his
bock beer sign out. If we had a dollar we could -- "
"Hush up!" said Mr. Peters, licking his lips.
"We got to get that case note somehow, boys. Ain't
what's a man's wife's his? Leave it to me. I'll go
over to the house and get it. Wait here for me."
"I've seen 'em give up quick, and tell you where
it's hid if you kick 'em in the ribs," said Kidd.
"No man would kick a woman," said Peters, vir-
tuously. "A little choking - just a touch on the
windpipe - that gets away with 'em - and no marks
left. Wait for me. I'll bring back that dollar, boys."
High up in a tenement-house between Second Ave-
nue and the river lived the Peterses in a back room
so gloomy that the landlord blushed to take the rent
for it. Mrs. Peters worked at sundry times, doing
odd jobs of scrubbing and washing. Mr. Peters had
a pure, unbroken record of five years without having
earned a penny. And yet they clung together, shar-
ing each other's hatred and misery, being creatures
of habit. Of habit, the power that keeps the earth
from flying to pieces; though there is some silly
theory of gravitation.
Mrs. Peters reposed her 200 pounds on the safer
of the two chairs and gazed stolidly out the one win-
dow at the brick wall opposite. Her eyes were red
and damp. The furniture could have been carried
away on a pushcart, but no pushcart man would have
removed it as a gift.
The door opened to admit Mr. Peters. His fox-
terrier eyes expressed a wish. His wife's diagnosis
located correctly the seat of it, but misread it hun-
ger instead of thirst.
"You'll get nothing more to eat till night," she
said, looking out of the window again. Take your
hound-dog's face out of the room."
Mr. Peters's eye calculated the distance between
them. By taking her by surprise it might be pos-
sible to spring upon her, overthrow her, and apply
the throttling tactics of which he had boasted to
his waiting comrades. True, it had been only a
boast; never yet had be dared to lay violent bands
upon her; but with the thoughts of the delicious, cool
bock or Culmbacher bracing his nerves, he was near
to upsetting his own theories of the treatment due by
a gentleman to a lady. But, with his loafer's love
for the more artistic and less strenuous way, he chose
diplomacy first, the high card in the game -- the as-
sumed attitude of success already attained.
"You have a dollar," he said, loftily, but signifi-
cantly in the tone that goes with the lighting of a
cigar - when the properties are at hand."
"I have," said Mrs. Peters, producing the bill
from her bosom and crackling it, teasingly.
"I am offered a position in a -- in a tea store,"
said Mr. Peters. "I am to begin work to-morrow.
But it will be necessary for me to buy a pair of --"
"You are a liar," said Mrs. Peters, reinterring
the note. "No tea store, nor no A B C store, nor
no junk shop would have you. I rubbed the skin off
both me hands washin' jumpers and overalls to make
that dollar. Do you think it come out of them suds
to buy the kind you put into you? Skiddoo! Get
your mind off of money."
Evidently the poses of Talleyrand were not worth
one hundred cents on that dollar. But diplomacy is
dexterous. The artistic temperament of Mr. Peters
lifted him by the straps of his congress gaiters and
set him on new ground. He called up a look of des-
perate melancholy to his eyes.
"Clara," he said, hollowly, "to struggle further
is useless. You have always misunderstood me.
Heaven knows I have striven with all my might to
keep my head above the waves of misfortune,
but - "
"Cut out the rainbow of hope and that stuff about
walkin' one by one through the narrow isles of
Spain," said Mrs. Peters, with a sigh. "I've heard
it so often. There's an ounce bottle of carbolic on the
shelf behind the empty coffee can. Drink hearty."
Mr. Peters reflected. What next! The old ex-
pedients had failed. The two musty musketeers were
awaiting him hard by the ruined chateau -- that is
to say, on a park bench with rickety cast-iron legs.
His honor was at stake. He had engaged to storm
the castle single-handed and bring back the treas-
ure that was to furnish them wassail and solace. And
all that stood between him and the coveted dollar
was his wife, once a little girl whom he could -- aha!
-- why not again? Once with soft words he could, as
they say, twist her around his little finger. Why not
again? Not for years had he tried it. Grim poverty
and mutual hatred had killed all that. But Ragsy
and Kidd were waiting for him to bring the dollar!
Mr. Peters took a surreptitiously keen look at his
wife. Her formless bulk overflowed the chair. She
kept her eyes fixed out the window in a strange kind
of trance. Her eyes showed that she had been re-
cently weeping.
"I wonder," said Mr. Peters to himself, "if there'd
be anything in it."
The window was open upon its outlook of brick
walls and drab, barren back yards. Except for the
mildness of the air that entered it might have been
midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frown-
ing face to besieging spring. But spring doesn't
come with the thunder of cannon. She is a sapper
and a miner, and you must capitulate.
"I'll try it," said Mr. Peters to himself, making a
wry face.
He went up to his wife and put his arm across
her shoulders.
"Clara, darling," he said in tones that shouldn't
have fooled a baby seal, "why should we have hard
words? Ain't you my own tootsum wootsums?
"A black mark against you, Mr. Peters, in the sa-
red ledger of Cupid. Charges of attempted graft are
filed against you, and of forgery and utterance of
two of Love's holiest of appellations.
But the miracle of spring was wrought. Into the
back room over the back alley between the black
walls had crept the Harbinger. It was ridiculous,
and yet - Well, it is a rat trap, and you, madam
and sir and all of us, are in it.
Red and fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara,
Mrs. Peters threw her arms around her lord and
dissolved upon him. Mr. Peters would have striven
to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault,
but his arms were bound to his sides.
"Do you love me, James?" asked Mrs. Peters.
"Madly," said James, "but -- "
"You are ill! " exclaimed Mrs. Peters. "Why
are you so pale and tired looking?"
"I feel weak," said Mr. Peters. "I -- "
"Oh, wait; I know what it is. Wait, James. I'll
be back in a minutes''
With a parting bug that revived in Mr. Peters
recollections of the Terrible Turk, his wife hurried
out of the room and down the stairs.
Mr. Peters hitched his thumbs under his sus-
penders.
"All right," he confided to the ceiling. "I've got
her going. I hadn't any idea the old girl was soft
any more under the foolish rib. Well, sir; ain't I
the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side? What?
It's a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar. I wonder
what she went out for. I guess she's gone to tell
Mrs. Muldoon on the second floor, that we're recon-
ciled. I'll remember this. Soft soap! And Ragsy
was talking about slugging her!
Mrs. Peters came back with a bottle of sarsapa-
rilla.
"I'm glad I happened to have that dollar," she
said. "You're all run down, boney."
Mr. Peters had a tablespoonful of the stuff in-
serted into him. Then Mrs. Peters sat on his lap
and murmured:
"Call me tootsum wootsums again, James."
He sat still, held there by his materialized goddess
of spring.
Spring had come.
On the bench in Union Square Mr. Ragsdale and
Mr. Kidd squirmed, tongue-parched, awaiting
D'Artagnan and his dollar.
"I wish I had choked her at first," said Mr. Peters
to himself.
WHILE THE AUTO WAITS
Promptly at the beginning of twilight, came
again to that quiet corner of that quiet, small park
the girl in gray. She sat upon a bench and read a
book, for there was yet to come a half hour in which
print could be accomplished.
To repeat: Her dress was gray, and plain enough
to mask its impeccancy of style and fit. A large-
meshed veil imprisoned her turban hat and a face
that shone through it with a calm and unconscious
beauty. She had come there at the same hour on the
day previous, and on the day before that; and there
was one who knew it.
The young man who knew it hovered near, relying
upon burnt sacrifices to the great joss, Luck. His
piety was rewarded, for, in turning a page, her book
slipped from her fingers and bounded from the bench
a full yard away.
The young man pounced upon it with instant avid-
ity, returning it to its owner with that air that seems
to flourish in parks and public places - a compound
of gallantry and hope, tempered with respect for the
policeman on the beat. In a pleasant voice, be risked
an inconsequent remark upon the weather that in-
troductory topic responsible for so much of the
world's unhappiness-and stood poised for a mo-
ment, awaiting his fate.
The girl looked him over leisurely; at his ordinary,
neat dress and his features distinguished by nothing
particular in the way of expression.
"You may sit down, if you like," she said, in a
full, deliberate contralto. "Really, I would like to
have you do so. The light is too bad for reading.
I would prefer to talk."
The vassal of Luck slid upon the seat by her side
with complaisance.
"Do you know," be said, speaking the formula
with which park chairmen open their meetings, "that
you are quite the stunningest girl I have seen in a
long time? I had my eye on you yesterday.
Didn't know somebody was bowled over by those
pretty lamps of yours, did you, honeysuckle?"
"Whoever you are," said the girl, in icy tones,
"you must remember that I am a lady. I will excuse
the remark you have just made because the mistake
was, doubtless, not an unnatural one -- in your circle.
I asked you to sit down; if the invitation must con-
stitute me your honeysuckle, consider it with-
drawn."
"I earnestly beg your pardon," pleaded the young
ran. His expression of satisfaction had changed to
one of penitence and humility. It was my fault,
you know -I mean, there are girls in parks, you
know - that is, of course, you don't know, but -- "
"Abandon the subject, if you please. Of course
I know. Now, tell me about these people passing
and crowding, each way, along these paths. Where
are they going? Why do they hurry so? Are they
happy?"
The young man had promptly abandoned his air
of coquetry. His cue was now for a waiting part;
he could not guess the role be would be expected to
play.
"It is interesting to watch them," he replied, pos-
tulating her mood. "It is the wonderful drama of
life. Some are going to supper and some to -- er --
other places. One wonders what their histories are."
"I do not," said the girl; "I am not so inquisi-
tive. I come here to sit because here, only, can I be
tear the great, common, throbbing heart of hu-
manity. My part in life is cast where its beats are
never felt. Can you surmise why I spoke to you,
Mr. -- ?"
"Parkenstacker," supplied the young man. Then
be looked eager and hopeful.
"No," said the girl, holding up a slender finger,
and smiling slightly. "You would recognize it im-
mediately. It is impossible to keep one's name out of
print. Or even one's portrait. This veil and this
hat of my maid furnish me with an incog. You
should have seen the chauffeur stare at it when he
thought I did not see. Candidly, there are five or six
names that belong in the holy of holies, and mine, by
the accident of birth, is one of them. I spoke to you,
Mr. Stackenpot -- "
"Parkenstacker," corrected the young man, mod-
estly.
" -- Mr. Parkenstacker, because I wanted to talk,
for once, with a natural man -- one unspoiled by the
despicable gloss of wealth and supposed social su-
periority. Oh! you do not know how weary I am of
it -- money, money, money! And of the men who
surround me, dancing like little marionettes all cut by
the same pattern. I am sick of pleasure, of jewels,
of travel, of society, of luxuries of all kinds."
"I always had an idea," ventured the young man,
hesitatingly, "that money must be a pretty good
thing."
"A competence is to be desired. But when you
leave so many millions that -- !" She concluded
the sentence with a gesture of despair. "It is the mo-
otony of it" she continued, "that palls. Drives,
dinners, theatres, balls, suppers, with the gilding of
superfluous wealth over it all. Sometimes the very
tinkle of the ice in my champagne glass nearly drives
me mad."
Mr. Parkenstacker looked ingenuously interested.
"I have always liked," he said, "to read and hear
about the ways of wealthy and fashionable folks. I
suppose I am a bit of a snob. But I like to have my
information accurate. Now, I had formed the opin-
ion that champagne is cooled in the bottle and not by
placing ice in the glass."
The girl gave a musical laugh of genuine amuse-
ment.
"You should know," she explained, in an indul-
gent tone, "that we of the non-useful class depend
for our amusement upon departure from precedent.
Just now it is a fad to put ice in champagne. The
idea was originated by a visiting Prince of Tartary
while dining at the Waldorf. It will soon give way
to some other whim. Just as at a dinner party this
week on Madison Avenue a green kid glove was laid
by the plate of each guest to be put on and used while
eating olives."
"I see," admitted the young man, humbly.
"These special diversions of the inner circle do not
become familiar to the common public."
"Sometimes," continued the girl, acknowledging
his confession of error by a slight bow, "I have
thought that if I ever should love a man it would be
one of lowly station. One who is a worker and not a
drone. But, doubtless, the claims of caste and wealth
will prove stronger than my inclination. Just now
I am besieged by two. One is a Grand Duke of a
German principality. I think he has, or has bad, a
wife, somewhere, driven mad by his intemperance and
cruelty. The other is an English Marquis, so cold
and mercenary that I even prefer the diabolism of the
Duke. What is it that impels me to tell you these
things, Mr. Packenstacker?
"Parkenstacker," breathed the young man. "In-
deed, you cannot know how much I appreciate your
confidences."
The girl contemplated him with the calm, imper-
sonal regard that befitted the difference in their sta-
tions.
"What is your line of business, Mr. Parken-
stacker?" she asked.
"A very humble one. But I hope to rise in the
world. Were you really in earnest when you said
that you could love a man of lowly position?"
"Indeed I was. But I said 'might.' There is the
Grand Duke and the Marquis, you know. Yes; no
calling could be too humble were the man what I
would wish him to be."
"I work," declared Mr. Parkenstacker, "in a res-
taurant."
The girl shrank slightly.
"Not as a waiter?" she said, a little imploringly.
"Labor is noble, but personal attendance, you
know -- valets and -- "
"I am not a waiter. I am cashier in" -- on the
street they faced that bounded the opposite side of
the park was the brilliant electric sign "RESTAU-
RANT" -- "I am cashier in that restaurant you am
there."
The girl consulted a tiny watch set in a bracelet of
rich design upon her left wrist, and rose, hurriedly.
She thrust her book into a glittering reticule sus-
pended from her waist, for which, however, the book
was too large.
"Why are you not at work?" she asked.
"I am on the night turn," said the young man;
it is yet an hour before my period begins. May I
not hope to see you again?"
"I do not know. Perhaps - but the whim may
not seize me again. I must go quickly now. There
is a dinner, and a box at the play -- and, oh! the
same old round. Perhaps you noticed an automobile
at the upper corner of the park as you came. One
with a white body
"And red running gear?" asked the young man,
knitting his brows reflectively.
"Yes. I always come in that. Pierre waits for
me there. He supposes me to be shopping in the de-
partment store across the square. Conceive of the
bondage of the life wherein we must deceive even our
chauffeurs. Good-night."
"But it is dark now," said Mr. Parkenstacker,
"and the park is full of rude men. May I not
walk -- "
"If you have the slightest regard for my wishes,"
said the girl, firmly, "you will remain at this bench
for ten minutes after I have left. I do not mean to
accuse you, but you are probably aware that autos
generally bear the monogram of their owner. Again,
good-night"
Swift and stately she moved away through the
dusk. The young man watched her graceful form
as she reached the pavement at the park's edge, and
turned up along it toward the corner where stood the
automobile. Then he treacherously and unhesitat-
ingly began to dodge and skim among the park trees
and shrubbery in a course parallel to her route, keep-
ing her well in sight
When she reached the corner she turned her head
to glance at the motor car, and then passed it, con
tinuing on across the street. Sheltered behind a con-
venient standing cab, the young man followed her
movements closely with his eyes. Passing down the
sidewalk of the street opposite the park, she entered
the restaurant with the blazing sign. The place was
one of those frankly glaring establishments, all white,
paint and glass, where one may dine cheaply and
conspicuously. The girl penetrated the restaurant to
some retreat at its rear, whence she quickly emerged
without her bat and veil.
The cashier's desk was well to the front. A red-
head girl an the stool climbed down, glancing
pointedly at the clock as she did so. The girl in
gray mounted in her place.
The young man thrust his hands into his pockets
and walked slowly back along the sidewalk. At the
corner his foot struck a small, paper-covered volume
lying there, sending it sliding to the edge of the
turf. By its picturesque cover he recognized it as
the book the girl had been reading. He picked it up
carelessly, and saw that its title was "New Arabian
Nights," the author being of the name of Stevenson.
He dropped it again upon the grass, and lounged,
irresolute, for a minute. Then he stepped into the
automobile, reclined upon the cushions, and said two
words to the chauffeur:
"Club, Henri."
A COMEDY IN RUBBER
One may hope, in spite of the metaphorists, to
avoid the breath of the deadly upas tree; one may, by
great good fortune, succeed in blacking the eye of the
basilisk; one might even dodge the attentions of Cer-
berus and Argus, but no man, alive or dead, can es-
cape the gaze of the Rubberer.
New York is the Caoutchouc City. There are
many, of course, who go their ways, making money,
without turning to the right or the left, but there is a
tribe abroad wonderfully composed, like the Martians,
solely of eyes and means of locomotion.
These devotees of curiosity swarm, like flies, in a
moment in a struggling, breathless circle about the
scene of an unusual occurrence. If a workman opens
a manhole, if a street car runs over a man from
North Tarrytown, if a little boy drops an egg on
his way home from the grocery, if a casual house or
two drops into the subway, if a lady loses a nickel
through a hole in the lisle thread, if the police drag
a telephone and a racing chart forth from an Ibsen
Society reading-room, if Senator Depew or Mr.
Chuck Connors walks out to take the air - if any of
these incidents or accidents takes place, you will see
the mad, irresistible rush of the "rubber" tribe to
the spot.
The importance of the event does not count. They
gaze with equal interest and absorption at a cho-
rus girl or at a man painting a liver pill sign. They
will form as deep a cordon around a man with a club-
foot as they will around a balked automobile. They
have the furor rubberendi. They are optical glut-
tons, feasting and fattening on the misfortunes of
their fellow beings. They gloat and pore and glare
and squint and stare with their fishy eyes like goggle-
eyed perch at the book baited with calamity.
It would seem that Cupid would find these ocular
vampires too cold game for his calorific shafts, but
have we not yet to discover an immune even among
the Protozoa? Yes, beautiful Romance descended
upon two of this tribe, and love came into their
hearts as they crowded about the prostrate form
of a man who had been run over by a brewery wagon.
William Pry was the first on the spot. He was an
expert at such gatherings. With an expression of in-
tense happiness on his features, be stood over the vic-
tim of the accident, listening to his groans as if to
the sweetest music. When the crowd of spectators
had swelled to a closely packed circle William saw a
violent commotion in the crowd opposite him. Men
were hurled aside like ninepins by the impact of some
moving body that clove them like the rush of a tor-
nado. With elbows, umbrella, hat-pin, tongue, and
fingernails doing their duty, Violet Seymour forced
her way through the mob of onlookers to the first row.
Strong men who even had been able to secure a seat
on the 5.30 Harlem express staggered back like chil-
dren as she bucked centre. Two large lady spectators
who bad seen the Duke of Roxburgh married and
had often blocked traffic on Twenty-third Street
fell back into the second row with ripped shirtwaists
when Violet had finished with them. William Pry
loved her at first sight.
The ambulance removed the unconscious agent of
Cupid. William and Violet remained after the crowd
had dispersed. They were true Rubberers. People
who leave the scene of an accident with the ambulance
have not genuine caoutchouc in the cosmogony of
their necks. The delicate, fine flavor of the affair is
to be bad only in the after-taste - in gloating over
the spot, in gazing fixedly at the houses opposite, in
hovering there in a dream more exquisite than the
opium-eater's ecstasy. William Pry and Violet Sey-
mour were connoisseurs in casualties. They knew bow
to extract full enjoyment from every incident.
Presently they looked at each other. Violet had a
brown birthmark on her neck as large as a silver
half-dollar. William fixed his eyes upon it. William
Pry had inordinately bowed legs. Violet allowed her
gaze to linger unswervingly upon them. Face to face
they stood thus for moments, each staring at the
other. Etiquette would not allow them to speak; but
in the Caoutchouc City it is permitted to gaze with-
out stint at the trees in the parks and at the physi-
cal blemishes of a fellow creature.
At length with a sigh they parted. But Cupid had
been the driver of the brewery wagon, and the wheel
that broke a leg united two fond hearts.
The next meeting of the hero and heroine was in
front of a board fence near Broadway. The day had
been a disappointing one. There had been no fights
on the street, children had kept from under the wheels
of the street cars, cripples and fat men in negligee
shirts were scarce; nobody seemed to be inclined to
slip on banana peels or fall down with heart disease.
Even the sport from Kokomo, Ind., who claims to
be a cousin of ex-Mayor Low and scatters nickels
from a cab window, had not put in his appearance.
There was nothing to stare at, and William Pry had
premonitions of ennui.
But he saw a large crowd scrambling and pushing
excitedly in front of a billboard. Sprinting for it,
he knocked down an old woman and a child carrying
a bottle of milk, and fought his way like a demon into
the mass of spectators. Already in the inner line
stood Violet Seymour with one sleeve and two gold fill-
ings gone, a corset steel puncture and a sprained
wrist, but happy. She was looking at what there
was to see. A man was painting upon the fence:
"Eat Bricklets - They Fill Your Face."
Violet blushed when she saw William Pry. William
jabbed a lady in a black silk raglan in the ribs, kicked
a boy in the shin, bit an old gentleman on the left ear
and managed to crowd nearer to Violet. They stood
for an hour looking at the man paint the letters.
Then William's love could be repressed no longer.
He touched her on the arm.
"Come with me," he said. "I know where there
is a bootblack without an Adam's apple."
She looked up at him shyly, yet with unmistakable
love transfiguring her countenance.
"And you have saved it for me?" she asked,
trembling with the first dim ecstasy of a woman be-
loved.
Together they hurried to the bootblack's stand.
An hour they spent there gazing at the malformed
youth.
A window-cleaner fell from the fifth story to the
sidewalk beside them. As the ambulance came clang-
ing up William pressed her hand joyously. "Four
ribs at least and a compound fracture," he whispered,
swiftly. "You are not sorry that you met me, are
you, dearest?
"Me?" said Violet, returning the pressure. "Sure
not. I could stand all day rubbering with you."
The climax of the romance occurred a few days
later. Perhaps the reader will remember the intense
excitement into which the city was thrown when Eliza
Jane, a colored woman, was served with a subpoena.
The Rubber Tribe encamped on the spot. With his
own hands William Pry placed a board upon two beer
kegs in the street opposite Eliza Jane's residence.
He and Violet sat there for three days and nights.
Then it occurred to a detective to open the door and
serve the subpoena. He sent for a kinetoscope and
did so.
Two souls with such congenial tastes could not long
remain apart. As a policeman drove them away with
his night stick that evening they plighted their troth.
The seeds of love bad been well sown, and had grown
up, hardy and vigorous, into a - let us call it a rub-
ber plant.
The wedding of William Pry and Violet Seymour
was set for June 10. The Big Church in the Middle
of the Block was banked high with flowers. The
populous tribe of Rubberers the world over is ram-
pant over weddings. They are the pessimists of the
pews. They are the guyers of the groom and the
banterers of the bride. They come to laugh at your
marriage, and should you escape from Hymen's
tower on the back of death's pale steed they will
come to the funeral and sit in the same pew and cry
over your luck. Rubber will stretch.
The church was lighted. A grosgrain carpet lay
over the asphalt to the edge of the sidewalk. Brides-
maids were patting one another's sashes awry and
speaking of the Bride's freckles. Coachmen tied
white ribbons on their whips and bewailed the space
of time between drinks. The minister was musing
over his possible fee, essaying conjecture whether it
would suffice to purchase a new broadcloth suit for
himself and a photograph of Laura Jane Libbey for
his wife. Yea, Cupid was in the air.
And outside the church, oh, my brothers, surged
and heaved the rank and file of the tribe of Rubberers.
in two bodies they were, with the grosgrain carpet
and cops with clubs between. They crowded like
cattle, they fought, they pressed and surged and
swayed and trampled one another to see a bit of a
girl in a white veil acquire license to go through a
man's pockets while be sleeps.
But the hour for the wedding came and went, and
the bride and bridegroom came not. And impatience
gave way to alarm and alarm brought about search,
and they were not found. And then two big police-
men took a band and dragged out of the furious mob
of onlookers a crushed and trampled thing, with a
wedding ring in its vest pocket and a shredded and
hysterical woman beating her way to the carpet's
edge, ragged, bruised and obstreperous.
William Pry and Violet Seymour, creatures of
habit, had joined in the seething game of the specta-
tors, unable to resist the overwhelming desire to gaze
upon themselves entering, as bride and bridegroom,
the rose-decked church.
Rubber will out.
ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS
"One thousand dollars," repeated Lawyer Tolman,
solemnly and severely, "and here is the money."
Young Gillian gave a decidedly amused laugh as
he fingered the thin package of new fifty-dollar notes.
"It's such a confoundedly awkward amount," he
explained, genially, to the lawyer. "If it had been
ten thousand a fellow might wind up with a lot of
fireworks and do himself credit. Even fifty dollars
would have been less trouble."
"You heard the reading of your uncle's will," con-
tinued Lawyer Tolman, professionally dry in his
tones. "I do not know if you paid much attention
to its details. I must remind you of one. You are
required to render to us an account of the manner of
expenditure of this $1,000 as soon as you have dis-
posed of it. The will stipulates that. I trust that
you will so far comply with the late Mr. Gillian's
wishes."
"You may depend upon it," said the young man.%
politely, "in spite of the extra expense it will entail.
I may have to engage a secretary. I was never good
at accounts."
Gillian went to his club. There be hunted out one
whom he called Old Bryson.
Old Bryson was calm and forty and sequestered.
He was in a corner reading a book, and when he saw
Gillian approaching he sighed, laid down his book
and took off his glasses.
"Old Bryson, wake up," said Gillian. "I've a
funny story to tell you."
" I wish you would tell it to some one in the billiard
room," said Old Bryson. "You know how I hate
your stories."
" This is a better one than usual," said Gillian,
rolling a cigarette; " and I'm glad to tell it to you.
It's too sad and funny to go with the rattling of
billiard bars. I've just come from my late uncle's
firm of legal corsairs. He leaves me an even thou-
sand dollars. Now, what can a man possibly do with
a thousand dollars? "
"I thought," said Old Bryson, showing as much
interest as a bee shows in a vinegar cruet, "that the
late Septimus Gillian was worth something like half
a million."
" He was," assented Gillian, joyously, " and that's
where the joke comes in. He's left his whole cargo of
doubloons to a microbe. That is, part of it goes to
the man who invents a new bacillus and the rest to es-
tablish a hospital for doing away with it again.
There are one or two trifling bequests on the side.
- the butler and the housekeeper get a seal ring and
$10 each. His nephew gets $1,000."
"You've always had plenty of money to spend,"
observed Old Bryson.
"Tons," said Gillian. "Uncle was the fairygod-
mother as far as an allowance was concerned."
"Any other heirs? " asked Old Bryson.
"None." Gillian frowned at his cigarette and
kicked the upholstered leather of a divan uneasily.
There is a Miss Hayden, a ward of my uncle, who
lived in his house. She's a quiet thing - musical -
the daughter of somebody who was unlucky enough to
be his friend. I forgot to say that she was in on the
seal ring and $10 joke, too. I wish I had been.
Then I could have had two bottles of brut, tipped the
waiter with the ring and had the whole business off
my bands. Don't be superior and insulting, Old Bry-
son - tell me what a fellow can do with a thousand
dollars."
Old Bryson rubbed his glasses and smiled. And
when Old Bryson smiled, Gillian knew that be in-
tended to be more offensive than ever.
"A thousand dollars," lie said, "means much or
little. One man may buy a happy home with it and
laugh at Rockefeller. Another could send his wife
South with it and save her life. A thousand dollars
would buy pure milk for one hundred babies during
June, July, and August and save fifty of their lives.
You could count upon a half hour's diversion with it
at faro in one of the fortified art galleries. It would
furnish an education to an ambitious boy. I am told
that a genuine Corot was secured for that amount in
an auction room yesterday. You could move to a
New Hampshire town and live respectably two
years on it. You could rent Madison Square Garden
for one evening with it, and lecture your audience, if
you should have one, on the precariousness of the pro-
fession of heir presumptive."
"People might like you, Old Bryson," said Gillian,
always unruffled, "if you wouldn't moralize. I asked
you to tell me what I could do with a thousand
dollars."
"You?" said Bryson, with a gentle laugh.
"Why, Bobby Gillian, there's only one logical thing
you could do. You can go buy Miss Lotta Lauriere
a diamond pendant with the money, and then take
yourself off to Idaho and inflict, your presence upon a
ranch. I advise a sheep ranch, as I have a particular
dislike for sheep."
"Thanks," said Gillian, rising, "I thought I
could depend upon you, Old Bryson. You've hit on
the very scheme. I wanted to chuck the money in a
lump, for I've got to turn in an account for it, and
I hate itemizing."
Gillian phoned for a cab and said to the driver:
"The stage entrance of the Columbine Theatre."-
Miss Lotta Lauriere was assisting nature with a
powder puff, almost ready for her call at a crowded
Matinee, when her dresser mentioned the name of Mr.
Gillian.
"Let it in," said Miss Lauriere. " Now, what is
it, Bobby? I'm going on in two minutes."
"Rabbit-foot your right ear a little," suggested
Gillian, critically. " That's better. It won't take
two minutes for me. What do you say to a little
thing in the pendant line? I can stand three ciphers
with a figure one in front of 'em."
"Oh, just as you say," carolled Miss Lauriere.
my right glove, Adams. Say, Bobby, did you see
that necklace Della Stacey had on the other night?
Twenty-two hundred dollars it cost at Tiffany's.
But, of course -pull my sash a little to the left,
Adams."
"Miss Lauriere for the opening chorus!" cried the
call boy without.
Gillian strolled out to where his cab was waiting.
"What would you do with a thousand dollars if
you had it?" be asked the driver.
"Open a s'loon," said the cabby, promptly and
huskily. " I know a place I could take money in with
both hands. It's a four-story brick on a corner.
I've got it figured out. Second story - Chinks and
chop suey; third floor -manicures and foreign mis-
sions; fourth floor -poolroom. If you was think-
of putting up the capital.
"Oh, no," said Gillian, I merely asked from cu-
riosity. I take you by the hour. Drive 'til I tell you
to stop."
Eight blocks down Broadway Gillian poked up
the trap with his cane and got out. A blind man sat
upon a stool on the sidewalk selling pencils. Gillian
went out and stood before him.
"Excuse me," he said, " but would you mind tell-
ing me what you would do if you bad a thousand
dollars?"
"You got out of that cab that just drove up,
didn't you? " asked the blind man.
"I did," said Gillian.
" guess you are all right," said the pencil dealer,
"to ride in a cab by daylight. Take a look at that,
if you like."
He drew a small book from his coat pocket and
held it out. Gillian opened it and saw that it was a
bank deposit book. It showed a balance of $1,785 to
the blind man's credit.
Gillian returned the book and got into the cab.
"I forgot something," be said. "You may drive
to the law offices of Tolman & Sharp, at - Broad-
way."
Lawyer Tolman looked at him hostilely and in-
quiringly through his gold-rimmed glasses.
" I beg your pardon," said Gillian, cheerfully,
"but may I ask you a question? It is not an im-
pertinent one, I hope. Was Miss Hayden left any-
thing by my uncle's will besides the ring and the
$10?"
" Nothing," said Mr. Tolman.
" I thank you very much, sir," said Gillian, and
on he went to his cab. He gave the driver the ad-
dress of his late uncle's home.
Miss Hayden was writing letters in the library.
She was small and slender and clothed in black. But
you would have noticed her eyes. Gillian drifted
in with his air of regarding the world as inconse-
quent.
I've just come from old Tolman's," he explained.
They've been going over the papers down there.
They found a - Gillian searched his memory for a
legal term - they found an amendment or a post-
script or something to the will. It seemed that the
old boy loosened up a little on second thoughts and
willed you a thousand dollars. I was driving up this
way and Tolman asked me to bring you the money.
Here it is. You'd better count it to see if it's right."
Gillian laid the money beside her hand on the desk.
Miss Hayden turned white. "Oh! " she said, and
again "Oh !"
Gillian half turned and looked out the window.
"I suppose, of course," be said, in a low voice,
that you know I love you."
"I am sorry," said Miss Hayden, taking up her
money.
" There is no use? " asked Gillian, almost light-
heartedly.
" I am sorry," she said again.
" May I write a note? " asked Gillian, with a smile,
I-re seated himself at the big library table. She sup-
plied him with paper and pen, and then went back to
her secretaire.
Gillian made out his account of his expenditure of
the thousand dollars i;i these words:
Paid by the black sheep, Robert Gillian, $1,000
on account of the eternal happiness, owed by Heaven
to the best and dearest woman on earth."
Gillian slipped his writing into an envelope, bowed
and went his way.
His cab stopped again at the offices of Tolman &
Sharp.
"I have expended the thousand dollars," he said
cheerily, to Tolman of the gold glasses, " and I have
come to render account of it, as I agreed. There is
quite a feeling of summer in the air - do you not
think so, Mr. Tolman?" He tossed a white envelope
on the lawyer's table. You will find there a memo-
randum, sir, of the modus operandi of the vanishing
of the dollars."
Without touching the envelope, Mr. Tolman went
to a door and called his partner, Sharp. Together
they explored the caverns of an immense safe. Forth
they dragged, as trophy of their search a big envelope
sealed with wax. This they forcibly invaded, and
wagged their venerable heads together over its con-
tents. Then Tolman became spokesman.
"Mr. Gillian," he said, formally, "there was a
codicil to your uncle's will. It was intrusted to us
privately, with instructions that it be not opened until
you had furnished us with a full account of your
handling of the $1,000 bequest in the will. As you
have fulfilled the conditions, my partner and I have
read the codicil. I do not wish to encumber your
understanding with its legal phraseology, but I will
acquaint you with the spirit of its contents.
In the event that your disposition of the $1,000
demonstrates that you possess any of the qualifica-
tions that deserve reward, much benefit will
accrue to you. Mr. Sharp and I are named
as the judges, and I assure you that we will do our
duty strictly according to justice-with liberality.
We are not at all unfavorably disposed toward you,
Mr. Gillian. But let us return to the letter of the
codicil. If your disposal of the money in question has
been prudent, wise, or unselflish, it is in our power to
hand you over bonds to the value of $50,000, which
have been placed in our hands for that purpose. But
if - as our client, the late Mr. Gillian, explicitly
provides - you have used this money as you have
money in the past, I quote the late Mr. Gillian
- in reprehensible dissipation among disreputable
associates - the $50,000 is to be paid to Miriam
Hayden, ward of the late Mr. Gillian, without delay.
Now, Mr. Gillian, Mr. Sharp and I will examine your
account in regard to the $1,000. You submit it in
writing, I believe. I hope you will repose confidence
in our decision."
Mr. Tolman reached for the envelope. Gillian
was a little the quicker in taking it up. He tore the
account and its cover leisurely into strips and dropped
them into his pocket.
"It's all right," he said, smilingly. "There isn't a
bit of need to bother you with this. I don't suppose
you'd understand these itemized bets, anyway. I
lost the thousand dollars on the races. Good-day to
you, gentlemen."
Tolman & Sharp shook their beads mournfully at
each other when Gillian left, for they heard him whis-
tling gayly in the hallway as he waited for the ele-
vator.
THE DEFEAT OF THE CITY
Robert Walmsley's descent upon the city
resulted in a Kilkenny struggle. He came out of the
fight victor by a fortune and a reputation. On the
other band, he was swallowed up by the city. The
city gave him what he demanded and then branded
him with its brand. It remodelled, cut, trimmed and
stamped him to the pattern it approves. It opened
its social gates to him and shut him in on a close-
cropped, formal lawn with the select herd of rumi-
nants. In dress, habits, manners, provincialism,
routine and narrowness he acquired that charming in-
solence, that irritating completeness, that sophisti-
cated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes
the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his
greatness.
One of the up-state rural counties pointed with
pride to the successful young metropolitan lawyer as
a product of its soil. Six years earlier this county
had removed the wheat straw from between its huckle-
berry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic
laugh as old man Walmsley's freckle-faced " Bob
abandoned the certain three-per-diem meals of the
one-horse farm for the discontinuous quick lunch
counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end
of the six years no murder trial, coaching party, au-
tomobile accident or cotillion was complete in which
the name of Robert Walmsley did not figure. Tailors
waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from
the cut of his unwrinkled trousers. Hyphenated fel-
lows in the clubs and members of the oldest subpoenaed
families were glad to clap him on the back and allow
him three letters of his name.
But the Matterhorn of Robert Walmsley's success
was not scaled until be married Alicia Van Der Pool.
I cite the Matterhorn, for just so high and cool and
white and inaccessible was this daughter of the old
burghers. The social Alps that ranged about her
over whose bleak passes a thousand climbers struggled
-- reached only to her knees. She towered in her own
atmosphere, serene, chaste, prideful, wading in no
fountains, dining no monkeys, breeding no dogs for
bench shows. She was a Van Der Pool. Fountains
were made to play for her; monkeys were made for
other people's ancestors; dogs, she understood, were
created to be companions of blind persons and objec-
tionable characters who smoked pipes.
This was the Matterhorn that Robert Walmsley
accomplished. If he found, with the good poet with
the game foot and artificially curled hair, that he who
ascends to mountain tops will find the loftiest peaks
most wrapped in clouds and snow, he concealed his
chilblains beneath a brave and smiling exterior. He
was a lucky man and knew it, even though he were
imitating the Spartan boy with an ice-cream freezer
beneath his doublet frappeeing the region of his
heart.
After a brief wedding tour abroad, the couple re-
turned to create a decided ripple in the calm cistern
(so placid and cool and sunless it is) of the best so-
ciety. They entertained at their red brick mausoleum
of ancient greatness in an old square that is a ceme-
tery of crumbled glory. And Robert Walmsley was
proud of his wife; although while one of his hands
shook his guests' the other held tightly to his alpen-
stock and thermometer.
One day Alicia found a letter written to Robert by
his mother. It was an unerudite letter, full of crops
and motherly love and farm notes. It chronicled the
health of the pig and the recent red calf, and asked
concerning Robert's in return. It was a letter direct
from the soil, straight from home, full of biographies
of bees, tales of turnips, peaans of new-laid eggs, neg-
lected parents and the slump in dried apples.
"Why have I not been shown your mother's let-
ters?" asked Alicia. There was always something in
her voice that made you think of lorgnettes, of ac-
counts at Tiffany's, of sledges smoothly gliding on
the trail from Dawson to Forty Mile, of the tinkling
of pendant prisms on your grandmothers' chandeliers,
of snow lying on a convent roof; of a police sergeant
refusing bail. "Your mother," continued Alicia,
"invites us to make a visit to the farm. I have
never seen a farm. We will go there for a week or
two, Robert."
"We will," said Robert, with the grand air of an
associate Supreme Justice concurring in an opinion.
"I did not lay the invitation before you because I
thought you would not care to go. I am much pleased
at your decision."
"I will write to her myself," answered Alicia, with
a faint foreshadowing of enthusiasm. " Felice shall
pack my trunks at once. Seven, I think, will be
enough. I do not suppose that your mother entertains
a great deal. Does she give many house parties?"
Robert arose, and as attorney for rural places filed
a demurrer against six of the seven trunks. He en-
deavored to define, picture, elucidate, set forth and
describe a farm. His own words sounded strange in
his ears. He had not realized how thoroughly urbsi-
dized he had become.
A week passed and found them landed at the little
country station five hours out from the city. A grin-
ning, stentorian, sarcastic youth driving a mule to a
spring wagon hailed Robert savagely.
"Hallo, Mr. Walmsley. Found your way back at
last, have you? Sorry I couldn't bring in the auto-
mobile for you, but dad's bull-tonguing the ten-acre
clover patch with it to-day. Guess you'll excuse my,
not wearing a dress suit over to meet you -- it ain't
six o'clock yet, you know."
"I'm glad to see you, Tom," said Robert, grasp-
ing his brother's band. "Yes, I've found my way at
last. You've a right to say 'at last.' It's been over
two years since the last time. But it will be oftener
after this, my boy."
Alicia, cool in the summer beat as an Arctic wraith,
white as a Norse snow maiden in her flimsy muslin and
fluttering lace parasol, came round the corner of the
station; and Tom was stripped of his assurance. He
became chiefly eyesight clothed in blue jeans, and on
the homeward drive to the mule alone did he confide
in language the inwardness of his thoughts.
They drove homeward. The low sun dropped a
spendthrift flood of gold upon the fortunate fields of
wheat. The cities were far away. The road lay curl-
ing around wood and dale and bill like a ribbon lost
from the robe of careless summer. The wind followed
like a whinnying colt in the track of Phoebus's steeds.
By and by the farmhouse peeped gray out of its
faithful grove; they saw the long lane with its convoy
of walnut trees running from the road to the house;
they smelled the wild rose and the breath of cool,
damp willows in the creek's bed. And then in unison
all the voices of the soil began a chant addressed to
the soul of Robert Walmsley. Out of the tilted aisles
of the dim wood they came hollowly; they chirped and
buzzed from the parched grass; they trilled from the
ripples of the creek ford; they floated up in clear
Pan's pipe notes from the dimming meadows; the
whippoorwills joined in as they pursued midges in the
upper air; slow-going cow-bells struck out a homely
accompaniment -- and this was what each one said:
"You've found your way back at last, have you?"
The old voices of the soil spoke to him. Leaf and
bud and blossom conversed with him in the old vocabu-
lary of his careless youth - the inanimate things, the
familiar stones and rails, the gates and furrows and
roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and
a power in the transformation. The country had
smiled and he had felt the breath of it, and his heart
was drawn as if in a moment back to his old love.
The city was far away.
This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley
and possessed him. A queer thing he noticed in con-
nection with it was that Alicia, sitting at his side,
suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not be-
long to this recurrent phase. Never before had she
seemed so remote, so colorless and high - so intan-
gible and unreal. And yet he had never admired her
more than when she sat there by him in the rickety
spring wagon, chiming no more with his mood and
with her environment than the Matterhorn chimes
with a peasant's cabbage garden.
That night when the greetings and the supper were
over, the entire family, including Buff, the yellow dog,
bestrewed itself upon the front porch. Alicia, not
haughty but silent, sat in the shadow dressed in an
exquisite pale-gray tea gown. Robert's mother dis-
coursed to her happily concerning marmalade and
lumbago. Tom sat on the top step; Sisters Millie
and Pam on the lowest step to catch the lightning
bugs. Mother had the willow rocker. Father sat in
the big armchair with one of its arms gone. Buff
sprawled in the middle of the porch in everybody's
way. The twilight pixies and pucks stole forth un-
seen and plunged other poignant shafts of memory
into the heart of Robert. A rural madness entered
his soul. The city was far away.
Father sat without his pipe, writhing in his heavy
boots, a sacrifice to rigid courtesy. Robert shouted:
"No, you don't!" He fetched the pipe and lit it; be
seized the old gentleman's boots and tore them off.
The last one slipped suddenly, and Mr. Robert
Walmsley, of Washington Square, tumbled off the
porch backward with Buff on top of him, bowling
fearfully. Tom laughed sarcastically.
Robert tore off his coat and vest and hurled them
into a lilac bush.
"Come out here, you landlubber," be cried to Tom,
and I'll put grass seed on your back. I think you
Called me a 'dude' a while ago. Come along and cut
your capers."
Tom understood the invitation and accepted it with
delight. Three times they wrestled on the grass,
"side holds," even as the giants of the mat. And
twice was Tom forced to bite grass at the hands of
the distinguished lawyer. Dishevelled, panting, each
still boasting of his own prowess, they stumbled back
to the porch. Millie cast a pert reflection upon the
qualities of a city brother. In an instant Robert had
secured a horrid katydid in his fingers and bore down
upon her. Screaming wildly, she fled up the lane,
pursued by the avenging glass of form. A quarter
of a mile and they returned, she full of apology to
the victorious " dude." The rustic mania possessed
him unabatedly.
I can do up a cowpenful of you slow hayseeds,"
he proclaimed, vaingloriously. "Bring on your bull-
dogs, your hired men and your log-rollers."
He turned handsprings on the grass that prodded
Tom to envious sarcasm. And then, with a whoop,
he clattered to the rear and brought back Uncle like,
a battered colored retainer of the family, with his
banjo, and strewed sand on the porch and danced
"Chicken in the Bread Tray" and did buck-and-
wing wonders for half an hour longer. Incredibly,
wild and boisterous things he did. He sang, he told
stories that set all but one shrieking, he played the
yokel, the humorous clodhopper; he was mad, and
with the revival of the old life in his blood.
He became so extravagant that once his mother
sought gently to reprove him. Then Alicia moved as
though she were about to speak, but she did not.
Through it all she sat immovable, a slim, white spirit
in the dusk that no man might question or read.
By and by she asked permission to ascend to her
room, saying that she was tired. On her way she
passed Robert. He was standing in the door, the
figure of vulgar comedy, with ruffled hair, reddened
face and unpardonable confusion of attire -- no trace
there of the immaculate Robert Walmsley, the courted
clubman and ornament of select circles. He was do-
ing a conjuring trick with some household utensils,
and the family, now won over to him without excep-
tion, was beholding him with worshipful admiration.
As Alicia passed in Robert started suddenly. He
had forgotten for the moment that she was present.
Without a glance at him she went on upstairs.
After that the fun grew quiet. An hour passed
in talk, and then Robert went up himself.
She was standing by the window when he entered
their room. She was still clothed as when they were
on the porch. Outside and crowding against the
window was a giant apple tree, full blossomed.
Robert sighed and went near the window. He was
ready to meet his fate. A confessed vulgarian, he
foresaw the verdict of justice in the shape of that
whiteclad form. He knew the rigid lines that a
Van Der Pool would draw. He was a peasant gam-
bolling indecorously in the valley, and the pure, cold,
white, unthawed summit of the Matterhorn could not
but frown on him. He had been unmasked by his
own actions. All the polish, the poise, the form that
the city had given him had fallen from him like an
ill-fitting mantle at the first breath of a country
breeze. Dully be awaited the approaching condemna-
tion.
"Robert," said the calm, cool voice of his judge,
"I thought I married a gentleman."
Yes, it was coming. And yet, in the face of it,
Robert Walmsley was eagerly regarding a certain
branch of the apple tree upon which be used to climb
out of that very window. He believed he could do it
now. He wondered bow many blossoms there were
on the tree -- ten millions? But here was some one
speaking again:
"I thought I married a gentleman," the voice
went on, "but -- "
Why had she come and was standing so close by
his side?
"But I find that I have married" -- was this
Alicia talking? -- "something better -- a man --
Bob, dear, kiss me, won't you?"
The city was far away.
THE SHOCKS OF DOOM
Here is an aristocracy of the public parks and
even of the vagabonds who use them for their private
apartments. Vallance felt rather than knew this,
but when he stepped down out of his world into
chaos his feet brought him directly to Madison
Square.
Raw and astringent as a schoolgirl -- of the old
order -- young May breathed austerely among the
budding trees. Vallance buttoned his coat, lighted
his last cigarette and took his seat upon a bench.
For three minutes be mildly regretted the last hundred
of his last thousand that it had cost him when the
bicycle cop put an end to his last automobile ride.
Then he felt in every pocket and found not a
single penny. He had given up his apartment that
morning. His furniture had gone toward certain
debts. His clothes, save what were upon him, had
descended to his man-servant for back wages. As he
sat there was not in the whole city for him a bed or a
broiled lobster or a street-car fare or a carnation for
buttonhole unless be should obtain them by spong-
on his friends or by false pretenses. Therefore
lie had chosen the park.
And all this was because an uncle had disinherited
him, and cut down his allowance from liberality to
nothing. And all that was because his nephew had
disobeyed him concerning a certain girl, who comes
not into this story -- therefore, all readers who
brush their hair toward its roots may be warned to
read no further. There was another nephew, of a
different branch, who had once been the prospective
heir and favorite. Being without grace or hope, he
had long ago disappeared in the mire. Now drag-
nets were out for him; he was to be rehabilitated and
restored. And so Vallance fell grandly as Lucifer
to the lowest pit, joining the tattered ghosts in the
little park.
Sitting there, he leaned far back on the hard bench
and laughed a jet of cigarette smoke up to the lowest
tree branches. The sudden severing of all his life's
ties had brought him a free, thrilling, almost joyous
elation. He felt precisely the sensation of the aero-
naut when he cuts loose his parachute and lets his
balloon drift away.
The hour was nearly ten. Not many loungers
were on the benches. The park-dweller, though a
stubborn fighter against autumnal coolness, is slow
to attack the advance line of spring's chilly cohorts.
Then arose one from a seat near the leaping foun-
tain, and came and sat himself at Vallance's side.
He was either young or old; cheap lodging-houses
had flavored him mustily; razors and combs had
passed him by; in him drink had been bottled and
sealed in the devil's bond. He begged a match, which
is the form of introduction among park benchers, and
then he began to talk.
"You're not one of the regulars," he said to Val-
lance. "I know tailored clothes when I see 'em.
You just stopped for a moment on your way through
the park. Don't mind my talking to you for a while?
I've got to be with somebody. I'm afraid -- I'm
afraid. I've told two or three of those bummers over
about it. They think I'm crazy. Say -- let
tell you -- all I've had to eat to-day was a couple
pretzels and an apple. To-morrow I'll stand in
to inherit three millions; and that restaurant you
ee over there with the autos around it will be too
for me to eat in. Don't believe it, do you?
"Without the slightest trouble," said Vallance,
with a laugh. "I lunched there yesterday. To-
night I couldn't buy a five-cent cup of coffee."
"You don't look like one of us. Well, I guess those
things happen. I used to be a high-flyer myself
years ago. What knocked you out of the game?"
"I -- oh, I lost my job," said Vallance.
"It's undiluted Hades, this city," went on the
other. "One day you're eating from china; the
next you are eating in China -- a chop-suey joint.
I've had more than my share of hard luck. For five
years I've been little better than a panhandler. I
was raised up to live expensively and do nothing.
Say -- I don't mind telling you -- I've got to talk
to somebody, you see, because I'm afraid -- I'm
afraid. My name's Ide. You wouldn't think that
old Paulding, one of the millionaires on Riverside
Drive, was my uncle, would you? Well, he is. I
lived in his house once, and had all the money I
wanted. Say, haven't you got the price of a couple
of drinks about you -- er -- what's your name"
"Dawson," said Vallance. "No; I'm sorry to say
that I'm all in, financially."
"I've been living for a week in a coal cellar on
Division Street," went on Ide, "with a crook they
called 'Blinky' Morris. I didn't have anywhere else
to go. While I was out to-day a chap with some pa-
pers in his pocket was there, asking for me. I didn't
know but what he was a fly cop, so I didn't go around
again till after dark. There was a letter there be
had left for me. Say -- Dawson, it was from a big
downtown lawyer, Mead. I've seen his sign on Ann
Street. Paulding wants me to play the prodigal
nephew -- wants me to come back and be his heir
again and blow in his money. I'm to call at the
lawyer's office at ten to-morrow and step into my old
shoes again -- heir to three million, Dawson, and
$10,000 a year pocket money. And -- I'm afraid
-- I'm afraid"
The vagrant leaped to his feet and raised both
trembling arms above his bead. He caught his breath
and moaned hysterically.
Vallance seized his arm and forced him back to the
bench.
"Be quiet!" he commanded, with something like
disgust in his tones. "One would think you had lost
a fortune, instead of being about to acquire one. Of
what are you afraid?"
Ide cowered and shivered on the bench. He clung
to Vallance's sleeve, and even in the dim glow of the
Broadway lights the latest disinherited one could see
drops on the other's brow wrung out by some strange
terror.
"Why, I'm afraid something will happen to me be-
fore morning. I don't know what -- something to
keep me from coming into that money. I'm afraid a
tree will fall on me -- I'm afraid a cab will run over
me, or a stone drop on me from a housetop, or some-
thing. I never was afraid before. I've sat in this
park a hundred nights as calm as a graven image
without knowing where my breakfast was to come
from. But now it's different. I love money, Daw-
son - I'm happy as a god when it's trickling through
my fingers, and people are bowing to me, with the
music and the flowers and fine clothes all around. As
long as I knew I was out of the game I didn't mind.
I was even happy sitting here ragged and hungry,
listening to the fountain jump and watching the
carriages go up the avenue. But it's in reach of my
hand again now -- almost -- and I can't stand it to
wait twelve hours, Dawson -- I can't stand it.
There are fifty things that could happen to me -- I
could go blind -- I might be attacked with heart
disease -- the world might come to an end before I
could -- "
Ide sprang to his feet again, with a shriek. Peo-
ple stirred on the benches and began to look. Val-
lance took his arm.
"Come and walk," he said, soothingly. "And try
to calm yourself. There is no need to become ex-
cited or alarmed. Nothing is going to happen to
you. One night is like another."
"That's right," said Ide. "Stay with me, Daw-
son -- that's a good fellow. Walk around with me
awhile. I never went to pieces like this before, and
I've had a good many hard knocks. Do you think
you could hustle something in the way of a little
lunch, old man? I'm afraid my nerve's too far gone
to try any panhandling"
Vallance led his companion up almost deserted
Fifth Avenue, and then westward along the Thirties
toward Broadway. "Wait here a few minutes," he
said, leaving Ide in a quiet and shadowed spot. He
entered a familiar hotel, and strolled toward the bar
quite in his old assured way.
"There's a poor devil outside, Jimmy," he said to
the bartender, "who says he's hungry and looks it.
You know what they do when you give them money.
Fix up a sandwich or two for him; and I'll see that
he doesn't throw it away."
"Certainly, Mr. Vallance," said the bartender.
"They ain't all fakes. Don't like to see anybody go
hungry."
Ide folded a liberal supply of the free lunch into a
napkin. Vallance went with it and joined his com-
panion. Ide pounced upon the food ravenously. "I
haven't had any free lunch as good as this in a
year," be said. "Aren't you going to eat any,
Dawson?
"I'm not hungry - thanks," said Vallance.
"We'll go back to the Square," said Ide. "The
cops won't bother us there. I'll roll up the rest of
this ham and stuff for our breakfast. I won't eat
any more; I'm afraid I'll get sick. Suppose I'd die
of cramps or something to-night, and never get to
touch that money again! It's eleven hours yet till
time to see that lawyer. You won't leave me, will
you, Dawson? I'm afraid something might happen.
You haven't any place to go, have you?"
"No," said Vallance, "nowhere to-night. I'll
have a bench with you."
"You take it cool," said Ide, "if you've told it to
me straight. I should think a man put on the bum
from a good job just in one day would be tearing his
hair."
"I believe I've already remarked," said Vallance,
laughing, "that I would have thought that a man
who was expecting to come into a fortune on the
next day would be feeling pretty easy and quiet."
"It's funny business," philosophized Ide, "about
the way people take things, anyhow. Here's your
bench, Dawson, right next to mine. The light don't
shine in your eyes here. Say, Dawson, I'll get the
old man to give you a letter to somebody about a job
when I get back home. You've helped me a lot to-
night. I don't believe I could have gone through
the night if I hadn't struck you."
"Thank you," said Vallance. "Do you lie down
or sit up on these when you sleep?
For hours Vallance gazed almost without winking
at the stars through the branches of the trees and
listened to the sharp slapping of horses' hoofs on the
sea of asphalt to the south His mind was active,
but his feelings were dormant. Every emotion
seemed to have been eradicated. Ide felt no regrets,
no fears, no pain or discomfort. Even when be
thought of the girl, it was as of an inhabitant of one
of those remote stars at which be gazed. He re-
membered the absurd antics of his companion and
laughed softly, yet without a feeling of mirth. Soon
the daily army of milk wagons made of the city a
roaring drum to which they marched. Vallance fell
asleep on his comfortless bench.
At ten o'clock on the next day the two stood at the
door of Lawyer Mead's office in Ann Street.
Ide's nerves fluttered worse than ever when the
hour approached; and Vallance could not decide to
leave him a possible prey to the dangers he dreaded.
When they entered the office, Lawyer Mead looked
at them wonderingly. He and Vallance were old
friends. After his greeting, he turned to Ide, who
stood with white face and trembling limbs before the
expected crisis.
"I sent a second letter to your address last night,
Mr. Ide," he said. "I learned this morning that
you were not there to receive it. It will inform you
that Mr. Paulding has reconsidered his offer to take
you back into favor. He has decided not to do so,
and desires you to understand that no change will be
made in the relations existing between you and
him."
Ide's trembling suddenly ceased. The color came
back to his face, and be straightened his back. His
jaw went forward half an inch, and a gleam came
into his eye. He pushed back his battered bat with
one hand, and extended the other, with levelled fin-
gers, toward the lawyer. He took a long breath and
then laughed sardonically.
"Tell old Paulding he may go to the devil," he
said, loudly and clearly, and turned and walked out
of the office with a firm and lively step.
Lawyer Mead turned on his heel to Vallance and
smiled.
"I am glad you came in," he said, genially.
"Your uncle wants you to return home at once. He
is reconciled to the situation that led to his hasty
action, and desires to say that all will be as -- "
"Hey, Adams!" cried Lawyer Mead, breaking his
sentence, and calling to his clerk. "Bring a glass of
water Mr. Vallance has fainted."
THE PLUTONIAN FIRE
There are a few editor men with whom I am privi-
leged to come in contact. It has not been long since
it was their habit to come in contact with me. There
is a difference.
They tell me that with a large number of the
manuscripts that are submitted to them come advices
(in the way of a boost) from the author asseverating
that the incidents in the story are true. The des-
tination of such contributions depends wholly upon
the question of the enclosure of stamps. Some are
returned, the rest are thrown on the floor in a corner
on top of a pair of gum shoes, an overturned statu-
ette of the Winged Victory, and a pile of old maga-
zines containing a picture of the editor in the act
of reading the latest copy of Le Petit Journal, right
side up - you can tell by the illustrations. It is
only a legend that there are waste baskets in editors'
offices.
Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth
and science and nature will adapt themselves to art.
Things will happen logically, and the villain be dis-
comfited instead of being elected to the board of
directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only
be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be
awarded custody of the press despatches.
This preamble is to warn you off the grade cross-
ing of a true story. Being that, it shall be told sim-
ply, with conjunctions substituted for adjectives
wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style
may appear in it shall be due to the linotype man.
It is a story of the literary life in a great city, and
it should be of interest to every author within a 20-
mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a MS.
story beginning thus: "While the cheers following
his nomination were still ringing through the old
courthouse, Harwood broke away from the congrat-
ulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to
Judge Creswell's house to find Ida."
Pettit came up out of Alabama to write fiction.
The Southern papers had printed eight of his stories
under an editorial caption identifying the author as
the son of "the gallant Major Pettingill Pettit, our
former County Attorney and hero of the battle of
Lookout Mountain."
Pettit was a rugged fellow, with a kind of shame-
faced culture, and my good friend. His father kept
a general store in a little town called Hosea. Pettit
had been raised in the pine-woods and broom-sedge
fields adjacent thereto. He had in his gripsack two
manuscript novels of the adventures in Picardy of
one Gaston Laboulaye, Vicompte de Montrepos, in
the year 1329. That's nothing. We all do that.
And some day when we make a hit with the little
sketch about a newsy and his lame dog, the editor
prints the other one for us -- or "on us," as the say-
ing is -- and then -- and then we have to get a big
valise and peddle those patent air-draft gas burners.
At $1.25 everybody should have 'em.
I took Pettit to the red-brick house which was to
appear in an article entitled "Literary Landmarks
of Old New York," some day when we got through
with it. He engaged a room there, drawing on the
general store for his expenses. I showed New York
to him, and he did not mention how much narrower
Broadway is than Lee Avenue in Hosea. This
seemed a good sign, so I put the final test.
"Suppose you try your band at a descriptive arti-
cle," I suggested, "giving your impressions of New
York as seen from the Brooklyn Bridge. The fresh
point of view, the -- "
"Don't be a fool," said Pettit. "Let's go have
some beer. On the whole I rather like the city."
We discovered and enjoyed the only true Bohemia.
Every day and night we repaired to one of those
palaces of marble and glass and tilework, where goes
on a tremendous and sounding epic of life. Valhalla
itself could not be more glorious and sonorous. The
classic marble on which we ate, the great, light-
flooded, vitreous front, adorned with snow-white
scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups
and bowls the flashing staccato of brandishing cut-
lery, the piercing recitative of the white-aproned
grub-maidens at the morgue-like banquet tables; the
recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register -- it was a
gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a
deafening, soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and em-
blematic life. And the beans were only ten cents.
We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine at
sad little tables in their so-called Bohemian restau-
rants; and we shuddered lest they should seek out our
resorts and make them conspicuous with their pres-
ence.
Pettit wrote many stories, which the editors re-
turned to him. He wrote love stories, a thing I have
always kept free from, holding the belief that the
well-known and popular sentiment is not properly a
matter for publication, but something to be privately
handled by the alienists and florists. But the editors
had told him that they wanted love stories, because
they said the women read them.
Now, the editors are wrong about that, of course.
Women do not read the love stories in the magazines.
They read the poker-game stories and the recipes
for cucumber lotion. The love stories are read by
fat cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls. I
am not criticising the judgment of editors. They
are mostly very fine men, but a man can be but one
man, with individual opinions and tastes. I knew
two associate editors of a magazine who were won-
derfully alike in almost everything. And yet one
of them was very fond of Flaubert, while the other
preferred gin.
Pettit brought me his returned manuscripts, and
we looked them over together to find out why they
were not accepted. They seemed to me pretty fair
stories, written in a good style, and ended, as they
should, at the bottom of the last page.
They were well constructed and the events were
marshalled in orderly and logical sequence. But I
thought I detected a lack of living substance -- it
was much as if I gazed at a symmetrical array of
presentable clamshells from which the succulent and
vital inhabitants had been removed. I intimated that
the author might do well to get better acquainted with
his theme.
"You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about
a gun fight in an Arizona mining town in which the
hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot seven bandits as
fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter
could -- "
"Oh, well," said I, "that's different. Arizona is
a long way from New York. I could have a man
stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair of chap-
arreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn't be noticed
until the usual error-sharp from around McAdams
Junction isolates the erratum and writes in to the pa-
pers about it. But you are up against another
proposition. This thing they call love is as common
around New York as it is in Sheboygan during the
young onion season. It may be mixed here with a
little commercialism -- they read Byron, but they
look up Bradstreet's, too, while they're among the
B's, and Brigham also if they have time -- but it's
pretty much the same old internal disturbance every-
where. You can fool an editor with a fake picture of
a cowboy mounting a pony with his left hand on the
saddle horn, but you can't put him up a tree with a
love story. So, you've got to fall in love and then
write the real thing."
Pettit did. I never knew whether he was taking
my advice or whether be fell an accidental victim.
There was a girl be had met at one of these studio
contrivances - a glorious, impudent, lucid, open-
minded girl with hair the color of Culmbacher, and a
good-natured way of despising you. She was a New
York girl.
Well (as the narrative style permits us to say in-
frequently), Pettit went to pieces. All those pains,
those lover's doubts, those heart-burnings and
tremors of which be had written so unconvincingly
were his. Talk about Shylock's pound of flesh!
Twenty-five pounds Cupid got from Pettit. Which
is the usurer?
One night Pettit came to my room exalted. Pale
and haggard but exalted. She had given him a
jonquil.
"Old Hoss," said he, with a new smile flickering
around his mouth, "I believe I could write that story
to-night -- the one, you know, that is to win out.
"I can feel it. I don't know whether it will come out
or not, but I can feel it."
I pushed him out of my door. "Go to your room
and write it," I ordered. "Else I can see your fin-
ish. I told you this must come first. Write it to-
night and put it under my door when it is done. Put
it under my door to-night when it is finished --
don't keep it until to-morrow."
I was reading my bully old pal Montaigne at two
o'clock when I beard the sheets rustle under my door.
I gathered them up and read the story.
The hissing of geese, the languishing cooing of
doves, the braying of donkeys, the chatter of irre-
sponsible sparrows - these were in my mind's ear as
I read. "Suffering Sappho!" I exclaimed to myself.
"Is this the divine fire that is supposed to ignite
genius and make it practicable and wage-earning?"
The story was sentimental drivel, full of whim-
pering softheartedness and gushing egoism. All
the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A pe-
rusal of its buttery phrases would have made a cynic
of a sighing chambermaid.
In the morning Pettit came to my room. I read
him his doom mercilessly. He laughed idiotically.
"All right, Old Hoss," he said, cheerily, "make
cigar-lighters of it. What's the difference? I'm
going to take her to lunch at Claremont to-day."
There was about a month of it. And then Pettit
came to me bearing an invisible mitten, with the forti-
tude of a dish-rag. He talked of the grave and
South America and prussic acid; and I lost an after-
noon getting him straight. I took him out and saw
that large and curative doses of whiskey were ad-
ministered to him. I warned you this was a true
story -- 'ware your white ribbons if only follow this
tale. For two weeks I fed him whiskey and Omar,
and read to him regularly every evening the column
in the evening paper that reveals the secrets of fe-
male beauty. I recommend the treatment.
After Pettit was cured be wrote more stories. He
recovered his old-time facility and did work just
short of good enough. Then the curtain rose on
the third act.
A little, dark-eyed, silent girl from New Hamp-
shire, who was studying applied design, fell deeply
in love with him. She was the intense sort, but ex-
ternally glace, such as New England sometimes fools
us with. Pettit liked her mildly, and took her about
a good deal. She worshipped him, and now and then
ignored him.
There came a climax when she tried to jump out
of a window, and he had to save her by some perfunc-
tary, unmeant wooing. Even I was shaken by the
depths of the absorbing affection she showed. Home,
friends, traditions, creeds went up like thistle-down
in the scale against her love. It was really discom-
posing.
One night again Pettit sauntered in, yawning. As
he had told me before, he said he felt that he could
do a great story, and as before I hunted him to his
room and saw him open his inkstand. At one o'clock
the sheets of paper slid under my door.
I read that story, and I jumped up, late as it was,
with a whoop of joy. Old Pettit had done it. Just
as though it lay there, red and bleeding, a woman's
heart was written into the lines. You couldn't see
the joining, but art, exquisite art, and pulsing na-
ture had been combined into a love story that took
you by the throat like the quinsy. I broke into
Pettit's room and beat him on the back and called
him name -- names high up in the galaxy of the im-
mortals that we admired. And Pettit yawned and
begged to be allowed to sleep.
On the morrow, I dragged him to an editor. The
great man read, and, rising, gave Pettit his hand.
That was a decoration, a wreath of bay, and a guar-
antee of rent.
And then old Pettit smiled slowly. I call him Gen-
tleman Pettit now to myself. It's a miserable name
to give a man, but it sounds better than it looks in
print.
"I see," said old Pettit, as he took up his story
and began tearing it into small strips. "I see the
game now. You can't write with ink, and you can't
write with your own heart's blood, but you can write
with the heart's blood of some one else. You have
to be a cad before you can be an artist. Well, I am
for old Alabam and the Major's store. Have you
got a light, Old Hoss?"
I went with Pettit to the depot and died hard.
"Shakespeare's sonnets?" I blurted, making a last
stand. "How about him?"
"A cad," said Pettit. "They give it to you, and
you sell it -- love, you know. I'd rather sell ploughs
for father."
"But," I protested, " you are reversing the de-
cision of the world's greatest -- "
"Good-by, Old Hoss," said Pettit.
"Critics," I continued. " But -- say -- if the
Major can use a fairly good salesman and book-
keeper down there in the store, let me know, will
you?"
NEMESIS AND THE CANDY MAN
"We sail at eight in the morning on the Celtic," said
Honoria, plucking a loose thread from her lace
sleeve.
"I heard so," said young Ives, dropping his hat,
and muffing it as he tried to catch it, "and I came
around to wish you a pleasant voyage."
"Of course you heard it," said Honoria, coldly
sweet, "since we have had no opportunity of inform-
ing you ourselves."
Ives looked at her pleadingly, but with little hope.
Outside in the street a high-pitched voice
chanted, not unmusically, a commercial gamut of
"Cand-de-ee-ee-s! Nice, fresh cand-ee-ee-ee-ees!d
"It's our old candy man," said Honoria, leaning
out the window and beckoning. "I want some of his
motto kisses. There's nothing in the Broadway
shops half so good."
The candy man stopped his pushcart in front of
the old Madison Avenue home. He had a holiday
and festival air unusual to street peddlers. His tie
was new and bright red, and a horseshoe pin, almost
life-size, glittered speciously from its folds. His
brown, thin face was crinkled into a semi-foolish
smile. Striped cuffs with dog-head buttons covered
the tan on his wrists.
"I do believe he's going to get married," said
Honoria, pityingly. "I never saw him taken that
way before. And to-day is the first time in months
that he has cried his wares, I am sure."
Ives threw a coin to the sidewalk. The candy man
knows his customers. He filled a paper bag, climbed
the old-fashioned stoop and banded it in.
"I remember -- " said Ives.
"Wait," said Honoria.
She took a small portfolio from the drawer of a
writing desk and from the portfolio a slip of flimsy
paper one-quarter of an inch by two inches in size.
"This," said Honoria, inflexibly, "was wrapped
about the first one we opened."
"It was a year ago," apologized Ives, as he held
out his hand for it,
"As long as skies above are blue
To you, my love, I will be true."
This he read from the slip of flimsy paper.
"We were to have sailed a fortnight ago," said
Honoria, gossipingly. "It has been such a warm
summer. The town is quite deserted. There is no-
where to go. Yet I am told that one or two of the
roof gardens are amusing. The, singing -- and the
dancing -- on one or two seem to have met with ap-
proval."
Ives did not wince. When you are in the ring you
are not surprised when your adversary taps you on
the ribs.
"I followed the candy man that time," said Ives,
irrelevantly, "and gave him five dollars at the corner
of Broadway."
He reached for the paper bag in Honoria's lap,
took out one of the square, wrapped confections and
slowly unrolled it.
Sara Chillingworth's father," said Honoria,
"has given her an automobile."
"Read that," said Ives, handing over the slip that
had been wrapped around the square of candy.
"Life teaches us -- how to live,
Love teaches us -- to forgive."
Honoria's checks turned pink.
"Honoria!" cried Ives, starting up from his chair.
"Miss Clinton," corrected Honoria, rising like
Venus from the head on the surf. "I warned you
not to speak that name again."'
"Honoria," repeated Ives, "you must bear me. I
know I do not deserve your forgiveness, but I must
have it. There is a madness that possesses one some-
times for which his better nature is not responsible.
I throw everything else but you to the winds. I
strike off the chains that have bound me. I re-
nounce the siren that lured me from you. Let the
bought verse of that street peddler plead for me. It
is you only whom I can love. Let your love forgive,
and I swear to you that mine will be true 'as long
as skies above are blue.'
On the west side, between Sixth and Seventh Ave-
nues, an alley cuts the block in the middle. It per-
ishes in a little court in the centre of the block. The
district is theatrical; the inhabitants, the bubbling
froth of half a dozen nations. The atmosphere is
Bohemian, the language polyglot, the locality pre-
carious.
In the court at the rear of the alley lived the candy
man. At seven o'clock be pushed his cart into the
narrow entrance, rested it upon the irregular stone
slats and sat upon one of the handles to cool himself.
There was a great draught of cool wind through the
alley.
There was a window above the spot where be al-
ways stopped his pushcart. In the cool of the after-
noon, Mlle. Adele, drawing card of the Aerial Roof
Garden, sat at the window and took the air. Gen-
erally her ponderous mass of dark auburn hair was
down, that the breeze might have the felicity of aid-
ing Sidonie, the maid, in drying and airing it.
About her shoulders -- the point of her that the pho-
tographers always made the most of -- was loosely
draped a heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow
were bare -- there were no sculptors there to rave
over them -- but even the stolid bricks in the walls
of the alley should not have been so insensate as to
disapprove. While she sat thus Fe1ice, another maid,
anointed and bathed the small feet that twinkled and
so charmed the nightly Aerial audiences.
Gradually Mademoiselle began to notice the candy
man stopping to mop his brow and cool himself be-
neath her window. In the hands of her maids she
was deprived for the time of her vocation -- the
charming and binding to her chariot of man. To
lose time was displeasing to Mademoiselle. Here
was the candy man - no fit game for her darts, truly
-- but of the sex upon which she had been born to
make war.
After casting upon him looks of unseeing coldness
for a dozen times, one afternoon she suddenly thawed
and poured down upon him a smile that put to shame
the sweets upon his cart.
"Candy man," she said, cooingly, while Sidonie
followed her impulsive dive, brushing the heavy
auburn hair, "don't you think I am beautiful?
The candy man laughed harshly, and looked up,
with his thin jaw set, while he wiped his forehead
with a red-and-blue handkerchief
"Yer'd make a dandy magazine cover," he said,
grudgingly. "Beautiful or not is for them that
cares. It's not my line. If yer lookin' for bou-
quets apply elsewhere between nine and twelve. I
think we'll have rain."
Truly, fascinating a candy man is like killing rab-
bits in a deep snow; but the hunter's blood is widely
diffused. Mademoiselle tugged a great coil of
hair from Sidonie's bands and let it fall out the
window.
"Candy man, have you a sweetheart anywhere
with hair as long and soft as that? And with an arm
so round? " She flexed an arm like Galatea's after
the miracle across the window-sill.
The candy man cackled shrilly as he arranged a
stock of butter-scotch that had tumbled down.
"Smoke up!" said he, vulgarly. "Nothin' doin'
in the complimentary line. I'm too wise to be bam-
boozled by a switch of hair and a newly massaged
arm. Oh, I guess you'll make good in the calcium,
all right, with plenty of powder and paint on and the
orchestra playing "Under the Old Apple Tree."
But don't put on your hat and chase downstairs to
fly to the Little Church Around the Corner with me.
I've been up against peroxide and make-up boxes be-
fore. Say, all joking aside -- don't you think we'll
have rain?"
"Candy man," said Mademoiselle softly, with her
lips curving and her chin dimpling, "don't you think
I'm pretty?"
The candy man grinned.
"Savin' money, ain't yer? " said be, "by bein' yer
own press agent. I smoke, but I haven't seen yer
mug on any of the five-cent cigar boxes. It'd take
a new brand of woman to get me goin', anyway. I
know 'em from sidecombs to shoelaces. Gimme a
good day's sales and steak-and-onions at seven and
a pipe and an evenin' paper back there in the court,
and I'll not trouble Lillian Russell herself to wink at
me, if you please."
Mademoiselle pouted.
"Candy man," she said, softly and deeply, "yet
you shall say that I am beautiful. All men say so
and so shall you."
The candy man laughed and pulled out his pipe.
"Well," said be, "I must be goin' in. There is a
story in the evenin' paper that I am readin'. Men
are divin' in the seas for a treasure, and pirates are
watchin' them from behind a reef. And there ain't
a woman on land or water or in the air. Good-
evenin'." And he trundled his pushcart down the
alley and back to the musty court where he lived.
Incredibly to him who has not learned woman,
Mademoiselle sat at the window each day and spread
her nets for the ignominious game. Once she kept a
grand cavalier waiting in her reception chamber for
half an hour while she battered in vain the candy
man's tough philosophy. His rough laugh chafed her
vanity to its core. Daily he sat on his cart in the
breeze of the alley while her hair was being ministered
to, and daily the shafts of her beauty rebounded
from his dull bosom pointless and ineffectual. Un-
worthy pique brightened her eyes. Pride-hurt she
glowed upon him in a way that would have sent her
higher adorers into an egoistic paradise. The candy
man's hard eyes looked upon her with a half-con-
cealed derision that urged her to the use of the sharp-
est arrow in her beauty's quiver.
One afternoon she leaned far over the sill, and she
did not challenge and torment him as usual.
"Candy man," said she, "stand up and look into
my eyes."
He stood up and looked into her eyes, with his
harsh laugh like the sawing of wood. He took out
his pipe, fumbled with it, and put it back into big
pocket with a trembling band.
"That will do," said Mademoiselle, with a slow
smile. "I must go now to my masseuse. Good-
evening."
The next evening at seven the candy man came and
rested his cart under the window. But was it the
candy man? His clothes were a bright new check.
His necktie was a flaming red, adorned by a glit-
tering horseshoe pin, almost life-size. His shoes were
polished; the tan of his cheeks had paled -- his hands
had been washed. The window was empty, and he
waited under it with his nose upward, like a hound
hoping for a bone.
Mademoiselle came, with Sidonie carrying her load
of hair. She looked at the candy man and smiled a
slow smile that faded away into ennui. Instantly she
knew that the game was bagged; and so quickly
she wearied of the chase. She began to talk to
Sidonie.
"Been a fine day," said the candy man, hollowly.
"First time in a month I've felt first-class. Hit it
up down old Madison, hollering out like I useter.
Think it'll rain to-morrow?"
Mademoiselle laid two round arms on the cushion
on the window-sill, and a dimpled chin upon them.
"Candy man," said she, softly, "do you not
love me? "
The candy man stood up and leaned against the
brick wall.
"Lady," said be, chokingly, "I've got $800 saved
up. Did I say you wasn't beautiful? Take it every
bit of it and buy a collar for your dog with it."
A sound as of a hundred silvery bells tinkled in the
room of Mademoiselle. The laughter filled the alley
and trickled back into the court, as strange a thing to
enter there as sunlight itself. Mademoiselle was
amused. Sidonie, a wise echo, added a sepulchral but
faithful contralto. The laughter of the two seemed
at last to penetrate the candy man. He fumbled
with his horseshoe pin. At length Mademoiselle, ex-
hausted, turned her flushed, beautiful face to the win-
dow.
"Candy man," said she, "go away. When I
laugh Sidonie pulls my hair. I can but laugh while
you remain there."
"Here is a note for Mademoiselle," said Fe1ice,
coming to the window in the room.
"There is no justice," said the candy man, lift-
ing the handle of his cart and moving away.
Three yards he moved, and stopped. Loud shriek
after shriek came from the window of Mademoiselle.
Quickly he ran back. He heard a body thumping
upon the floor and a sound as though heels beat alter-
nately upon it.
"What is it?" be called.
Sidonie's severe head came into the window.
"Mademoiselle is overcome by bad news," she said.
"One whom she loved with all her soul has gone --
you may have beard of him -- he is Monsieur Ives.
He sails across the ocean to-morrow. Oh, you men!"
SQUARING THE CIRCLE
At the hazard of wearying you this tale of vehe-
ment emotions must be prefaced by a discourse on
geometry.
Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines.
The natural is rounded; the artificial is made up
of angles. A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite
of himself, in perfect circles; the city man's feet,
denaturalized by rectangular streets and floors, carry
him ever away from himself.
The round eyes of childhood typify innocence;
the narrowed line of the flirt's optic proves the in-
vasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark of
determined cunning; who has not read Nature's most
spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss?
Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its
chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchant-
ing golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the
huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring,
the ring for the waiter, and the "round" of drinks.
On the other hand, straight lines show that Na-
ture has been deflected. Imagine Venus's girdle
transformed into a "straight front"!
When we begin to move in straight lines and turn
sharp corners our natures begin to change. The
consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than
Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The
result is often a rather curious product -- for in-
stance: A prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whis-
key, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower au gratin,
and a New Yorker,
Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause
is geometrical, not moral. The straight lines of its
streets and architecture, the rectangularity of its
laws and social customs, the undeviating pavements,
the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules
of all its ways -- even of its recreation and sports --
coldly exhibit a sneering defiance of the curved line
of Nature.
Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has
demonstrated the problem of squaring the circle.
And it may be added that this mathematical intro-
duction precedes an account of the fate of a Kentucky
feud that was imported to the city that has a habit
of making its importations conform to its angles.
The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains be-
tween the Folwell and the Harkness families. The
first victim of the homespun vendetta was a 'possum
dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness
family evened up this dire loss by laying out the
chief of the Folwell clan. The Folwells were prompt
at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles and
made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog
to a land where the 'possums come down when treed
without the stroke of an ax.
The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses
were shot at the plough, through their lamp-lit cabin
windows, coming from camp-meeting, asleep, in duello,
sober and otherwise, singly and in family groups,
prepared and unprepared. Folwells had the
branches of their family tree lopped off in similar
ways, as the traditions of their country prescribed
and authorized.
By and by the pruning left but a single member
of each family. And then Cal Harkness, probably
reasoning that further pursuance of the controversy
would give a too decided personal flavor to the feud,
suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands,
baulking the avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate op-
posing Folwell.
A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his
hereditary, unsuppressed enemy was living in New
York City. Sam turned over the big iron wash-pot
in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he
mixed with lard and shined his boots with the com-
pound. He put on his store clothes of butternut
dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and packed a
carpet-sack with Spartan lingerie. He took his
squirrel rifle from its hooks, but put it back again
with a sigh. However ethical and plausible the habit
might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps New York
would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among
the skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but
reliable Colt's revolver that he resurrected from a
bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself the pink of
weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance.
This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam
packed in the carpet-sack. As he started, Muleback,
for the lowland railroad station the last Folwell
turned in his saddle and looked grimly at the little
cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that
marked the Folwell burying-ground.
Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night.
Still moving and living in the free circles of nature,
he did not perceive the formidable, pitiless, restless,
fierce angles of the great city waiting in the dark
to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain
and mould him to the form of its millions of re-shaped
victims. A cabby picked him out of the whirl, as
Sam himself had often picked a nut from a bed of
wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away
to a hotel commensurate to his boots and carpet-
sack.
On the next morning the last of the Folwells made
his sortie into the city that sheltered the last Hark-
ness. The Colt was thrust beneath his coat and se-
cured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife
hung between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an
inch below his coat collar. He knew this much --
that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon some-
where in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had
come to kill him. And as he stepped upon the side-
walk the red came into his eye and the feud-hate into
his heart.
The clamor of the central avenues drew him thith-
erward. He had half expected to see Cal coming
down the street in his shirt-sleeves, with a jug and
a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him
in Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by
and Cal did not appear. Perhaps he was waiting in
ambush, to shoot him from a door or a window. Sam
kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.
About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse
and suddenly squeezed him with its straight lines.
Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular
arteries of the city cross. He looked four ways, and
saw the world burled from its orbit and reduced
by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered
plane. All life moved on tracks, in grooves, accord-
ing to system, within boundaries, by rote. The root
of life was the cube root; the measure of existence
was square measure. People streamed by in straight
rows; the horrible din and crash stupefied him.
Sam leaned against the sharp corner of a stone
building. Those faces passed him by thousands, and
none of them were turned toward him. A sudden fool-
ish fear that he had died and was a spirit, and that
they could not see him, seized him. And then the city
smote him with loneliness.
A fat man dropped out of the stream and stood
a few feet distant, waiting for his car. Sam crept
to his side and shouted above the tumult into his
ear:
"The Rankinses' hogs weighed more'n ourn a
whole passel, but the mast in thar neighborhood was
a fine chance better than what it was down -- "
The fat man moved away unostentatiously, and
bought roasted chestnuts to cover his alarm.
Sam felt the need of a drop of mountain dew.
Across the street men passed in and out through
swinging doors. Brief glimpses could be had of a
glistening bar and its bedeckings. The feudist crossed
and essayed to enter. Again had Art eliminated the
familiar circle. Sam's hand found no door-knob -
it slid, in vain, over a rectangular brass plate and
polished oak with nothing even so large as a pin's
head upon which his fingers might close.
Abashed, reddened, heartbroken, he walked away
from the bootless door and sat upon a step. A locust
club tickled him in the ribs.
"Take a walk for yourself," said the policeman.
You've been loafing around here long enough."
At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam's
ear. He wheeled around and saw a black-browed vil-
lain scowling at him over peanuts heaped on a steam-
ing machine. He started across the street. An im-
mense engine, running without mules, with the voice of
a bull and the smell of a smoky lamp, whizzed past,
grazing his knee. A cab-driver bumped him with a
hub and explained to him that kind words were in-
vented to be used on other occasions. A motorman
clanged his bell wildly and, for once in his life, cor-
roborated a cab-driver. A large lady in a changeable
silk waist dug an elbow into his back, and a newsy
pensively pelted him with banana rinds, murmuring,
"I hates to do it -- but if anybody seen me let it
pass!"
Cal Harkness, his day's work over and his express
wagon stabled, turned the sharp edge of the build-
ing that, by the cheek of architects, is modelled upon
a safety razor. Out of the mass of hurrying people
his eye picked up, three yards away, the surviving
bloody and implacable foe of his kith and kin.
He stopped short and wavered for a moment, be-
ing unarmed and sharply surprised. But the keen
mountaineer's eye of Sam Folwell had picked him out.
There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream
of passersby and the sound of Sam's voice crying:
"Howdy, Cal! I'm durned glad to see ye."
And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and
Twenty-third Street the Cumberland feudists shook
hands.
ROSES, RUSES AND ROMANCE
Ravenel -- Ravenel, the traveller, artist and
poet, threw his magazine to the floor. Sammy Brown,
broker's clerk, who sat by the window, jumped.
"What is it, Ravvy?" he asked. "The critics
been hammering your stock down?"
"Romance is dead," said Ravenel, lightly. When
Ravenel spoke lightly be was generally serious. He
picked up the magazine and fluttered its leaves.
"Even a Philistine, like you, Sammy," said Rave-
nel, seriously (a tone that insured him to be speak-
ing lightly), "ought to understand. Now, here is
a magazine that once printed Poe and Lowell and
Whitman and Bret Harte and Du Maurier and Lanier
and -- well, that gives you the idea. The current
number has this literary feast to set before you: an
article on the stokers and coal bunkers of battleships,
an expose of the methods employed in making liver-
wurst, a continued story of a Standard Preferred
International Baking Powder deal in Wall Street, a
'poem' on the bear that the President missed, an-
other 'story' by a young woman who spent a week
as a spy making overalls on the East Side, another
'fiction' story that reeks of the 'garage' and a cer-
tain make of automobile. Of course, the title contains
the words 'Cupid' and 'Chauffeur' -- an article on
naval strategy, illustrated with cuts of the Spanish
Armada, and the new Staten Island ferry-boats; an-
other story of a political boss who won the love of a
Fifth Avenue belle by blackening her eye and refusing
to vote for an iniquitous ordinance (it doesn't say
whether it was in the Street-Cleaning Department or
Congress), and nineteen pages by the editors brag-
ging about the circulation. The whole thing, Sammy,
is an obituary on Romance."
Sammy Brown sat comfortably in the leather arm-
chair by the open window. His suit was a vehement
brown with visible checks, beautifully matched in
shade by the ends of four cigars that his vest pocket
poorly concealed. Light tan were his shoes, gray his
socks, sky-blue his apparent linen, snowy and high
and adamantine his collar, against which a black but-
terfly had alighted and spread his wings. Sammy's
face -- least important -- was round and pleasant
and pinkish, and in his eyes you saw no haven for
fleeing Romance.
That window of Ravenel's apartment opened upon
an old garden full of ancient trees and shrubbery.
The apartment-house towered above one side of it;
a high brick wall fended it from the street; oppo-
site Ravenel's window an old, old mansion stood, half-
hidden in the shade of the summer foliage. The house
was a castle besieged. The city howled and roared
and shrieked and beat upon its double doors, and
shook white, fluttering checks above the wall, offering
terms of surrender. The gray dust settled upon the
trees; the siege was pressed hotter, but the draw-
bridge was not lowered. No further will the language
of chivalry serve. Inside lived an old gentleman who
loved his home and did not wish to sell it. That is
all the romance of the besieged castle.
Three or four times every week came Sammy
Brown to Ravenel's apartment. He belonged to the
poet's club, for the former Browns had been con-
spicuous, though Sammy bad been vulgarized by
Business. He had no tears for departed Romance.
The song of the ticker was the one that reached
his heart, and when it came to matters equine and
batting scores he was something of a pink edition.
He loved to sit in the leather armchair by Ravenel's
window. And Ravenel didn't mind particularly.
Sammy seemed to enjoy his talk; and then the broker's
clerk was such a perfect embodiment of modernity and
the day's sordid practicality that Ravenel rather
liked to use him as a scapegoat.
"I'll tell you what's the matter with you," said
Sammy, with the shrewdness that business had taught
him. "The magazine has turned down some of your
poetry stunts. That's why you are sore at it."
"That would be a good guess in Wall Street or in
a campaign for the presidency of a woman's club,"
said Ravenel, quietly. "Now, there is a poem - if
you will allow me to call it that - of my own in this
number of the magazine."
"Read it to me," said Sammy, watching a cloud
of pipe-smoke be had just blown out the window.
Ravenel was no greater than Achilles. No one is.
There is bound to be a spot. The Somebody-or-Other
must take bold of us somewhere when she dips us in
the Something-or-Other that makes us invulnerable.
He read aloud this verse in the magazine:
THE FOUR ROSES
'One rose I twined within your hair --
(White rose, that spake of worth);
And one you placed upon your breast --
(Red rose, love's seal of birth).
You plucked another from its stem --
(Tea rose, that means for aye);
And one you gave -- that bore for me
The thorns of memory."
"That's a crackerjack," said Sammy, admiringly.
There are five more verses," said Ravenel, pa-
tiently sardonic. "One naturally pauses at the end
of each. Of course -- "
"Oh, let's have the rest, old man," shouted Sammy,
contritely, " I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm not
much of a poetry expert, you know. I never saw a
poem that didn't look like it ought to have terminal
facilities at the end of every verse. Reel off the rest
of it."
Ravenel sighed, and laid the magazine down. "All
right," said Sammy, cheerfully, "we'll have it next
time. I'll be off now. Got a date at five o'clock."
He took a last look at the shaded green garden
and left, whistling in an off key an untuneful air from
a roofless farce comedy.
The next afternoon Ravenel, while polishing a
ragged line of a new sonnet, reclined by the window
overlooking the besieged garden of the unmercenary
baron. Suddenly he sat up, spilling two rhymes and
a syllable or two.,
Through the trees one window of the old mansion
could be seen clearly. In its window, draped in flow-
ing white, leaned the angel of all his dreams of ro-
mance and poesy. Young, fresh as a drop of dew,
graceful as a spray of clematis, conferring upon the
garden hemmed in by the roaring traffic the air
of a princess's bower, beautiful as any flower sung
by poet -- thus Ravenel saw her for the first time.
She lingered for a while, and then disappeared within,
leaving a few notes of a birdlike ripple of song to
reach his entranced ears through the rattle of cabs
and the snarling of the electric cars.
Thus, as if to challenge the poet's flaunt at ro-
mance and to punish him for his recreancy to the
undying spirit of youth and beauty, this vision bad
dawned upon him with a thrilling and accusive power.
And so metabolic was the power that in an instant
the atoms of Ravenel's entire world were redistrib-
uted. The laden drays that passed the house in which
she lived rumbled a deep double-bass to the tune of
love. The newsboys' shouts were the notes of singing
birds; that garden was the pleasance of the Capulets;
the janitor was an ogre; himself a knight, ready with
sword, lance or lute.
Thus does romance show herself amid forests of
brick and stone when she gets lost in the city, and
there has to be sent out a general alarm to find her
again.
At four in the afternoon Ravenel looked out across
the garden. In the window of his hopes were set
four small vases, each containing a great, full-blown
rose - red and white. And, as he gazed, she leaned
above them, shaming them with her loveliness and
seeming to direct her eyes pensively toward his own
window. And then, as though she had caught his
respectful but ardent regard, she melted away, leaving
the fragrant emblems on the window-sill.
"Yes, emblems! -- he would be unworthy if be had
not understood. She had read his poem, "The Four
Roses"; it had reached her heart; and this was its
romantic answer. Of course she must know that
Ravenel, the poet, lived there across her garden. His
picture, too, she must have seen in the magazines.
The delicate, tender, modest, flattering message could
not be ignored.
Ravenel noticed beside the roses a small flowering-
pot containing a plant. Without shame be brought
his opera-glasses and employed them from the cover
of his window-curtain. A nutmeg geranium!
With the true poetic instinct be dragged a book
of useless information from his shelves, and tore open
the leaves at "The Language of Flowers."
"Geranium, Nutmeg - I expect a meeting."
So! Romance never does things by halves. If she
comes back to you she brings gifts and her knitting,
and will sit in your chimney-corner if you will let
her.
And now Ravenel smiled. The lover smiles
when be thinks he has won. The woman who loves
ceases to smile with victory. He ends a battle; she
begins hers. What a pretty idea to set the four roses
in her window for him to see! She must have
a sweet, poetic soul. And now to contrive the
meeting.
A whistling and slamming of doors preluded the
coming of Sammy Brown.
Ravenel smiled again. Even Sammy Brown was
shone upon by the far-flung rays of the renaissance.
Sammy, with his ultra clothes, his horseshoe pin, his
plump face, his trite slang, his uncomprehending
admiration of Ravenel -- the broker's clerk made an
excellent foil to the new, bright unseen visitor to the
poet's sombre apartment.
Sammy went to his old seat by the window, and
looked out over the dusty green foliage in the
garden. Then he looked at his watch, and rose
hastily.
"By grabs!" he exclaimed. "Twenty after four!
I can't stay, old man; I've got a date at 4:30."
"Why did you come, then?" asked Ravenel, with
sarcastic jocularity, "if you had an engagement at
that time. I thought you business men kept better
account of your minutes and seconds than that."
Sammy hesitated in the doorway and turned
pinker.
"Fact is, Ravvy," be explained, as to a customer
whose margin is exhausted, "I didn't know I had it
till I came. I'll tell you, old man - there's a dandy
girl in that old house next door that I'm dead gone
on. I put it straight -- we're engaged. The old
man says 'nit' but that don't go. He keeps her
pretty close. I can see Edith's window from yours
here. She gives me a tip when she's going shopping,
and I meet her. It's 4:30 to-day. Maybe I ought
to have explained sooner, but I know it's all right
with you -- so long."
"How do you get your 'tip,' as you call it?" asked
Ravenel, losing a little spontaneity from his smile.
"Roses," said Sammy, briefly. Four of 'em to-
day. Means four o'clock at the corner of Broadway
and Twenty-third."
"But the geranium?" persisted Ravenel, clutch-
ing at the end of flying Romance's trailing robe.
"Means half-past 5," shouted Sammy from the hall.
"See you to-morrow."
THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
"During the recent warmed-over spell," said my
friend Carney, driver of express wagon No. 8,606,
"a good many opportunities was had of observing
human nature through peekaboo waists.
"The Park Commissioner and the Commissioner
of Polis and the Forestry Commission gets together
and agrees to let the people sleep in the parks until
the Weather Bureau gets the thermometer down again
to a living basis. So they draws up open-air resolu-
tions and has them 0. K.'d by the Secretary of Agri-
culture, Mr. Comstock and the Village Improvement
Mosquito Exterminating Society of South Orange,
N. J.
"When the proclamation was made opening up to
the people by special grant the public parks that be-
long to 'em, there was a general exodus into Central
Park by the communities existing along its borders.
In ten minutes after sundown you'd have thought
that there was an undress rehearsal of a potato
famine in Ireland and a Kishineff massacre. They
come by families, gangs, clambake societies, clans,
clubs and tribes from all sides to enjoy a cool sleep on
the grass. Them that didn't have oil stoves brought
along plenty of blankets, so as not to be upset with
the cold and discomforts of sleeping outdoors. By
building fires of the shade trees and huddling together
in the bridle paths, and burrowing under the grass
where the ground was soft enough, the likes of 5,000
head of people successfully battled against the night
air in Central Park alone.
"Ye know I live in the elegant furnished apart-
ment house called the Beersheba Flats, over against
the elevated portion of the New York Central Rail-
road.
"When the order come to the flats that all hands
must turn out and sleep in the park, according to the
instructions of the consulting committee of the City
Club and the Murphy Draying, Returfing and Sod-
ding Company, there was a look of a couple of fires
and an eviction all over the place.
"The tenants began to pack up feather beds, rub-
ber boots, strings of garlic, hot-water bags, porta-
ble canoes and scuttles of coal to take along for the
sake of comfort. The sidewalk looked like a Russian
camp in Oyama's line of mareb. There was waiting
and lamenting up and down stairs from Danny Geog-
hegan's flat on the top floor to the apartments of
Missis Goldsteinupski on the first.
"'For why," says Danny, coming down and raging
in his blue yarn socks to the janitor, 'should I be
turned out of me comfortable apartments to lay in
the dirty grass like a rabbit? 'Tis like Jerome to
stir up trouble wid small matters like this instead
of -- "
"'Whist!' says Officer Reagan on the sidewalk,
rapping with his club. ''Tis not Jerome. 'Tis by
order of the Polis Commissioner. Turn out every
one of yez and hike yerselves to the park.'
"Now, 'twas a peaceful and happy home that all
of us had in them same Beersheba Flats. The
O'Dowds and the Steinowitzes and the Callahans and
the Cohens and the Spizzinellis and the McManuses
and the Spiegelmayers and the Joneses -- all nations
of us, we lived like one big family together. And
when the hot nights come along we kept a line of
children reaching from the front door to Kelly's on the
corner passing along the cans of beer from one to
another without the trouble of running after it. And
with no more clothing on than is provided for in the
statutes, sitting in all the windies, with a cool growler
in every one, and your feet out in the air, and the
Rosenstein girls singing on the fire-escape of the sixth
floor, and Patsy Rourke's flute going in the eighth,
and the ladies calling each other synonyms out the win-
dies, and now and then a breeze sailing in over Mister
Depew's Central -- I tell you the Beersheba Flats was
a summer resort that made the Catskills look like
a bole in the ground. With his person full of beer
and his feet out the windy and his old woman frying
pork chops over a charcoal furnace and the children
dancing in cotton slips on the sidewalk around the
organ-grinder and the rent paid for a week -- what
does a man want better on a hot night than that?
And then comes this ruling of the polis driving people
out o' their comfortable homes to sleep in parks --
'twas for all the world like a ukase of them Rus-
sians -- 'twill be heard from again at next election
time.
"Well, then, Officer Reagan drives the whole lot
of us to the park and turns us in by the nearest
gate. 'Tis dark under the trees, and all the children
sets up to howling that they want to go home.
"'Ye'll pass the night in this stretch of woods
and scenery,' says Officer Reagan. ''Twill be fine
and imprisonment for insoolting the Park Commis-
sioner and the Chief of the Weather Bureau if ye re-
fuse. I'm in charge of thirty acres between here and
the Agyptian Monument, and I advise ye to give no
trouble. 'Tis sleeping on the grass yez all have been
condemned to by the authorities. Yez'll be permitted
to leave in the morning, but ye must retoorn be night.
Me orders was silent on the subject of bail, but I'11
find out if 'tis required and there'll be bondsmen at
the gate.'
"There being no lights except along the automo-
bile drives, us 179 tenants of the Beersheba Flats
prepared to spend the night as best we could in the
raging forest. Them that brought blankets and kin-
dling wood was best off. They got fires started and
wrapped the blankets round their heads and laid
down, cursing, in the grass. There was nothing to
see, nothing to drink, nothing to do. In the dark we
had no way of telling friend or foe except by feeling
the noses of 'em. I brought along me last winter
overcoat, me toothbrush, some quinine pills and the
red quilt off the bed in me flat. Three times during
the night somebody rolled on me quilt and stuck his
knees against the Adam's apple of me. And three
times I judged his character by running me hand over
his face, and three times I rose up and kicked the in-
truder down the hill to the gravelly walk below. And
then some one with a flavor of Kelly's whiskey snug-
gled up to me, and I found his nose turned up the
right way, and I says: ' Is that you, then, Patsey?
and he says, 'It is, Carney. How long do you think
it'll last?'
"' I'm no weather-prophet,' says I, 'but if they
bring out a strong anti-Tammany ticket next fall it
ought to get us home in time to sleep on a bed once
or twice before they line us up at the polls.'
"A-playing of my flute into the airshaft, I says
Patsey Rourke, 'and a-perspiring in me own windy
to the joyful noise of the passing trains and the smell
of liver and onions and a-reading of the latest mur-
der in the smoke of the cooking is well enough for
me,' says he. 'What is this herding us in grass for,
not to mention the crawling things with legs that walk
up the trousers of us, and the Jersey snipes that
peck at us, masquerading under the name and denom-
ination of mosquitoes. What is it all for Carney, and
the rint going on just the same over at the flats?'
"Tis the great annual Municipal Free Night
Outing Lawn Party,' says I, 'given by the polis,
Hetty Green and the Drug Trust. During the heated
season they hold a week of it in the principal parks.
'Tis a scheme to reach that portion of the people
that's not worth taking up to North Beach for a
fish fry.'
"' I can't sleep on the ground,' says Patsey, 'wid
any benefit. I have the hay fever and the rheuma-
tism, and me car is full of ants.'
"Well, the night goes on, and the ex-tenants of
the Flats groans and stumbles around in the dark,
trying to find rest and recreation in the forest. The
children is screaming with the coldness, and the jan-
itor makes hot tea for 'em and keeps the fires going
with the signboards that point to the Tavern and the
Casino. The tenants try to lay down on the grass by
families in the dark, but you're lucky if you can sleep
next to a man from the same floor or believing in
the same religion. Now and then a Murpby, acci-
dental, rolls over on the grass of a Rosenstein, or
a Cohen tries to crawl under the O'Grady bush, and
then there's a feeling of noses and somebody is rolled
down the hill to the driveway and stays there. There
is some hair-pulling among the women folks, and
everybody spanks the nearest howling kid to him by
the sense of feeling only, regardless of its parentage
and ownership. 'Tis hard to keep up the social dis-
tinctions in the dark that flourish by daylight in the
Beersheba Flats. Mrs. Rafferty, that despises the
asphalt that a Dago treads on, wakes up in the morn-
ing with her feet in the bosom of Antonio Spizzinelli.
And Mike O'Dowd, that always threw peddlers down-
stairs as fast as he came upon 'em, has to unwind old
Isaacstein's whiskers from around his neck, and wake
up the whole gang at daylight. But here and there
some few got acquainted and overlooked the discom-
forts of the elements. There was five engagements to
be married announced at the flats the next morning.
About midnight I gets up and wrings the dew out
of my hair, and goes to the side of the driveway
and sits down. At one side of the park I could see
the lights in the streets and houses; and I was thinking
how happy them folks was who could chase the duck
and smoke their pipes at their windows, and keep cool
and pleasant like nature intended for 'em to.
Just then an automobile stops by me, and a fine-
looking, well-dressed man steps out.
'Me man,' says he, 'can you tell me why all these
people are lying around on the grass in the park?
I thought it was against the rules.'
"''Twas an ordinance,' says I, 'just passed by
the Polis Department and ratified by the Turf Cut-
ters' Association, providing that all persons not car-
rying a license number on their rear axles shall keep
in the public parks until further notice. Fortu-
nately, the orders comes this year during a spell of
fine weather, and the mortality, except on the borders
of the lake and along the automobile drives, will not
be any greater than usual.'
"'Who are these people on the side of the bill?'
asks the man.
"'Sure,' says I, 'none others than the tenants of
the Beersheba Flats -- a fine home for any man,
especially on hot nights. May daylight come soon!'
"'They come here be night,' says be, 'and breathe
in the pure air and the fragrance of the flowers and
trees. They do that,' says be, 'coming every night
from the burning beat of dwellings of brick and stone.'
"'And wood,' says I. 'And marble and plaster
and iron.'
"'The matter will be attended to at once,' says the
man, putting up his book.
"'Are ye the Park Commissioner?' I asks.
"'I own the Beersheba Flats,' says he. 'God
bless the grass and the trees that give extra benefits
to a man's tenants. The rents shall be raised fifteen
per cent. to-morrow. Good-night,' says he."
THE EASTER OF THE SOUL
It is hardly likely that a goddess may die. Then
Eastre, the old Saxon goddess of spring, must be
laughing in her muslin sleeve at people who believe
that Easter, her namesake, exists only along certain
strips of Fifth Avenue pavement after church service.
Aye! It belongs to the world. The ptarmigan in
Chilkoot Pass discards his winter white feathers for
brown; the Patagonian Beau Brummell oils his chi-
gnon and clubs him another sweetheart to drag to his
skull-strewn flat. And down in Chrystie Street --
Mr. "Tiger" McQuirk arose with a feeling of
disquiet that be did not understand. With a prac-
tised foot be rolled three of his younger brothers like
logs out of his way as they lay sleeping on the floor.
Before a foot-square looking glass hung by the win-
dow he stood and shaved himself. If that may seem to
you a task too slight to be thus impressively chron-
icled, I bear with you; you do not know of the areas
to be accomplished in traversing the cheek and chin
of Mr. McQuirk.
McQuirk, senior, had gone to work long before.
The big son of the house was idle. He was a marble-
cutter, and the marble-cutters were out on a strike.
"What ails ye?" asked his mother, looking at him
curiously; "are ye not feeling well the morning,
maybe now?"
"He's thinking along of Annie Maria Doyle, im-
pudently explained younger brother Tim, ten years
old."
"Tiger" reached over the hand of a champion and
swept the small McQuirk from his chair.
"I feel fine," said he, "beyond a touch of the
I-don't-know-wbat-you-call-its. I feel like there was
going to be earthquakes or music or a trifle of chills
and fever or maybe a picnic. I don't know how I
feel. I feel like knocking the face off a policeman,
or else maybe like playing Coney Island straight
across the board from pop-corn to the elephant
boudabs."
"It's the spring in yer bones," said Mrs. McQuirk.
"It's the sap risin'. Time was when I couldn't keep
me feet still nor me head cool when the earthworms
began to crawl out in the dew of the mornin'. 'Tis
a bit of tea will do ye good, made from pipsissewa
and gentian bark at the druggist's."
"Back up!" said Mr. McQuirk, impatiently.
"There's no spring in sight There's snow yet on
the shed in Donovan's backyard. And yesterday they
puts open cars on the Sixth Avenue lines, and the
janitors have quit ordering coal. And that means
six weeks more of winter, by all the signs that be."
After breakfast Mr. McQuirk spent fifteen minutes
before the corrugated mirror, subjugating his hair
and arranging his green-and-purple ascot with its
amethyst tombstone pin-eloquent of his chosen
calling.
Since the strike had been called it was this par-
ticular striker's habit to hie himself each morning
to the corner saloon of Flaherty Brothers, and there
establish himself upon the sidewalk, with one foot
resting on the bootblack's stand, observing the
panorama of the street until the pace of time brought
twelve o'clock and the dinner hour. And Mr.
"Tiger" McQuirk, with his athletic seventy inches,
well trained in sport and battle; his smooth, pale,
solid, amiable face -- blue where the razor had trav-
elled; his carefully considered clothes and air of capa-
bility, was himself a spectacle not displeasing to the
eye.
But on this morning Mr. McQuirk did not hasten
immediately to his post of leisure and observation.
Something unusual that he could not quite grasp was
in the air. Something disturbed his thoughts, ruffled
his senses, made him at once languid, irritable, elated,
dissastisfied and sportive. He was no diagnostician,
and he did not know that Lent was breaking up
physiologically in his system.
Mrs. McQuirk had spoken of spring. Sceptically
Tiger looked about him for signs. Few they
were. The organ-grinders were at work; but they
were always precocious harbingers. It was near
enough spring for them to go penny-hunting when the
skating ball dropped at the park. In the milliners'
windows Easter hats, grave, gay and jubilant, blos-
somed. There were green patches among the side-
walk debris of the grocers. On a third-story window-
sill the first elbow cushion of the season -- old gold
stripes on a crimson ground -- supported the kimo-
noed arms of a pensive brunette. The wind blew
cold from the East River, but the sparrows were fly-
ing to the eaves with straws. A second-hand store,
combining foresight with faith, had set out an ice-
chest and baseball goods.
And then "Tiger's" eye, discrediting these signs,
fell upon one that bore a bud of promise. From a
bright, new lithograph the head of Capricornus con-
fronted him, betokening the forward and heady brew.
Mr. McQuirk entered the saloon and called for his
glass of bock. He threw his nickel on the bar, raised
the glass, set it down without tasting it and strolled
toward the door.
"Wot's the matter, Lord Bolinbroke?" inquired
the sarcastic bartender; want a chiny vase or a
gold-lined epergne to drink it out of -- hey?"
"Say," said Mr. McQuirk, wheeling and shooting
out a horizontal hand and a forty-five-degree chin,
"you know your place only when it comes for givin'
titles. I've changed me mind about drinkin -- see?
You got your money, ain't you? Wait till you get
stung before you get the droop to your lip, will
you?"
Thus Mr. Quirk added mutability of desires to the
strange humors that had taken possession of him.
Leaving the saloon, he walked away twenty steps
and leaned in the open doorway of Lutz, the barber.
He and Lutz were friends, masking their sentiments
behind abuse and bludgeons of repartee.
"Irish loafer," roared Lutz, "how do you do?
So, not yet haf der bolicemans or der catcher of
dogs done deir duty!"
"Hello, Dutch," said Mr. McQuirk. "Can't get
your mind off of frankfurters, can you?"
"Bah!" exclaimed the German, coming and lean-
ing in the door. "I haf a soul above frankfurters
to-day. Dere is springtime in der air. I can feel it
coming in ofer der mud of der streets and das ice
in der river. Soon will dere be bienics in der islands,
mit kegs of beer under der trees."
"Say," said Mr. McQuirk, setting his bat on one
side, "is everybody kiddin' me about gentle Spring?
There ain't any more spring in the air than there is
in a horsehair sofa in a Second Avenue furnished
room. For me the winter underwear yet and the
buckwheat cakes."
"You haf no boetry," said Lutz. True, it is
yedt cold, und in der city we haf not many of der
signs; but dere are dree kinds of beoble dot should
always feel der'approach of spring first -- dey are
boets, lovers and poor vidows."
Mr. McQuirk went on his way, still possessed by
the strange perturbation that he did not understand.
Something was lacking to his comfort, and it made
him half angry because be did not know what it was.
Two blocks away he came upon a foe, one Conover,
whom he was bound in honor to engage in combat.
Mr. McQuirk made the attack with the charac-
teristic suddenness and fierceness that had gained for
him the endearing sobriquet of "Tiger." The de-
fence of Mr. Conover was so prompt and admirable
that the conflict was protracted until the onlookers un-
selfishly gave the warning cry of "Cheese it -- the
cop!" The principals escaped easily by running
through the nearest open doors into the communi-
cating backyards at the rear of the houses.
Mr. McQuirk emerged into another street. He
stood by a lamp-post for a few minutes engaged in
thought and then he turned and plunged into a small
notion and news shop. A red-haired young woman,
eating gum-drops, came and looked freezingly at him
across the ice-bound steppes of the counter.
"Say, lady," he said, "have you got a song book
with this in it. Let's see bow it leads off --
"When the springtime comes well wander in the dale, love,
And whisper of those days of yore -- "
"I'm having a friend," explained Mr. McQuirk,
"laid up with a broken leg, and he sent me after
it. He's a devil for songs and poetry when he can't
get out to drink."
"We have not," replied the young woman, with un-
concealed contempt. "But there is a new song out
that begins this way:
"'Let us sit together in the old armchair;
And while the firelight flickers we'll be comfortable there.'"
There will be no profit in following Mr. "Tiger"
McQuirk through his further vagaries of that day
until he comes to stand knocking at the door of Annie
Maria Doyle. The goddess Eastre, it seems, had
guided his footsteps aright at last.
"Is that you now, Jimmy McQuirk?" she cried,
smiling through the opened door (Annie Maria had
never accepted the "Tiger"). "Well, whatever!"
"Come out in the ball," said Mr. McQuirk. "I
want to ask yer opinion of the weather - on the
level."
"Are you crazy, sure?" said Annie Maria.
"I am," said the "Tiger." "They've been telling
me all day there was spring in the air. Were they
liars? Or am I?"
"Dear me!" said Annie Maria -- "haven't you no-
ticed it? I can almost smell the violets. And the
green grass. Of course, there ain't any yet -- it's
just a kind of feeling, you know."
"That's what I'm getting at," said Mr. McQuirk.
I've had it. I didn't recognize it at first. I
thought maybe it was en-wee, contracted the other
day when I stepped above Fourteenth Street. But
the katzenjammer I've got don't spell violets. It
spells yer own name, Annie Maria, and it's you I
want. I go to work next Monday, and I make four
dollars a day. Spiel up, old girl -- do we make a
team?"
"Jimmy," sighed Annie Maria, suddenly disap-
pearing in his overcoat, "don't you see that spring
is all over the world right this minute?"
But you yourself remember how that day ended.
Beginning with so fine a promise of vernal things,
late in the afternoon the air chilled and an inch of
snow fell -- even so late in March. On Fifth Ave-
nue the ladies drew their winter furs close about
them. Only in the florists' windows could be per-
ceived any signs of the morning smile of the coming
goddess Eastre.
At six o'clock Herr Lutz began to close his shop.
He beard a well-known shout: "Hello, Dutch!"
"Tiger" McQuirk, in his shirt-sleeves, with his
hat on the back of his bead, stood outside in the
whirling snow, puffing at a black cigar.
"Donnerwetter!" shouted Lutz, "der vinter, he
has gome back again yet!"
"Yer a liar, Dutch," called back Mr. McQuirk,
with friendly geniality, it's springtime, by the
watch."
THE FOOL-KILLER
Down South whenever any one perpetrates some
particularly monumental piece of foolishness every-
body says: "Send for Jesse Holmes."
Jesse Holmes is the Fool-Killer. Of course he is a
myth, like Santa Claus and Jack Frost and General
Prosperity and all those concrete conceptions that
are supposed to represent an idea that Nature has
failed to embody. The wisest of the Southrons can-
not tell you whence comes the Fool-Killer's name;
but few and happy are the households from the Ro-
anoke to the Rio Grande in which the name of Jesse
Holmes has not been pronounced or invoked. Always
with a smile, and often with a tear, is he summoned
to his official duty. A busy man is Jesse Holmes.
I remember the clear picture of him that hung on
the walls of my fancy during my barefoot days when
I was dodging his oft-threatened devoirs. To me
be was a terrible old man, in gray clothes, with a
long, ragged, gray beard, and reddish, fierce eyes.
I looked to see him come stumping up the road in
a cloud of dust, with a white oak staff in his hand
and his shoes tied with leather thongs. I may
yet --
But this is a story, not a sequel.
I have taken notice with regret, that few stories
worth reading have been written that did not con-
tain drink of some sort. Down go the fluids, from
Arizona Dick's three fingers of red pizen to the in-
efficacious Oolong that nerves Lionel Montressor to
repartee in the "Dotty Dialogues." So, in such
good company I may introduce an absinthe drip --
one absinthe drip, dripped through a silver dripper,
orderly, opalescent, cool, green-eyed -- deceptive.
Kerner was a fool. Besides that, he was an artist
and my good friend. Now, if there is one thing on
earth utterly despicable to another, it is an artist
in the eyes of an author whose story he has illus-
trated. Just try it once. Write a story about a
mining camp in Idiho. Sell it. Spend the money,
and then, six months later, borrow a quarter (or
a dime), and buy the magazine containing it. You
find a full-page wash drawing of your hero, Black
Bill, the cowboy. Somewhere in your story you em-
ployed the word "horse." Aha! the artist has
grasped the idea. Black Bill has on the regulation
trousers of the M. F. H. of the Westchester County
Hunt. He carries a parlor rifle, and wears a mon-
ocle. In the distance is a section of Forty-second
Street during a search for a lost gas-pipe, and the
Taj Mahal, the famous mausoleum in India.
"Enough! I hated Kerner, and one day I met him
and we became friends. He was young and glori-
ously melancholy because his spirits were so high
and life bad so much in store for him. Yes, he was
almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a
man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you
can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair. Ker-
ner's hair was plentiful and carefully matted as an
artist's thatch should be. He was a cigaretteur, and
be audited his dinners with red wine. But, most of
all, be was a fool. And, wisely, I envied him, and
listened patiently while he knocked Velasquez and
Tintoretto. Once he told me that he liked a story of
mine that he bad come across in an anthology. He
described it to me, and I was sorry that Mr. Fitz-
James O'Brien was dead and could not learn of the
eulogy of his work. But mostly Kerner made few
breaks and was a consistent fool.
I'd better explain what I mean by that. There
was a girl. Now, a girl, as far as I am concerned,
is a thing that belongs in a seminary or an album;
but I conceded the existence of the animal in order
to retain Kerner's friendship. He showed me her
picture in a locket -- she was a blonde or a brunette
-- I have forgotten which. She worked in a factory
for eight dollars a week. Lest factories quote this
wage by way of vindication, I will add that the girl
bad worked for five years to reach that supreme ele-
vation of remuneration, beginning at $1.50 per week.
Kerner's father was worth a couple of millions
He was willing to stand for art, but he drew the
line at the factory girl. So Kerner disinherited his
father and walked out to a cheap studio and lived
on sausages for breakfast and on Farroni for dinner.
Farroni had the artistic soul and a line of credit for
painters and poets, nicely adjusted. Sometimes Ker-
rier sold a picture and bought some new tapestry, a
ring and a dozen silk cravats, and paid Farroni
two dollars on account.
One evening Kerner had me to dinner with himself
and the factory girl. They were to be married as
soon as Kerner could slosh paint profitably. As for
the ex-father's two millions -- pouf!
She was a wonder. Small and half-way pretty,
and as much at her ease in that cheap cafe as though
she were only in the Palmer House, Chicago, with a
souvenir spoon already safely hidden in her shirt
waist. She was natural. Two things I noticed about
her especially. Her belt buckle was exactly in the
middle of her back, and she didn't tell us that a large
man with a ruby stick-pin had followed her up all the
way from Fourteenth Street. Was Kerner such a fool?
I wondered. And then I thought of the quantity of
striped cuffs and blue glass beads that $2,000,000
can buy for the heathen, and I said to myself that he
was. And then Elise -- certainly that was her name
told us, merrily, that the brown spot on her waist
was caused by her landlady knocking at the door
while she (the girl -- confound the English language)
was heating an iron over the gas jet, and she hid the
iron under the bedclothes until the coast was clear,
and there was the piece of chewing gum stuck
to it when she began to iron the waist, and -- well,
I wondered bow in the world the chewing gum
came to be there -- don't they ever stop chewing
it?
A while after that -- don't be impatient, the ab-
sinthe drip is coming now -- Kerner and I were dining
at Farroni's. A mandolin and a guitar were being
attacked; the room was full of smoke in nice, long
crinkly layers just like the artists draw the steam
from a plum pudding on Christmas posters, and a
lady in a blue silk and gasolined gauntlets was be-
ginning to bum an air from the Catskills.
"Kerner," said I, "you are a fool."
"Of course," said Kerner, "I wouldn't let her go
on working. Not my wife. What's the use to wait?
She's willing. I sold that water color of the Pali-
sades yesterday. We could cook on a two-burner gas
stove. You know the ragouts I can throw together?
Yes, I think we will marry next week."
"Kerner," said I, "you are a fool."
"Have an absinthe drip?" said Kerner, grandly.
"To-night you are the guest of Art in paying quan-
tities. I think we will get a flat with a bath."
"I never tried one -- I mean an absinthe drip,"
said I.
The waiter brought it and poured the water slowly
over the ice in the dripper.
"It looks exactly like the Mississippi River water
in the big bend below Natchez," said I, fascinated,
gazing at the be-muddled drip.
"There are such flats for eight dollars a week,"
said Kerner.
"You are a fool," said I, and began to sip the
filtration. "What you need," I continued, "is the
official attention of one Jesse Holmes."
Kerner, not being a Southerner, did not compre-
hend, so he sat, sentimental, figuring on his flat in
his sordid, artistic way, while I gazed into the green
eyes of the sophisticated Spirit of Wormwood.
Presently I noticed casually that a procession of
bacchantes limned on the wall immediately below the
ceiling bad begun to move, traversing the room from
right to left in a gay and spectacular pilgrimage. I
did not confide my discovery to Kerner. The artistic
temperament is too high-strung to view such devia-
tions from the natural laws of the art of kalsomining.
I sipped my absinthe drip and sawed wormwood.
One absinthe drip is not much -- but I said again to
Kerner, kindly:
"You are a fool." And then, in the vernacular:
"Jesse Holmes for yours."
And then I looked around and saw the Fool-Killer,
as he had always appeared to my imagination, sitting
at a nearby table, and regarding us with his reddish,
fatal, relentless eyes. He was Jesse Holmes from top
to toe; he had the long, gray, ragged beard, the
gray clothes of ancient cut, the executioner's look,
and the dusty shoes of one who bad been called from
afar. His eyes were turned fixedly upon Kerner. I
shuddered to think that I bad invoked him from his
assiduous southern duties. I thought of flying, and
then I kept my seat, reflecting that many men bad es-
caped his ministrations when it seemed that nothing
short of an appointment as Ambassador to Spain
could save them from him. I had called my brother
Kerner a fool and was in danger of hell fire. That
was nothing; but I would try to save him from Jesse
Holmes.
The Fool-Killer got up from his table and came
over to ours. He rested his hands upon it, and
turned his burning, vindictive eyes upon Kerner, ig-
noring me.
"You are a hopeless fool," be said to the artist.
"Haven't you had enough of starvation yet? I of-
fer you one more opportunity. Give up this girl and
come back to your home. Refuse, and you must take
the consequences."
The Fool-Killer's threatening face was within a
foot of his victim's; but to my horror, Kerner made
not the slightest sign of being aware of his presence.
"We will be married next week," be muttered ab-
sent-mindedly. "With my studio furniture and some
second-hand stuff we can make out."
"You have decided your own fate," said the Fool-
Killer, in a low but terrible voice. "You may con-
sider yourself as one dead. You have had your last
chance."
"In the moonlight," went on Kerner, softly, "we
will sit under the skylight with our guitar and sing
away the false delights of pride and money."
"On your own head be it," hissed the Fool-Killer,
and my scalp prickled when I perceived that neither
Kerner's eyes nor his ears took the slightest cog-
nizance of Jesse Holmes. And then I knew that for
some reason the veil had been lifted for me alone, and
that I bad been elected to save my friend from de-
struction at the Fool-Killer's bands. Something of
the fear and wonder of it must have showed itself in
my face.
"Excuse me," said Kerner, with his wan, amiable
smile; "was I talking to myself? I think it is getting
to be a habit with me."
The Fool-Killer turned and walked out of Far-
ronils.
"Wait here for me," said I, rising; "I must speak
to that man. Had you no answer for him? Because
you are a fool must you die like a mouse under his
foot? Could you not utter one squeak in your own
defence?
"You are drunk," said Kerner, heartlessly. "No
one addressed me."
"The destroyer of your mind," said I, "stood
above you just now and marked you for his victim.
You are not blind or deaf."
"I recognized no such person," said Kerner. "I
have seen no one but you at this table. Sit down.
Hereafter you shall have no more absinthe drips."
"Wait here," said I, furious; "if you don't care
for your own life, I will save it for you."
I hurried out and overtook the man in gray half-
way down the block. He looked as I bad seen him in
my fancy a thousand times - truculent, gray and
awful. He walked with the white oak staff, and but
for the street-sprinkler the dust would have been fly-
ing under his tread.
I caught him by the sleeve and steered him to a
dark angle of a building. I knew he was a myth, and
I did not want a cop to see me conversing with va-
cancy, for I might land in Bellevue minus my silver
matchbox and diamond ring.
"Jesse Holmes," said I, facing him with apparent
bravery, "I know you. I have heard of you all my
life. I know now what a scourge you have been to
your country. Instead of killing fools you have been
murdering the youth and genius that are necessary to
make a people live and grow great. You are a fool
yourself, Holmes; you began killing off the brightest
and best of our countrymen three generations ago,
when the old and obsolete standards of society and
honor and orthodoxy were narrow and bigoted. You
proved that when you put your murderous mark upon
my friend Kerner -- the wisest chap I ever knew in
my life."
The Fool-Killer looked at me grimly and closely.
"You've a queer jag," said he, curiously. "Oh,
yes; I see who you are now. You were sitting with
him at the table. Well, if I'm not mistaken, I heard
you call him a fool, too."
"I did," said I. "I delight in doing so. It is
from envy. By all the standards that you know he is
the most egregious and grandiloquent and gorgeous
fool in all the world. That's why you want to kill
him."
"Would you mind telling me who or what you think
I am?" asked the old man.
I laughed boisterously and then stopped suddenly,
for I remembered that it would not do to be seen so
hilarious in the company of nothing but a brick
wall.
"You are Jesse Holmes, the Fool-Killer," I said,
solemnly, "and you are going to kill my friend Ker-
ner. I don't know who rang you up, but if you do
kill him I'll see that you get pinched for it. That
is," I added, despairingly, "if I can get a cop to see
you. They have a poor eye for mortals, and I think
it would take the whole force to round up a myth mur-
derer."
"Well," said the Fool-Killer, briskly, "I must be
going. You had better go home and sleep it off.
Good-night."
At this I was moved by a sudden fear for Kerner to
a softer and more pleading mood. I leaned against
the gray man's sleeve and besought him:
"Good Mr. Fool-Killer, please don't kill little Ker-
ner. Why can't you go back South and kill Con-
gressmen and clay-caters and let us alone? Why
don't you go up on Fifth Avenue and kill millionaires
that keep their money locked up and won't let young
fools marry because one of 'em lives on the wrong
street? Come and have a drink, Jesse. Will you
never get on to your job?"
"Do you know this girl that your friend has made
himself a fool about?" asked the Fool-Killer.
"I have the honor," said I, "and that's why I
called Kerner a fool. He is a fool because he has
waited so long before marrying her. He is a fool
because be has been waiting in the hopes of getting
the consent of some absurd two-million-dollar-fool
parent or something of the sort."
"Maybe," said the Fool-Killer -- " maybe I -- I
might have looked at it differently. Would you mind
going back to the restaurant and bringing your friend
Kerner here?"
"OH, what's the use, Jesse," I yawned. "He can't
see you. He didn't know you were talking to him
at the table, You are a fictitious character, you
know."
"Maybe He can this time. Will you go fetch
him?"
"All right," said I, "but I've a suspicion that
you're not strictly sober, Jesse. You seem to be wa-
vering and losing your outlines. Don't vanish before
I get back."
I went back to Kerner and said:
"There's a man with an invisible homicidal mania
waiting to see you outside. I believe he wants to
murder you. Come along. You won't see him, so
there's nothing to be frightened about."
Kerner looked anxious.
"Why," said be, "I had no idea one absinthe
would do that. You'd better stick to Wurzburger.
I'll walk home with you."
I led him to Jesse Holmes's.
"Rudolf," said the Fool-Killer, "I'll give in.
Bring her up to the house. Give me your hand,
boy.",
"Good for you, dad," said Kerner, shaking hands
with the old man. You'll never regret it after you
know her."
"So, you did see him when he was talking to you
at the table?" I asked Kerner.
"We hadn't spoken to each other in a year," said
Kerner. "It's all right now."
I walked away.
"Where are you going?" called Kerner.
"I am going to look for Jesse Holmes," I an-
swered, with dignity and reserve.
TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA
There is a hotel on Broadway that has escaped
discovery by the summer-resort promoters. It is
deep and wide and cool. Its rooms are finished in
dark oak of a low temperature. Home-made breezes
and deep-green shrubbery give it the delights without
the inconveniences of the Adirondacks. One can
mount its broad staircases or glide dreamily upward
in its aerial elevators, attended by guides in brass but-
tons, with a serene joy that Alpine climbers have
never attained. There is a chef in its kitchen who
will prepare for you brook trout better than the White
Mountains ever served, sea food that would turn Old
Point Comfort -- "by Gad, sah!" -- green with
envy, and Maine venison that would melt the official
heart of a game warden.
A few have found out this oasis in the July desert
of Manhattan. During that month you will see the
hotel's reduced array of guests scattered luxuriously
about in the cool twilight of -- its lofty dining-room,
gazing at one another across the snowy waste of un-
occupied tables, silently congratulatory.
Superfluous, watchful, pneumatically moving wait-
ers hover near, supplying every want before it is ex-
pressed. The temperature is perpetual April. The
ceiling is painted in water colors to counterfeit a sum-
mer sky across which delicate clouds drift and do not
vanish as those of nature do to our regret.
The pleasing, distant roar of Broadway is trans-
formed in the imagination of the happy guests to the
noise of a waterfall filling the woods with its restful
sound. At every strange footstep the guests turn an
anxious ear, fearful lest their retreat be discovered
and invaded by the restless pleasure-seekers who are
forever hounding nature to her deepest lairs.
Thus in the depopulated caravansary the little
band of connoisseurs jealously bide themselves during
the heated season, enjoying to the uttermost the de-
lights of mountain and seashore that art and skill
have gathered and served to them.
In this July came to the hotel one whose card that
she sent to the clerk for her name to be registered
read "Mme. He1oise D'Arcy Beaumont."
Madame Beaumont was a guest such as the Hotel
Lotus loved. She possessed the fine air of the e1ite,
tempered and sweetened by a cordial graciousness
that made the hotel employees her slaves. Bell-boys
fought for the honor of answering her ring; the
clerks, but for the question of ownership, would have
deeded to her the hotel and its contents; the other
guests regarded her as the final touch of feminine
exclusiveness and beauty that rendered the entourage
perfect.
This super-excellent guest rarely left the hotel.
Her habits were consonant with the customs of the dis-
criminating patrons of the Hotel Lotus. To enjoy
that delectable hostelry one must forego the city as
though it were leagues away. By night a brief ex-
cursion to the nearby roofs is in order; but during
the torrid day one remains in the umbrageous fast-
nesses of the Lotus as a trout hangs poised in the pel-
lucid sanctuaries of his favorite pool.,
Though alone in the Hotel Lotus, Madame Beau-
mont preserved the state of a queen whose loneliness
was of position only. She breakfasted at ten, a cool,
sweet, leisurely, delicate being who glowed softly in
the dimness like a jasmine flower in the dusk.
But at dinner was Madame's glory at its height.
She wore a gown as beautiful and immaterial as the
mist from an unseen cataract in a mountain gorge.
The nomenclature of this gown is beyond the guess
of the scribe. Always pale-red roses reposed against
its lace-garnished front. It was a gown that the
bead-waiter viewed with respect and met at the door.
You thought of Paris when you saw it, and maybe of
mysterious countesses, and certainly of Versailles and
rapiers and Mrs. Fiske and rouge-et-noir. There was
an untraceable rumor in the Hotel Lotus that
Madame was a cosmopolite, and that she was pulling
with her slender white bands certain strings between
the nations in the favor of Russia. Being a citi-
zeness of the world's smoothest roads it was small
wonder that she was quick to recognize in the refined
purlieus of the Hotel Lotus the most desirable spot in
America for a restful sojourn during the heat of mid-
summer.
On the third day of Madame Beaumont's residence
in the hotel a young man entered and registered him-
self as a guest. His clothing -- to speak of his
points in approved order -- was quietly in the mode;
his features good and regular; his expression that of
a poised and sophisticated man of the world. He in-
formed the clerk that he would remain three or four
days, inquired concerning the sailing of European
steamships, and sank into the blissful inanition of the
nonpareil hotel with the contented air of a traveller in
his favorite inn.
The young man -- not to question the veracity of
the register -- was Harold Farrington. He drifted
into the exclusive and calm current of life in the Lotus
so tactfully and silently that not a ripple alarmed his
fellow-seekers after rest. He ate in the Lotus and
of its patronym, and was lulled into blissful peace
with the other fortunate mariners. In one day he
acquired his table and his waiter and the fear lest the
panting chasers after repose that kept Broadway
warm should pounce upon and destroy this contiguous
but covert haven.
After dinner on the next day after the arrival of
Harold Farrington Madame Beaumont dropped her
handkerchief in passing out. Mr. Farrington recov-
ered and returned it without the effusiveness of a
seeker after acquaintance.
Perhaps there was a mystic freemasonry between
the discriminating guests of the Lotus. Perhaps
they were drawn one to another by the fact of their
common good fortune in discovering the acme of sum-
mer resorts in a Broadway hotel. Words delicate in
courtesy and tentative in departure from formality
passed between the two. And, as if in the expedient
atmosphere of a real summer resort, an acquaintance
grew, flowered and fructified on the spot as does the
mystic plant of the conjuror. For a few moments
they stood on a balcony upon which the corridor
ended, and tossed the feathery ball of conversation.
"One tires of the old resorts," said Madame Beau-
mont, with a faint but sweet smile. "What is the use
to fly to the mountains or the seashore to escape noise
and dust when the very people that make both follow
us there?"
"Even on the ocean," remarked Farrington, sadly,
"the Philistines be upon you. The most exclusive
steamers are getting to be scarcely more than ferry
boats. Heaven help us when the summer resorter dis-
covers that the Lotus is further away from Broadway
than Thousand Islands or Mackinac."
"I hope our secret will be safe for a week, any-
how," said Madame, with a sigh and a smile. "I do
not know where I would go if they should descend
upon the dear Lotus. I know of but one place so de-
lightful in summer, and that is the castle of Count
Polinski, in the Ural Mountains."
"I hear that Baden-Baden and Cannes are almost
deserted this season," said Farrington. "Year by
year the old resorts fall in disrepute. Perhaps many
others, like ourselves, are seeking out the quiet nooks
that are overlooked by the majority."
"I promise myself three days more of this delicious
rest," said Madame Beaumont. "On Monday the
Cedric sails."
Harold Farrington's eyes proclaimed his regret.
"I too must leave on Monday," he said, "but I do
not go abroad."
Madame Beaumont shrugged one round shoulder in
a foreign gesture.
"One cannot bide here forever, charming though it
may be. The chateau has been in preparation for me
longer than a month. Those house parties that one
must give -- what a nuisance! But I shall never for-
get my week in the Hotel Lotus."
"Nor shall I," said Farrington in a low voice,
and I shall never forgive the Cedric."
On Sunday evening, three days afterward, the two
sat at a little table on the same balcony. A discreet
waiter brought ices and small glasses of claret cup.
Madame Beaumont wore the same beautiful even-
ing gown that she had worn each day at dinner. She
seemed thoughtful. Near her hand on the table lay a
small chatelaine purse. After she had eaten her ice
she opened the purse and took out a one-dollar bill.
"Mr. Farrington," she said, with the smile that
had won the Hotel Lotus, "I want to tell you some-
thing. I'm going to leave before breakfast in the
morning, because I've got to go back to my work.
I'm behind the hosiery counter at Casey's Mammoth
Store, and my vacation's up at eight o'clock to-
morrow. That paper-dollar is the last cent I'll see
till I draw my eight dollars salary next Saturday
night. You're a real gentleman, and you've been
good to me, and I wanted to tell you before I went.
I've been saving up out of my wages for a year
just for this vacation. I wanted to spend one week
like a lady if I never do another one. I wanted to
get up when I please instead of having to crawl out
at seven every morning; and I wanted to live on the
best and be waited on and ring bells for things just
like rich folks do. Now I've done it, and I've had the
happiest time I ever expect to have in my life. I'm
going back to my work and my little hall bedroom
satisfied for another year. I wanted to tell you
about it, Mr. Farrington, because I -- I thought you
kind of liked me, and I -- I liked you. But, oh, I
couldn't help deceiving you up till now, for it was all
just like a fairy tale to me. So I talked about Eu-
rope and the things I've read about in other countries,
and made you think I was a great lady.
"This dress I've got on -- it's the only one I have
that's fit to wear -- I bought from O'Dowd & Levin-
sky on the instalment plan."
"Seventy-five dollars is the price, and it was made
to measure. I paid $10 down, and they're to collect
$1 a week till it's paid for. That'll be about all I
have to say, Mr. Farrington, except that my name is
Mamie Siviter instead of Madame Beaumont, and I
thank you for your attentions. This dollar will pay
the instalment due on the dress to-morrow. I guess
I'll go up to my room now."
Harold Farrington listened to the recital of the
Lotus's loveliest guest with an impassive countenance.
When she had concluded he drew a small book like a
checkbook from his coat pocket. He wrote upon a
blank form in this with a stub of pencil, tore out the
leaf, tossed it over to his companion and took up the
paper dollar.
"I've got to go to work, too, in the morning," he
said, "and I might as well begin now. There's a
receipt for the dollar instalment. I've been a col-
lector for O'Dowd & Levinsky for three years.
Funny, ain't it, that you and me both had the same
idea about spending our vacation? I've always
wanted to put up at a swell hotel, and I saved up out
of my twenty per, and did it. Say, Mame, how about
a trip to Coney Saturday night on the boat
what?"
The face of the pseudo Madame Heloise D'Arcy
Beaumont beamed.
"Oh, you bet I'll go, Mr. Farrington. The store
closes at twelve on Saturdays. I guess Coney'll be
all right even if we did spend a week with the swells."
Below the balcony the sweltering city growled and
buzzed in the July night. Inside the Hotel Lotus
the tempered, cool shadows reigned, and the solicitous
waiter single-footed near the low windows, ready at
a nod to serve Madame and her escort.
At the door of the elevator Farrington took his
leave, and Madame Beaumont made her last ascent.
But before they reached the noiseless cage be said:
"Just forget that 'Harold Farrington,' will you?
McManus is the name -- James McManus. Some
call me Jimmy."
"Good-night, Jimmy," said Madame.
THE RATHSKELLER AND THE ROSE
Miss Posie Carrington had earned her suc-
cess. She began life handicapped by the family name
of "Boggs," in the small town known as Cranberry
Corners. At the age of eighteen she had acquired
the name of "Carrington" and a position in the
chorus of a metropolitan burlesque company.
Thence upward she had ascended by the legitimate and
delectable steps of "broiler," member of the famous
"Dickey-bird" octette, in the successful musical
comedy, "Fudge and Fellows," leader of the potato-
bug dance in "Fol-de-Rol," and at length to the part
of the maid "'Toinette" in "The King's Bath-Robe,"
which captured the critics and gave her her chance.
And when we come to consider Miss Carrington she
is in the heydey of flattery, fame and fizz; and that
astute manager, Herr Timothy Goldstein, has her
signature to iron-clad papers that she will star the
coming season in Dyde Rich's new play, "Paresis by
Gaslight."
Promptly there came to Herr Timothy a capable
twentieth-century young character actor by the name
of Highsmith, who besought engagement as "Sol
Haytosser," the comic and chief male character part
in "Paresis by Gaslight."
"My boy," said Goldstein, "take the part if you
can get it. Miss Carrington won't listen to any of
my suggestions. She has turned down half a dozen
of the best imitators of the rural dub in the city.
She declares she won't set a foot on the stage un-
less 'Haytosser' is the best that can be raked up --
She was raised in a village, you know, and when a
Broadway orchid sticks a straw in his hair and tries
to call himself a clover blossom she's on, all right.
I asked her, in a sarcastic vein, if she thought Den-
man Thompson would make any kind of a show in the
part. 'Oh, no,' says she. 'I don't want him or
John Drew or Jim Corbett or any of these swell
actors that don't know a turnip from a turnstile. I
want the real article.' So, my boy, if you want to
play I 'Sol Haytosser' you will have to convince Miss
Carrington. Luck be with you."
Highsmith took the train the next day for Cran-
berry Corners. He remained in that forsaken and
inanimate village three days. He found the Boggs
family and corkscrewed their history unto the third
and fourth generation. He amassed the facts and the
local color of Cranberry Corners. The village had
not grown as rapidly as had Miss Carrington. The
actor estimated that it had suffered as few actual
changes since the departure of its solitary follower
of Thespis as had a stage upon which "four years
is supposed to have elapsed." He absorbed Cran-
berry Corners and returned to the city of chameleon
changes.
It was in the rathskeller that Highsmith made the
hit of his histrionic career. There is no need to
name the place; there is but one rathskeller where
you could hope to find Miss Posie Carrington after a
performance of "The King's Bath-Robe."
There was a jolly small party at one of the tables
that drew many eyes. Miss Carrington, petite, mar-
vellous, bubbling, electric, fame-drunken, shall be
named first. Herr Goldstein follows, sonorous, curly-
haired, heavy, a trifle anxious, as some bear that had
caught, somehow, a butterfly in his claws. Next,
a man condemned to a newspaper, sad, courted,
armed, analyzing for press agent's dross every sen-
tence that was poured over him, eating his a la New-
burg in the silence of greatness. To conclude, a
youth with parted hair, a name that is ochre to red
journals and gold on the back of a supper check.
These sat at a table while the musicians played, while
waiters moved in the mazy performance of their duties
with their backs toward all who desired their service,
and all was bizarre and merry because it was nine feet
below the level of the sidewalk.
At 11.45 a being entered the rathskeller. The
first violin perceptibly flatted a C that should have
been natural; the clarionet blew a bubble instead of a
grace note; Miss Carrington giggled and the youth
with parted hair swallowed an olive seed.
Exquisitely and irreproachably rural was the new
entry. A lank, disconcerted, hesitating young man
it was, flaxen-haired, gaping of mouth, awkward,
stricken to misery by the lights and company. His
clothing was butternut, with bright blue tie, showing
four inches of bony wrist and white-socked ankle.
He upset a chair, sat in another one, curled a foot
around a table leg and cringed at the approach of
a waiter.
"You may fetch me a glass of lager beer," he said,
in response to the discreet questioning of the
servitor.
The eyes of the rathskeller were upon him. He was
as fresh as a collard and as ingenuous as a hay rake.
He let his eye rove about the place as one who re-
gards, big-eyed, hogs in the potato patch. His gaze
rested at length upon Miss Carrington. He rose and
went to her table with a lateral, shining smile and
a blush of pleased trepidation.
"How're ye, Miss Posie?" he said in accents not
to be doubted. "Don't ye remember me - Bill Sum-
mers - the Summerses that lived back of the black-
smith shop? I reckon I've growed up some since ye
left Cranberry Corners.
"'Liza Perry 'lowed I might see ye in the city
while I was here. You know 'Liza married Benny
Stanfield, and she says --"
"Ah, say! " interrupted Miss Carrington, brightly,
"Lize Perry is never married - what! Oh, the
freckles of her!"
"Married in June," grinned the gossip, "and livin'
in the old Tatum Place. Ham Riley perfessed reli-
gion; old Mrs. Blithers sold her place to Cap'n
Spooner; the youngest Waters girl run away with a
music teacher; the court-house burned up last March;
your uncle Wiley was elected constable; Matilda Hos-
kins died from runnin' a needle in her hand, and Tom
Beedle is courtin' Sallie Lathrop - they say he don't
miss a night but what he's settin' on their porch."
"The wall-eyed thing!" exclaimed Miss Carring-
ton, with asperity. "Why, Tom Beedle once -- say,
you folks, excuse me a while -- this is an old friend
of mine -- Mr. -- what was it? Yes, Mr. Summers
-- Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Ricketts, Mr. -- Oh, what's
yours? 'Johnny''ll do -- come on over here and
tell me some more."
She swept him to an isolated table in a corner.
Herr Goldstein shrugged his fat shoulders and beck-
oned to the waiter. The newspaper man brightened
a little and mentioned absinthe. The youth with
parted hair was plunged into melancholy. The
guests of the rathskeller laughed, clinked glasses and
enjoyed the comedy that Posie Carrington was treat-
ing them to after her regular performance. A few
cynical ones whispered "press agent"' and smiled
wisely.
Posie Carrington laid her dimpled and desirable
chin upon her hands, and forgot her audience -- a
faculty that had won her laurels for her.
"I don't seem to recollect any Bill Summers," she
said, thoughtfully gazing straight into the innocent
blue eyes of the rustic young man. "But I know the
Summerses, all right. I guess there ain't many
changes in the old town. You see any of my folks
lately?"
And then Highsmith played his trump. The part
of "Sol Haytosser" called for pathos as well as
comedy. Miss Carrington should see that he could
do that as well.
"Miss Posie," said "Bill Summers,"" I was up to
your folkeses house jist two or three days ago. No,
there ain't many changes to speak of. The lilac bush
by the kitchen window is over a foot higher, and the
elm in the front yard died and had to be cut down.
And yet it don't seem the same place that it used
to be."
"How's ma?" asked Miss Carrington.
"She was settin' by the front door, crocheting a
lamp-mat when I saw her last," said "Bill." "She's
older'n she was, Miss Posie. But everything in the
house looked jest the same. Your ma asked me to set
down. 'Don't touch that willow rocker, William,"
says she. 'It ain't been moved since Posie left; and
that's the apron she was hemmin', layin' over the arm
of it, jist as she flung it. I'm in hopes,' she goes on,
that Posie'll finish runnin' out that hem some day.'"
Miss Carrington beckoned peremptorily to a
waiter.
"A pint of extra dry," she ordered, briefly; "and
give the check to Goldstein."
"The sun was shinin' in the door," went on the
chronicler from Cranberry, "and your ma was settin'
right in it. I asked her if she hadn't better move
back a little. 'William,' says she, 'when I get sot
down and lookin' down the road, I can't bear to move.
Never a day,' says she, 'but what I set here every
minute that I can spare and watch over them palin's
for Posie. She went away down that road in the
night, for we seen her little shoe tracks in the dust,
and somethin' tells me she'll come back that way ag'in
when she's weary of the world and begins to think
about her old mother."
"When I was comin' away," concluded "Bill,"
"I pulled this off'n the bush by the front steps. I
thought maybe I might see you in the city, and I
knowed you'd like somethin' from the old home."
He took from his coat pocket a rose - a drooping,
yellow, velvet, odorous rose, that hung its bead in
the foul atmosphere of that tainted rathskeller like
a virgin bowing before the hot breath of the lions in
a Roman arena.
Miss Carrington's penetrating but musical laugh
rose above the orcbestra's rendering of "Bluebells."
"Oh, say!" she cried, with glee, "ain't those poky
places the limit? I just know that two hours at
Cranberry Corners would give me the horrors now.
Well, I'm awful glad to have seen you, Mr. Summers.
Guess I'll bustle around to the hotel now and get
my beauty sleep."
She thrust the yellow rose into the bosom of her
wonderful, dainty, silken garments, stood up and
nodded imperiously at Herr Goldstein.
Her three companions and "Bill Summers" at-
tended her to her cab. When her flounces and
streamers were all safely tucked inside she dazzled
them with au revoirs from her shining eyes and teeth.
"Come around to the hotel and see me, Bill, before
you leave the city," she called as the glittering cab
rolled away.
Highsmith, still in his make-up, went with Herr
Goldstein to a cafe booth.
"Bright idea, eh? " asked the smiling actor.
"Ought to land 'Sol Haytosser ' for me, don't you
think? The little lady never once tumbled."
"I didn't bear your conversation," said Goldstein,
but your make-up and acting was 0. K. Here's to
your success. You'd better call on Miss Carrington
early to-morrow and strike her for the part. I don't
see how she can keep from being satisfied with your
exhibition of ability."
At 11.45 A. M. on the next day Highsmith, hand-
some, dressed in the latest mode, confident, with a
fuchsia in his button-bole, sent up his card to Miss
Carrington in her select apartment hotel.
He was shown up and received by the actress's
French maid.
"I am sorree," said Mlle. Hortense, "but I am to
say this to all. It is with great regret. Mees Car-
rington have cancelled all engagements on the stage
and have returned to live in that how you call that
town? Cranberry Cornaire!"
THE CLARION CALL
Half of this story can be found in the records of
the Police Department; the other half belong behind
the business counter of a newspaper office.
One afternoon two weeks after Millionaire Nor-
cross was found in his apartment murdered by a bur-
glar, the murderer, while strolling serenely down
Broadway ran plump against Detective Barney
Woods.
"Is that you, Johnny Kernan?" asked Woods,
who had been near-sighted in public for five years.
"No less," cried Kernan, heartily. "If it isn't
Barney Woods, late and early of old Saint Jo!
You'll have to show me! What are you doing East?
Do the green-goods circulars get out that far?"
said Woods.
"I've been in New York some years, I'm on the city
detective force."
"Well, well!" said Kernan, breathing smiling joy
and patting the detective's arm.
"Come into Muller's," said Woods, "and let's
hunt a quiet table. I'd like to talk to you awhile."
It lacked a few minutes to the hour of four. The
tides of trade were not yet loosed, and they found a
quiet corner of the cafe. Kernan, well dressed
Slightly swaggering, self-confident, seated himself op-
posite the little detective, with his pale, sandy mus-
tache, squinting eyes and ready-made cheviot suit.
"What business are you in now?" asked Woods.
"You know you left Saint Jo a year before I did."
"I'm selling shares in a copper mine," said Ker-
nan. "I may establish an office here. Well, well!
and so old Barney is a New York detective. You
always had a turn that way. You were on the po-
lice in Saint Jo after I left there, weren't you?"
"Six months," said Woods. "And now there's one
more question, Johnny. I've followed your record
pretty close ever since you did that hotel job in Sara-
toga, and I never knew you to use your gun before.
Why did you kill Norcross?"
Kernan stared for a few moments with concen-
trated attention at the slice of lemon in his high-ball;
and then be looked at the detective with a sudden,
crooked, brilliant smile.
"How did you guess it, Barney? " he asked, ad-
miringly. "I swear I thought the job was as clean
and as smooth as a peeled onion. Did I leave a string
hanging out anywhere? "
Woods laid upon the table a small gold pencil in-
tended for a watch-charm.
"It's the one I gave you the last Christmas we
were in Saint Jo. I've got your shaving mug yet.
I found this under a corner of the rug in Norcross's
room. I warn you to be careful what you say. I've
got it put on to you, Johnny. We were old friends
once, but I must do my duty. You'll have to go to
the chair for Norcross." Kernan laughed.
"My luck stays with me," said be. "Who'd have
thought old Barney was on my trail!" He slipped
one hand inside his coat. In an instant Woods had
a revolver against his side.
"Put it away," said Kernan, wrinkling his nose.
"I'm only investigating. Aha! It takes nine tailors
to make a man, but one can do a man up. There's
a hole in that vest pocket. I took that pencil off my
chain and slipped it in there in case of a scrap. Put
up your gun, Barney, and I'll tell you why I had
to shoot Norcross. The old fool started down the
hall after me, popping at the buttons on the back of
my coat with a peevish little .22 and I had to stop
him. The old lady was a darling. She just lay in
bed and saw her $12,000 diamond necklace go with-
out a chirp, while she begged like a panhandler to
have back a little thin gold ring with a garnet worth
about $3. 1 guess she married old Norcross for his
money, all right. Don't they hang on to the little
trinkets from the Man Who Lost Out, though?
There were six rings, two brooches and a chatelaine
watch. Fifteen thousand would cover the lot."
"I warned you not to talk," said Woods.
"Oh, that's all right," said Kernan. "The stuff
is in my suit case at the hotel. And now I'll tell you
why I'm talking. Because it's safe. I'm talking to
a man I know. You owe me a thousand dollars, Bar-
ney Woods, and even if you wanted to arrest me your
hand wouldn't make the move."
"I haven't forgotten," said Woods. "You counted
out twenty fifties without a word. I'll pay it back
some day. That thousand saved me and -- well, they
were piling my furniture out on the sidewalk when I
got back to the house."
"And so," continued Kernan, "you being Barney
Woods, born as true as steel, and bound to play a
white man's game, can't lift a finger to arrest the
man you're indebted to. Oh, I have to study men
as well as Yale locks and window fastenings in my
business. Now, keep quiet while I ring for the
waiter. I've had a thirst for a year or two that wor-
ries me a little. If I'm ever caught the lucky sleuth
will have to divide honors with old boy Booze. But I
never drink during business hours. After a job I
can crook elbows with my old friend Barney with a
clear conscience. What are you taking?"
The waiter came with the little decanters and the
siphon and left them alone again.
"You've called the turn," said Woods, as he rolled
the little gold pencil about with a thoughtful fore-
finger. I've got to pass you up. I can't lay a
hand on you. If I'd a-paid that money back -- but
I didn't, and that settles it. It's a bad break I'm
making, Johnny, but I can't dodge it. You helped
me once, and it calls for the same."
"I knew it," said Kernan, raising his glass, with
a flushed smile of self-appreciation. "I can judge
men. Here's to Barney, for -- 'he's a jolly good
fellow.' "
"I don't believe," went on Woods quietly, as if be
were thinking aloud, "that if accounts had been
square between you and me, all the money in all the
banks in New York could have bought you out of
my hands to-night."
"I know it couldn't," said Kernan. "That's why
I knew I was safe with you."
"Most people," continued the detective, "look side-
ways at my business. They don't class it among the
fine arts and the professions. But I've always taken
a kind of fool pride in it. And here is where I go
'busted.' I guess I'm a man first and a detective
afterward. I've got to let you go, and then I've got
to resign from the force. I guess I can drive an ex-
press wagon. Your thousand dollars is further off
than ever, Johnny."
"Oh, you're welcome to it," said Kernan, with a
lordly air. "I'd be willing to call the debt off, but
I know you wouldn't have it It was a lucky day
for me when you borrowed it. And now, let's drop
the subject. I'm off to the West on a morning train.
I know a place out there where I can negotiate the
Norcross sparks. Drink up, Barney, and forget your
troubles. We'll have a jolly time while the police
are knocking their heads together over the case.
I've got one of my Sahara thirsts on to-night. But
I'm in the bands -- the unofficial bands -- of my old
friend Barney, and I won't even dream of a cop."
And then, as Kernan's ready finger kept the but-
ton and the waiter working, his weak point -- a tre-
mendous vanity and arrogant egotism, began to show
itself. He recounted story after story of his suc-
cessful plunderings, ingenious plots and infamous
transgressions until Woods, with all his familiarity
with evil-doers, felt growing within him a cold ab-
horrence toward the utterly vicious man who had
once been his benefactor.
"I'm disposed of, of course," said Woods, at
length. "But I advise you to keep under cover for a
spell. The newspapers may take up this Norcross
affair. There has been an epidemic of burglaries and
manslaughter in town this summer."
The word sent Kernan into a high glow of sullen
and vindictive rage.
"To hell with the newspapers," he growled.
"What do they spell but brag and blow and boodle in
box-car letters? Suppose they do take up a case
what does it amount to? The police are easy enough
to fool; but what do the newspapers do? They send
a lot of pin-head reporters around to the scene; and
they make for the nearest saloon and have beer while
they take photos of the bartender's oldest daughter
in evening dress, to print as the fiancee of the young
man in the tenth story, who thought he heard a noise
below on the night of the murder. That's about as
near as the newspapers ever come to running down
Mr. Burglar."
"Well, I don't know," said Woods, reflecting.
"Some of the papers have done good work in that
line. There's the Morning Mars, for instance. It
warmed up two or three trails, and got the man after
the police had let 'em get cold."
"I'll show you," said Tiernan, rising, and expand-
ing his chest. "I'll show you what I think of news-
papers in general, and your Morning Mars in par-
ticular."
Three feet from their table was the telephone
booth. Kernan went inside and sat at the instrument,
leaving the door open. He found a number in the
book, took down the receiver and made his demand
upon Central. Woods sat still, looking at the sneer-
ing, cold, vigilant face waiting close to the trans-
mitter, and listened to the words that came from the
thin, truculent lips curved into a contemptuous smile.
"That the Morning Mars? . . . I want to
speak to the managing editor . . . Why, tell
him it's some one who wants to talk to him about the
Norcross murder.
"You the editor? . . . All right. . . . I
am the man who killed old Norcross . . . Wait!
Hold the wire; I'm not the usual crank . . . oh,
there isn't the slightest danger. I've just been dis-
cussing it with a detective friend of mine. I killed
the old man at 2:30 A. M. two weeks ago to-
morrow. . . . Have a drink with you? Now,
hadn't you better leave that kind of talk to your
funny man? Can't you tell whether a man's guying
you or whether you're being offered the biggest scoop
your dull dishrag of a paper ever had? . . .
Well, that's so; it's a bobtail scoop -- but you can
hardly expect me to 'phone in my name and address.
. . . Why? Oh, because I beard you make a
specialty of solving mysterious crimes that stump the
police. . . . No, that's not all. I want to tell
you that your rotten, lying, penny sheet is of no more
use in tracking an intelligent murderer or highway-
man than a blind poodle would be. . . . What?
. . . Oh, no, this isn't a rival newspaper office;
you're getting it straight. I did the Norcross job,
and I've got the jewels in my suit case at -- 'the
name of the hotel could not be learned' -- you recog-
nize that phrase, don't you? I thought so. You've
used it often enough. Kind of rattles you, doesn't
it, to have the mysterious villain call up your great,
big, all-powerful organ of right and justice and good
government and tell you what a helpless old gas-bag
you are? . . . Cut that out; you're not that big
a fool -- no, you don't think I'm a fraud. I can tell
it by your voice. . . . Now, listen, and I'll give
you a pointer that will prove it to you. Of course
you've had this murder case worked over by your staff
of bright young blockheads. Half of the second but-
ton on old Mrs. Norcross's nightgown is broken off.
I saw it when I took the garnet ring off her finger.
I thought it was a ruby. . . . -- Stop that! it
won't work."
Kernan turned to Woods with a diabolic smile.
"I've got him going. He believes me now. He
didn't quite cover the transmitter with his hand when
he told somebody to call up Central on another 'phone
and get our number. I'll give him just one more dig,
and then we'll make a 'get-away.'
"Hello! . . . Yes. I'm here yet. You
didn't think -- I'd run from such a little subsidized, turn-
coat rag of a newspaper, did you? . . . Have
me inside of forty-eight hours? Say, will you quit
being funny? Now, you let grown men alone and at-
tend to your business of hunting up divorce cases
and street-car accidents and printing the filth and
scandal that you make your living by. Good-by, old
boy -- sorry I haven't time to call on you. I'd feel
perfectly safe in your sanctum asinorum. Tra-la!"
"He's as mad as a cat that's lost a mouse," said
Kernan, hanging up the receiver and coming out.
"And now, Barney, my boy, we'll go to a show and
enjoy ourselves until a reasonable bedtime. Four
hours' sleep for me, and then the west-bound."
The two dined in a Broadway restaurant. Kernan
was pleased with himself. He spent money like a
prince of fiction. And then a weird and gorgeous
musical comedy engaged their attention. Afterward
there was a late supper in a grillroom, with
champagne, and Kernan at the height of his com-
placency.
Half-past three in the morning found them in a
corner of an all-night cafe, Kernan still boasting in
a vapid and rambling way, Woods thinking moodily
over the end that had come to his usefulness as an
upholder of the law.
But, as he pondered, his eye brightened with a
speculative light.
"I wonder if it's possible," be said to himself, "I
won-der if it's pos-si-ble!
And then outside the cafe the comparative stillness
of the early morning was punctured by faint, uncer-
tain cries that seemed mere fireflies of sound, some
growing louder, some fainter, waxing and waning
amid the rumble of milk wagons and infrequent cars.
Shrill cries they were when near -- well-known cries
that conveyed many meanings to the ears of those of
the slumbering millions of the great city who waked
to hear them. Cries that bore upon their significant,
small volume the weight of a world's woe and laugh-
ter and delight and stress. To some, cowering be-
neath the protection of a night's ephemeral cover,
they brought news of the hideous, bright day; to
others, wrapped in happy sleep, they announced a
morning that would dawn blacker than sable night.
To many of the rich they brought a besom to sweep
away what had been theirs while the stars shone; to
the poor they brought -- another day.
All over the city the cries were starting up, keen
and sonorous, heralding the chances that the slip-
ping of one cogwheel in the machinery of time had
made; apportioning to the sleepers while they lay
at the mercy of fate, the vengeance, profit, grief,
reward and doom that the new figure in the calen-
dar had brought them. Shrill and yet plaintive
were the cries, as if the young voices grieved that so
much evil and so little good was in their irresponsible
hands. Thus echoed in the streets of the helpless
city the transmission of the latest decrees of the gods,
the cries of the newsboys -- the Clarion Call of the
Press.
Woods flipped a dime to the waiter, and said:
"Get me a Morning Mars."
When the paper came he glanced at its first page,
and then tore a leaf out of his memorandum book
and began to write on it with the little old pencil.
"What's the news?"' yawned Kernan.
Woods flipped over to him the piece of writing:
"The New York Morning Mars:
"Please pay to the order of John Kernan the one thousand
dollars reward coming to me for his arrest and conviction.
"BARNARD WOODS."
"I kind of thought they would do that," said
Woods, "when you were jollying them so hard. Now,
Johnny, you'll come to the police station with me."
EXTRADITED FROM BOHEMIA
From near the village of Harmony, at the foot
of the Green Mountains, came Miss Medora Martin
to New York with her color-box and easel.
Miss Medora resembled the rose which the autum-
nal frosts had spared the longest of all her sister
blossoms. In Harmony, when she started alone to
the wicked city to study art, they said she was a mad,
reckless, headstrong girl. In New York, when she
first took her seat at a West Side boardinghouse
table, the boarders asked: "Who is the nice-looking
old maid?"
Medora took heart, a cheap hall bedroom and two
art lessons a week from Professor Angelini, a retired
barber who had studied his profession in a Harlem
dancing academy. There was no one to set her right,
for here in the big city they do it unto all of us.
How many of us are badly shaved daily and taught
the two-step imperfectly by ex-pupils of Bastien Le
Page and Gerome? The most pathetic sight in New
York -- except the manners of the rush-hour crowds
-- is the dreary march of the hopeless army of Me-
diocrity. Here Art is no benignant goddess, but
a Circe who turns her wooers into mewing Toms and
Tabbies who linger about the doorsteps of her abode,
unmindful of the flying brickbats and boot-jacks of
the critics. Some of us creep back to our native vil-
lages to the skim-milk of "I told you so"; but most
of us prefer to remain in the cold courtyard of our
mistress's temple, snatching the scraps that fall from
her divine table d'hote. But some of us grow weary
at last of the fruitless service. And then there are
two fates open to us. We can get a job driving a
grocer's wagon, or we can get swallowed up in the
Vortex of Bohemia. The latter sounds good; but the
former really pans out better. For, when the grocer
pays us off we can rent a dress suit and -- the cap-
italized system of humor describes it best -- Get Bo-
hemia On the Run.
Miss Medora chose the Vortex and thereby fur-
nishes us with our little story.
Professor Angelini praised her sketches excessively.
Once when she had made a neat study of a horse-
chestnut tree in the park he declared she would be-
come a second Rosa Bonheur. Again -- a great art-
ist has his moods -- he would say cruel and cutting
things. For example, Medora had spent an after-
noon patiently sketching the statue and the archi-
tecture at Columbus Circle. Tossing it aside with
a sneer, the professor informed her that Giotto had
once drawn a perfect circle with one sweep of his
hand.
One day it rained, the weekly remittance from Har-
mony was overdue, Medora had a headache, the pro-
fessor had tried to borrow two dollars from her, her
art dealer had sent back all her water-colors unsold,
and -- Mr. Binkley asked her out to dinner.
Mr. Binkley was the gay boy of the boarding-
house. He was forty-nine, and owned a fishstall in
a downtown market. But after six o'clock he wore
an evening suit and whooped things up connected
with the beaux arts. The young men said he was an
"Indian." He was supposed to be an accomplished
habitue of the inner circles of Bohemia. It was no
secret that he had once loaned $10 to a young man
who had had a drawing printed in Puck. Often has
one thus obtained his entree into the charmed circle,
while the other obtained both his entree and roast.
The other boarders enviously regarded Medora as
she left at Mr. Binkley's side at nine o'clock. She
was as sweet as a cluster of dried autumn grasses
in her pale blue -- oh -- er -- that very thin stuff
-- in her pale blue Comstockized silk waist and box-
pleated voile skirt, with a soft pink glow on her thin
cheeks and the tiniest bit of rouge powder on her
face, with her handkerchief and room key in her
brown walrus, pebble-grain band-bag.
And Mr. Binkley looked imposing and dashing with
his red face and gray mustache, and his tight dress
coat, that made the back of his neck roll up just
like a successful novelist's.
They drove in a cab to the Cafe Terence, just off
the most glittering part of Broadway, which, as
every one knows, is one of the most popular and
widely patronized, jealously exclusive Bohemian re-
sorts in the city.
Down between the rows of little tables tripped
Medora, of the Green Mountains, after her escort.
Thrice in a lifetime may woman walk upon clouds
once when she trippeth to the altar, once when she
first enters Bohemian halls, the last when she marches
back across her first garden with the dead hen of her
neighbor in her band.
There was a table set, with three or four about it.
A waiter buzzed around it like a bee, and silver and
glass shone upon it. And, preliminary to the meal,
as the prehistoric granite strata heralded the pro-
tozoa, the bread of Gaul, compounded after the for-
mula of the recipe for the eternal bills, was there set
forth to the hand and tooth of a long-suffering city,
while the gods lay beside their nectar and home-made
biscuits and smiled, and the dentists leaped for joy
in their gold-leafy dens.
The eye of Binkley fixed a young man at his table
with the Bobemian gleam, which is a compound of
the look of the Basilisk, the shine of a bubble of
Wurzburger, the inspiration of genius and the plead-
ing of a panhandler.
The young man sprang to his feet. "Hello, Bink,
old boy! be shouted. "Don't tell me you were go-
ing to pass our table. Join us -- unless you've an-
other crowd on hand."
"Don't mind, old chap," said Binkley, of the fish-
stall. "You know how I like to butt up against the
fine arts. Mr. Vandyke -- Mr. Madder -- er --
Miss Martin, one of the elect also in art -- er -- "
The introduction went around. There were also
Miss Elise and Miss 'Toinette. Perhaps they were
models, for they chattered of the St. Regis decora-
tions and Henry James -- and they did it not badly.
Medora sat in transport. Music -- wild, intoxi-
eating music made by troubadours direct from a rear
basement room in Elysium -- set her thoughts to
dancing. Here was a world never before penetrated
by her warmest imagination or any of the lines con-
trolled by Harriman. With the Green Mountains'
external calm upon her she sat, her soul flaming in
her with the fire of Andalusia. The tables were filled
with Bohemia. The room was full of the fragrance
of flowers -- both mille and cauli. Questions and
corks popped; laughter and silver rang; champagne
flashed in the pail, wit flashed in the pan.
Vandyke ruffled his long, black locks, disarranged
his careless tie and leaned over to Madder.
"Say, Maddy," he whispered, feelingly, "some-
times I'm tempted to pay this Philistine his ten dol-
lars and get rid of him."
Madder ruffled his long, sandy locks and disar-
ranged his careless tie.
"Don't think of it, Vandy," he replied. "We are
short, and Art is long."
Medora ate strange viands and drank elderberry
wine that they poured in her glass. It was just the
color of that in the Vermont home. The waiter
poured something in another glass that seemed to
be boiling, but when she tasted it it was not hot.
She had never felt so light-hearted before. She
thought lovingly of the Green Mountain farm and its
fauna. She leaned, smiling, to Miss Elise.
"If I were at home," she said, beamingly, "I
could show you the cutest little calf! "
"Nothing for you in the White Lane," said Miss
Elise. "Why don't you pad?
The orchestra played a wailing waltz that Medora
had learned from the hand-organs. She followed
the air with nodding head in a sweet soprano hum.
Madder looked across the table at her, and wondered
in what strange waters Binkley had caught her in
his seine. She smiled at him, and they raised glasses
and drank of the wine that boiled when it was cold.
Binkley had abandoned art and was prating of the
unusual spring catch of shad. Miss Elise arranged
the palette-and-maul-stick tie pin of Mr. Vandyke.
A Philistine at some distant table was maundering
volubly either about Jerome or Gerome. A famous
actress was discoursing excitably about monogrammed
hosiery. A hose clerk from a department store was
loudly proclaiming his opinions of the drama. A
writer was abusing Dickens. A magazine editor and
a photographer were drinking a dry brand at a re-
served table. A 36-25-42 young lady was saying to
an eminent sculptor: "Fudge for your Prax Italys!
Bring one of your Venus Anno Dominis down to
Cohen's and see bow quick she'd be turned down for
a cloak model. Back to the quarries with your
Greeks and Dagos!"
Thus went Bohemia.
At eleven Mr. Binkley took Medora to the board-
ing-bouse and left her, with a society bow, at the foot
of the hall stairs. She went up to her room and lit
the gas.
And then, as suddenly as the dreadful genie arose
in vapor from the copper vase of the fisherman,
arose in that room the formidable shape of the New
England Conscience. The terrible thing that
Medora had done was revealed to her in its full
enormity. She had sat in the presence of the un-
godly and looked upon the wine both when it was red
and effervescent.
At midnight she wrote this letter:
"Mr. BERLAH HOSKINS, Harmony, Vermont.
"Dear Sir: Henceforth, consider me as dead to
you forever. I have loved you too well to blight your
career by bringing into it my guilty and sin-stained
life. I have succumbed to the insidious wiles of this
wicked world and have been drawn into the vortex of
Bohemia. There is scarcely any depth of glittering
iniquity that I have not sounded. It is hopeless to
combat my decision. There is no rising from the
depths to which I have sunk. Endeavor to forget
me. I am lost forever in the fair but brutal maze of
awful Bohemia. Farewell.
"ONCE YOUR MEDORA."
On the next day Medora formed her resolutions.
Beelzebub, flung from heaven, was no more cast down.
Between her and the apple blossoms of Harmony
there was a fixed gulf. Flaming cherubim warded
her from the gates of her lost paradise. In one
evening, by the aid of Binkley and Mumm, Bohemia
had gathered her into its awful midst.
There remained to her but one thing -- a life of
brilliant, but irremediable error. Vermont was a
shrine that she never would dare to approach again.
But she would not sink -- there were great and com-
pelling ones in history upon whom she would model
her meteoric career -- Camille, Lola Montez, Royal
Mary, Zaza -- such a name as one of these would that
of Medora Martin be to future generations
For two days Medora kept her room. On the
third she opened a magazine at the portrait of the
King of Belgium, and laughed sardonically. If that
far-famed breaker of women's hearts should cross her
path, he would have to bow before her cold and im-
perious beauty. She would not spare the old or
the young. All America -- all Europe should do
homage to her sinister, but compelling charm.
As yet she could not bear to think of the life she
had once desired -- a peaceful one in the shadow of
the Green Mountains with Beriah at her side, and
orders for expensive oil paintings coming in by each
mail from New York. Her one fatal misstep had
shattered that dream.
On the fourth day Medora powdered her face and
rouged her lips. Once she had seen Carter in
"Zaza." She stood before the mirror in a reckless
attitude and cried: "Zut! zut!" She rhymed it
with "nut," but with the lawless word Harmony
seemed to pass away forever. The Vortex had her.
She belonged to Bohemia for evermore. And never
would Beriah --
The door opened and Beriah walked in.
"'Dory," said he, "what's all that chalk and pink
stuff on your face, honey?
Medora extended an arm.
"Too late," she said, solemnly. The die is cast.
I belong in another world. Curse me if you will --
it is your right. Go, and leave me in the path I
have chosen. Bid them all at home never to men-
tion my name again. And sometimes, Beriah, pray
for me when I am revelling in the gaudy, but hol-
low, pleasures of Bohemia."
"Get a towel, 'Dory," said Beriah, "and wipe
that paint off your face. I came as soon as I got
your letter. Them pictures of yours ain't amount-
ing to anything. I've got tickets for both of us
back on the evening train. Hurry and get your
things in your trunk."
"Fate was too strong for me, Beriah. Go while
I am strong to bear it."
"How do you fold this easel, 'Dory? -- now begin
to pack, so we have time to eat before train time.
The maples is all out in full-grown leaves, 'Dory --
you just ought to see 'em!
"Not this early, Beriah?
"You ought to see 'em, 'Dory; they're like an
ocean of green in the morning sunlight."
"Oh, Beriah!"
On the train she said to him suddenly:
"I wonder why you came when you got my let-
ter."
"Oh, shucks! " said Beriah. "Did you think you
could fool me? How could you be run away to that
Bohemia country like you said when your letter was
postmarked New York as plain as day?"
A PHILISTINE IN BOHEMIA
George Washington, with his right arm up-
raised, sits his iron horse at the lower corner of
Union Square, forever signaling the Broadway cars
to stop as they round the curve into Fourteenth
Street. But the cars buzz on, heedless, as they do at
the beck of a private citizen, and the great General
must feel, unless his nerves are iron, that rapid tran-
sit gloria mundi.
Should the General raise his left hand as he has
raised his right it would point to a quarter of the
city that forms a haven for the oppressed and sup-
pressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national
or personal freedom they have found a refuge here,
and the patriot who made it for them sits his steed,
overlooking their district, while he listens through his
left car to vaudeville that caricatures the posterity
of his proteges. Italy, Poland, the former Spanish
possessions and the polyglot tribes of Austria-Hun-
gary have spilled here a thick lather of their effer-
vescent sons. In the eccentric cafes and lodging-
houses of the vicinity they hover over their native
wines and political secrets. The colony changes
with much frequency. Faces disappear from the
haunts to be replaced by others. Whither do these
uneasy birds flit? For half of the answer observe
carefully the suave foreign air and foreign courtesy
of the next waiter who serves your table d'hote.
For the other half, perhaps if the barber shops had
tongues (and who will dispute it?) they could tell
their share.
Titles are as plentiful as finger rings among these
transitory exiles. For lack of proper exploitation a
stock of titled goods large enough to supply the trade
of upper Fifth Avenue is here condemned to a mere
pushcart traffic. The new-world landlords who en-
tertain these offshoots of nobility are not dazzled
by coronets and crests. They have doughnuts to
sell instead of daughters. With them it is a serious
matter of trading in flour and sugar instead of pearl
powder and bonbons.
These assertions are deemed fitting as an intro-
duction to the tale, which is of plebeians and contains
no one with even the ghost of a title.
Katy Dempsey's mother kept a furnished-room
house in this oasis of the aliens. The business was
not profitable. If the two scraped together enough
to meet the landlord's agent on rent day and nego-
tiate for the ingredients of a daily Irish stew they
called it success. Often the stew lacked both meat
and potatoes. Sometimes it became as bad as con-
somme' with music.
In this mouldy old house Katy waxed plump and
pert and wholesome and as beautiful and freckled as
a tiger lily. She was the good fairy who was guilty
of placing the damp clean towels and cracked pitchers
of freshly laundered Croton in the lodgers' rooms.
You are informed (by virtue of the privileges of
astronomical discovery) that the star lodger's name
was Mr. Brunelli. His wearing a yellow tie and pay-
ing his rent promptly distinguished him from the
other lodgers. His raiment was splendid, his com-
plexion olive, his, mustache fierce, his manners a
prince's, his rings and pins as magnificent as those
of a traveling dentist.
He had breakfast served in his room, and he ate it
in a red dressing gown with green tassels. He left
the house at noon and returned at midnight. Those
were mysterious hours, but there was nothing my-
terious about Mrs. Dempsey's lodgers except the
things that were not mysterious. One of Mr. Kip-
ling's poems is addressed to "Ye who hold the un-
written clue to all save all unwritten thing." The
same "readers" are invited to tackle the foregoing
assertion.
Mr. Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin,
fell to conjugating the verb "amare," with Katy in
the objective case, though not because of antipathy.
She talked it over with her mother.
"Sure, I like him," said Katy. "He's more po-
liteness than twinty candidates for Alderman, and lie
makes me feel like a queen whin he walks at me side.
But what is he, I dinno? I've me suspicions. The
marnin'll coom whin he'll throt out the picture av his
baronial halls and ax to have the week's rint hung
up in the ice chist along wid all the rist of 'em."
"'Tis true," admitted Mrs. Dempsey, "that he
seems to be a sort iv a Dago, and too coolchured in
his spache for a rale gentleman. But ye may be mis-
judgin' him. Ye should niver suspect any wan of
bein' of noble descint that pays cash and pathronizes
the laundry rig'lar."
"He's the same tbricks of spakin' and blarneyin'
wid his hands," sighed Katy, "as the Frinch noble-
man at Mrs. Toole's that ran away wid Mr. Toole's
Sunday pants and left the photograph of the Bastile,
his grandfather's chat-taw, as security for tin weeks'
rint."
Mr. Brunelli continued his calorific wooing. Katy
continued to hesitate. One day he asked her out to
dine and she felt that a denouement was in the air.
While they are on their way, with Katy in her best
muslin, you must take as an entr'acte a brief peep at
New York's Bohemia.
'Tonio's restaurant is in Bohemia. The very lo-
cation of it is secret. If you wish to know where it is
ask the first person you meet. He will tell you in a
whisper. 'Tonio discountenances custom; he keeps
his house-front black and forbidding; he gives you a
pretty bad dinner; he locks his door at the dining
hour; but he knows spaghetti as the boarding-house
knows cold veal; and -- he has deposited many dol-
lars in a certain Banco di -- something with many
gold vowels in the name on its windows.
To this restaurant Mr. Brunelli conducted Katy.
The house was dark and the shades were lowered; but
Mr. Brunelli touched an electric button by the base-
ment door, and they were admitted.
Along a long, dark, narrow hallway they went and
then through a shining and spotless kitchen that
opened directly upon a back yard.
The walls of houses hemmed three sides of the
yard; a high, board fence, surrounded by cats, the
other. A wash of clothes was suspended high upon
a line stretched from diagonal corners. Those were
property clothes, and were never taken in by 'Tonio.
They were there that wits with defective pronuncia-
tion might make puns in connection with the ragout.
A dozen and a half little tables set upon the bare
ground were crowded with Bohemia-hunters, who
flocked there because 'Tonio pretended not to want
them and pretended to give them a good dinner.
There was a sprinkling of real Bohemians present
who came for a change because they were tired of
the real Bohemia, and a smart shower of the men
who originate the bright sayings of Congressmen and
the little nephew of the well-known general passen-
ger agent of the Evansville and Terre Haute Rail-
road Company.
Here is a bon mot that was manufactured at
'Tonio's:
"A dinner at 'Tonio's," said a Bohemian, "always
amounts to twice the price that is asked for it."
Let us assume that an accommodating voice in-
quires:
"How so?"
"The dinner costs you 40 cents; you give 10 cents
to the waiter, and it makes you feel like 30 cents."
Most of the diners were confirmed table d'hoters --
gastronomic adventuress, forever seeking the El Do-
rado of a good claret, and consistently coming to
grief in California.
Mr. Brunelli escorted Katy to a little table em-
bowered with shrubbery in tubs, and asked her to
excuse him for a while.
Katy sat, enchanted by a scene so brilliant to her.
The grand ladies, in splendid dresses and plumes and
sparkling rings; the fine gentlemen who laughed so
loudly, the cries of "Garsong! " and "We, mon-
seer," and "Hello, Mame! " that distinguish Bo-
hemia; the lively chatter, the cigarette smoke, the
interchange of bright smiles and eye-glances -- all
this display and magnificence overpowered the daugh-
ter of Mrs. Dempsey and held her motionless.
Mr. Brunelli stepped into the yard and seemed to
spread his smile and bow over the entire company.
And everywhere there was a great clapping of bands
and a few cries of "Bravo! " and "'Tonio! 'Tonio!"
whatever those words might mean. Ladies waved
their napkins at him, gentlemen almost twisted their
necks off, trying to catch his nod.
When the ovation was concluded Mr. Brunelli,
with a final bow, stepped nimbly into the kitchen and
flung off his coat and waistcoat.
"Flaherty, the nimblest "garsong" among the
waiters, had been assigned to the special service of
Katy. She was a little faint from hunger, for the
Irish stew on the Dempsey table had been particu-
larly weak that day. Delicious odors from unknown
dishes tantalized her. And Flaherty began to bring
to her table course after course of ambrosial food
that the gods might have pronounced excellent.
But even in the midst of her Lucullian repast Katy
laid down her knife and fork. Her heart sank as
lead, and a tear fell upon her filet mignon. Her
haunting suspicions of the star lodger arose again,
fourfold. Thus courted and admired and smiled
upon by that fashionable and gracious assembly,
what else could Mr. Brunelli be but one of those
dazzling titled patricians, glorious of name but shy
of rent money, concerning whom experience had made
her wise? With a sense of his ineligibility growing
within her there was mingled a torturing conviction
that his personality was becoming more pleasing to
her day by day. And why had he left her to dine
alone?
But here he was coming again, now coatless, his
snowy shirt-sleeves rolled high above his Jeffries-
onian elbows, a white yachting cap perched upon his
jetty curls.
"'Tonio! 'Tonio!" shouted many, and "The
spaghetti! The spaghetti!" shouted the rest.
Never at 'Tonio's did a waiter dare to serve a dish
of spaghetti until 'Tonio came to test it, to prove the
sauce and add the needful dash of seasoning that
gave it perfection.
From table to table moved 'Tonio, like a prince in
his palace, greeting his guests. White, jewelled
bands signalled him from every side.
A glass of wine with this one and that, smiles for
all, a jest and repartee for any that might challenge
-- truly few princes could be so agreeable a host!
And what artist could ask for further appreciation
of his handiwork? Katy did not know that the
proudest consummation of a New Yorker's ambition
is to shake bands with a spaghetti chef or to receive
a nod from a Broadway head-waiter.
At last the company thinned, leaving' but a few
couples and quartettes lingering over new wine and
old stories. And then came Mr. Brunelli to Katy's
secluded table, and drew a chair close to hers.
Katy smiled at him dreamily. She was eating the
last spoonful of a raspberry roll with Burgundy
sauce.
"You have seen!" said Mr. Brunelli, laying one
hand upon his collar bone. "I am Antonio Brunelli!
Yes; I am the great 'Tonio! You have not suspect
that! I loave you, Katy, and you shall marry with
me. Is it not so? Call me 'Antonio,' and say that
you will be mine."
Katy's head drooped to the shoulder that was now
freed from all suspicion of having received the
knightly accolade.
"Oh, Andy," she sighed, "this is great! Sure,
I'll marry wid ye. But why didn't ye tell me ye was
the cook? I was near turnin' ye down for bein' one
of thim foreign counts!"
FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY
Vuyning left his club, cursing it softly, without
any particular anger. From ten in the morning un-
til eleven it had bored him immeasurably. Kirk with
his fish story, Brooks with his Porto Rico cigars, old
Morrison with his anecdote about the widow, Hep-
burn with his invariable luck at billiards -- all these
afflictions had been repeated without change of bill or
scenery. Besides these morning evils Miss Allison
had refused him again on the night before. But that
was a chronic trouble. Five times she had laughed at
his offer to make her Mrs. Vuyning. He intended
to ask her again the next Wednesday evening.
Vuyning walked along Forty-fourth Street to
Broadway, and then drifted down the great sluice
that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.
He wore a morning suit of light gray, low, dull kid
shoes, a plain, finely woven straw hat, and his visible
linen was the most delicate possible shade of belio-
trope. His necktie was the blue-gray of a Novem-
ber sky, and its knot was plainly the outcome of a
lordly carelessness combined with an accurate con-
ception of the most recent dictum of fashion.
Now, to write of a man's haberdashery is a worse
thing than to write a historical novel "around"
Paul Jones, or to pen a testimonial to a hay-fever
cure.
Therefore, let it be known that the description of
Vuyning's apparel is germane to the movements of
the story, and not to make room for the new fall
stock of goods.
Even Broadway that morning was a discord in
Vuyning's ears; and in his eyes it paralleled for a
few dreamy, dreary minutes a certain howling,
scorching, seething, malodorous slice of street that he
remembered in Morocco. He saw the struggling
mass of dogs, beggars, fakirs, slave-drivers and
veiled women in carts without horses, the sun blazing
brightly among the bazaars, the piles of rubbish
from ruined temples in the street - and then a lady,
passing, jabbed the ferrule of a parasol in his side
and brought him back to Broadway.
Five minutes of his stroll brought him to a certain
corner, where a number of silent, pale-faced men are
accustomed to stand, immovably, for hours, busy
with the file blades of their penknives, with their hat
brims on a level with their eyelids. Wall Street
speculators, driving home in their carriages, love to
point out these men to their visiting friends and tell
them of this rather famous lounging-place of the
"crooks." On Wall Street the speculators never
use the file blades of their knives.
Vuyning was delighted when one of this company
stepped forth and addressed him as he was passing.
He was hungry for something out of the ordinary,
and to be accosted by this smooth-faced, keen-eyed,
low-voiced, athletic member of the under world, with
his grim, yet pleasant smile, had all the taste of an
adventure to the convention-weary Vuyning.
"Excuse me, friend," said be. "Could I have a
few minutes' talk with you -- on the level?"
"Certainly," said Vuyning, with a smile. "But,
suppose we step aside to a quieter place. There is a
divan -- a cafe over here that will do. Schrumm
will give us a private corner."
Schrumm established them under a growing palm,
with two seidls between them. Vuyning made a
pleasant reference to meteorological conditions, thus
forming a binge upon which might be swung the
door leading from the thought repository of the
other.
"In the first place," said his companion, with the
air of one who presents his credentials, "I want you
to understand that I am a crook. Out West I am
known as Rowdy the Dude. Pickpocket, supper man,
second-story man, yeggman, boxman, all-round bur-
glar, cardsharp and slickest con man west of the
Twenty-third Street ferry landing -- that's my his-
tory. That's to show I'm on the square -- with you.
My name's Emerson."
"Confound old Kirk with his fish stories" said
Vuyning to himself, with silent glee as he went
through his pockets for a card. "It's pronounced
'Vining,'" he said, as he tossed it over to the other.
"And I'll be as frank with you. I'm just a kind of
a loafer, I guess, living on my daddy's money. At
the club they call me 'Left-at-the-Post.' I never
did a day's work in my life; and I haven't the heart
to run over a chicken when I'm motoring. It's a
pretty shabby record, altogether."
"There's one thing you can do," said Emerson,
admiringly; "you can carry duds. I've watched you
several times pass on Broadway. You look the best
dressed man I've seen. And I'll bet you a gold mine
I've got $50 worth more gent's furnishings on my
frame than you have. That's what I wanted to see
you about. I can't do the trick. Take a look at
me. What's wrong?"
"Stand up," said Vuyning.
Emerson arose, and slowly revolved.
"You've been 'outfitted,'" declared the clubman.
"Some Broadway window-dresser has misused you."
"That's an expensive suit, though, Emerson."
"A hundred dollars," said Emerson.
"Twenty too much," said Vuyning. "Six months
old in cut, one inch too long, and half an inch to-
much lapel. Your hat is plainly dated one year ago,
although there's only a sixteenth of an inch lacking
in the brim to tell the story. That English poke in
your collar is too short by the distance between Troy
and London. A plain gold link cuff-button would
take all the shine out of those pearl ones with dia-
mond settings. Those tan shoes would be exactly
the articles to work into the heart of a Brooklyn
school-ma'am on a two weeks' visit to Lake Ronkon-
koma. I think I caught a glimpse of a blue silk
sock embroidered with russet lilies of the valley when
you -- improperly -- drew up your trousers as you
sat down. There are always plain ones to be had
in the stores. Have I hurt your feelings, Emer-
son?"
"Double the ante!" cried the criticised one, greed-
ily. "Give me more of it. There's a way to tote
the haberdashery, and I want to get wise to it. Say,
you're the right kind of a swell. Anything else to the
queer about me?"
"Your tie," said Vuyning, "is tied with absolute
precision and correctness."
"Thanks," gratefully -- "I spent over half an
hour at it before I -- "
"Thereby," interrupted Vuyning, "completing
your resemblance to a dummy in a Broadway store
window."
"Yours truly," said Emerson, sitting down again.
"It's bully of you to put me wise. I knew there
was something wrong, but I couldn't just put my
finger on it. I guess it comes by nature to know how
to wear clothes."
"Oh, I suppose," said Vuyning, with a laugh,
"that my ancestors picked up the knack while they
were peddling clothes from house to house a couple
of hundred years ago. I'm told they did that."
"And mine," said Emerson, cheerfully, "were
making their visits at night, I guess, and didn't have
a chance to catch on to the correct styles."
"I tell you what," said Vuyning, whose ennui had
taken wings, "I'll take you to my tailor. He'll
eliminate the mark of the beast from your exterior.
That is, if you care to go any further in the way of
expense."
"Play 'em to the ceiling," said Emerson, with a
boyish smile of joy. "I've got a roll as big around
as a barrel of black-eyed peas and as loose as the
wrapper of a two-for-fiver. I don't mind telling you
that I was not touring among the Antipodes when
the burglar-proof safe of the Farmers' National Bank
of Butterville, Ia., flew open some moonless nights
ago to the tune of $16,000."
"Aren't you afraid," asked Vuyning, "that I'll
call a cop and hand you over?"
"You tell me," said Emerson, coolly, "why I
didn't keep them."
He laid Vuyning's pocketbook and watch -- the
Vuyning 100-year-old family watch on the table.
"Man," said Vuyning, revelling, "did you ever
hear the tale Kirk tells about the six-pound trout
and the old fisherman?"
"Seems not," said Emerson, politely. "I'd
like to."
"But you won't," said Vuyning. "I've heard it
scores of times. That's why I won't tell you. I was
just thinking how much better this is than a club.
Now, shall we go to my tailor?"
"Boys, and elderly gents," said Vuyning, five days
later at his club, standing up against the window
where his coterie was gathered, and keeping out the
breeze, "a friend of mine from the West will dine
at our table this evening."
"Will he ask if we have heard the latest from
Denver?" said a member, squirming in his chair.
"Will he mention the new twenty-three-story Ma-
sonic Temple, in Quincy, Ill.?" inquired another,
dropping his nose-glasses.
"Will he spring one of those Western Mississippi
River catfish stories, in which they use yearling
calves for bait?" demanded Kirk, fiercely.
"Be comforted," said Vuyning. "He has none of
the little vices. He is a burglar and safe-blower,
and a pal of mine."
"Oh, Mary Ann!" said they. "Must you always
adorn every statement with your alleged humor?"
It came to pass that at eight in the evening a calm,
smooth, brilliant, affable man sat at Vuyning's right
hand during dinner. And when the ones who pass
their lives in city streets spoke of skyscrapers or of
the little Czar on his far, frozen throne, or of insig-
nificant fish from inconsequential streams, this big,
deep-chested man, faultlessly clothed, and eyed like
an Emperor, disposed of their Lilliputian chatter
with a wink of his eyelash.
And then he painted for them with hard, broad
strokes a marvellous lingual panorama of the West.
He stacked snow-topped mountains on the table,
freezing the hot dishes of the waiting diners. With
a wave of his hand he swept the clubhouse into a
pine-crowned gorge, turning the waiters into a grim
posse, and each listener into a blood-stained fugitive,
climbing with torn fingers upon the ensanguined
rocks. He touched the table and spake, and the five
panted as they gazed on barren lava beds, and each
man took his tongue between his teeth and felt his
mouth bake at the tale of a land empty of water and
food. As simply as Homer sang, while he dug a tine
of his fork leisurely into the tablecloth, he opened a
new world to their view, as does one who tells a child
of the Looking-Glass Country.
As one of his listeners might have spoken of tea
too strong at a Madison Square "afternoon," so he
depicted the ravages of redeye in a border town
when the caballeros of the lariat and "forty-five"
reduced ennui to a minimum.
And then, with a sweep of his white, unringed
hands, be dismissed Melpomene, and forthwith Diana
and Amaryllis footed it before the mind's eyes of
the clubmen.
The savannas of the continent spread before them.
The wind, humming through a hundred leagues of
sage brush and mesquite, closed their ears to the
city's staccato noises. He told them of camps, of
ranches marooned in a sea of fragrant prairie blos-
soms, of gallops in the stilly night that Apollo would
have forsaken his daytime steeds to enjoy; he read
them the great, rough epic of the cattle and the hills
that have not been spoiled by the band of man, the
mason. His words were a telescope to the city men,
whose eyes had looked upon Youngstown, O., and
whose tongues had called it "West."
In fact, Emerson had them "going."
The next morning at ten he met Vuyning, by ap-
pointment, at a Forty-second Street cafe.
Emerson was to leave for the West that day. He
wore a suit of dark cheviot that looked to have been
draped upon him by an ancient Grecian tailor who
was a few thousand years ahead of the styles.
"Mr. Vuyning," said he, with the clear, ingenuous
smile of the successful "crook," it's up to me to
go the limit for you any time I can do so. You're
the real thing; and if I can ever return the favor, you
bet your life I'll do it."
"What was that cow-puncher's name?" asked
Vuyning, "who used to catch a mustang by the nose
and mane, and throw him till he put the bridle on?"
"Bates," said Emerson.
"Thanks," said Vuyning. "I thought it was
Yates. Oh, about that toggery business -- I'd for-
gotten that."
"I've been looking for some guy to put me on the
right track for years," said Emerson. "You're the
goods, duty free, and half-way to the warehouse in a
red wagon."
"Bacon, toasted on a green willow switch over red
coals, ought to put broiled lobsters out of business,"
said Vuyning. "And you say a horse at the end of a
thirty-foot rope can't pull a ten-inch stake out of wet
prairie? Well, good-bye, old man, if you must
be off."
At one o'clock Vuyning had luncheon with Miss
Allison by previous arrangement.
For thirty minutes be babbled to her, unaccount-
ably, of ranches, horses, cations, cyclones, round-ups,
Rocky Mountains and beans and bacon. She looked
at him with wondering and half-terrified eyes.
"I was going to propose again to-day," said Vuy-
ning, cheerily, but I won't. I've worried you often
enough. You know dad has a ranch in Colorado.
What's the good of staying here? Jumping jon-
quils! but it's great out there. I'm going to start
next Tuesday."
"No, you won't," said Miss Allison.
"What?" said Vuyning.
"Not alone," said Miss Allison, dropping a tear
upon her salad. "What do you think?"
"Betty!" exclaimed Vuyning, "what do you
mean?
"I'll go too," said Miss Allison, forcibly.
Vuyning filled her glass with Apollinaris.
"Here's to Rowdy the Dude!" he gave -- a toast
mysterious.
"Don't know him," said Miss Allison; "but if
he's your friend, Jimmy -- here goes!"
THE MEMENTO
Miss Lynnette D'Armande turned her
back on Broadway. This was but tit for tat, be-
cause Broadway had often done the same thing to
Miss D'Armande. Still, the "tats" seemed to have
it, for the ex-leading lady of the "Reaping the
Whirlwind" company had everything to ask of
Broadway, while there was no vice-versa.
So Miss Lynnette D'Armande turned the back of
her chair to her window that overlooked Broadway,
and sat down to stitch in time the lisle-thread heel
of a black silk stocking. The tumult and glitter of
the roaring Broadway beneath her window had no
charm for her; what she greatly desired was the
stifling air of a dressing-room on that fairyland
street and the roar of an audience gathered in that
capricious quarter. In the meantime, those stock-
ings must not be neglected. Silk does wear out so,
but -- after all, isn't it just the only goods there is?
The Hotel Thalia looks on Broadway as Marathon
looks on the sea. It stands like a gloomy cliff above
the whirlpool where the tides of two great thorough-
fares clash. Here the player-bands gather at the end
of their wanderings, to loosen the buskin and dust the
sock. Thick in the streets around it are booking-
offices, theatres, agents, schools, and the lobster-pal-
aces to which those thorny paths lead.
Wandering through the eccentric halls of the dim
and fusty Thalia, you seem to have found yourself
in some great ark or caravan about to sail, or fly, or
roll away on wheels. About the house lingers a sense
of unrest, of expectation, of transientness, even of
anxiety and apprehension. The halls are a labyrinth.
Without a guide, you wander like a lost soul in a
Sam Loyd puzzle.
Turning any corner, a dressing-sack or a cul-de-sac
may bring you up short. You meet alarming
tragedians stalking in bath-robes in search of ru-
mored bathrooms. From hundreds of rooms come the
buzz of talk, scraps of new and old songs, and the
ready laughter of the convened players.
Summer has come; their companies have disbanded,
and they take their rest in their favorite caravansary,
while they besiege the managers for engagements for
the coming season.
At this hour of the afternoon the day's work of
tramping the rounds of the agents' offices is over.
Past you, as you ramble distractedly through the
mossy halls, flit audible visions of houris, with veiled,
starry eyes, flying tag-ends of things and a swish of
silk, bequeathing to the dull hallways an odor of
gaiety and a memory of frangipanni. Serious young
comedians, with versatile Adam's apples, gather in
doorways and talk of Booth. Far-reaching from
somewhere comes the smell of ham and red cabbage,
and the crash of dishes on the American plan.
The indeterminate hum of life in the Thalia is
enlivened by the discreet popping -- at reasonable
and salubrious intervals -- of beer-bottle corks.
Thus punctuated, life in the genial hostel scans easily
-- the comma being the favorite mark, semicolons
frowned upon, and periods barred.
Miss D'Armannde's room was a small one. There
was room for her rocker between the dresser and the
wash-stand if it were placed longitudinally. On the
dresser were its usual accoutrements, plus the ex-lead-
ing lady's collected souvenirs of road engagements
and photographs of her dearest and best professional
friends.
At one of these photographs she looked twice or
thrice as she darned, and smiled friendlily.
"I'd like to know where Lee is just this minute,"
she said, half-aloud.
If you had been privileged to view the photograph
thus flattered, you would have thought at the first
glance that you saw the picture of a many-petalled
white flower, blown through the air by a storm. But
the floral kingdom was not responsible for that swirl
of petalous whiteness.
You saw the filmy, brief skirt of Miss Rosalie Ray
as she made a complete heels-over-head turn in her
wistaria-entwined swing, far out from the stage, high
above the heads of the audience. You saw the cam-
era's inadequate representation of the graceful,
strong kick, with which she, at this exciting moment,
sent flying, high and far, the yellow silk garter that
each evening spun from her agile limb and descended
upon the delighted audience below.
You saw, too, amid the black-clothed, mainly mas-
culine patrons of select vaudeville a hundred hands
raised with the hope of staying the flight of the bril-
liant aerial token.
Forty weeks of the best circuits this act had
brought Miss Rosalie Ray, for each of two years.
She did other things during her twelve minutes -- a
song and dance, imitations of two or three actors who
are but imitations of themselves, and a balancing
feat with a step-ladder and feather-duster; but when
the blossom-decked swing was let down from the flies,
and Miss Rosalie sprang smiling into the seat, with
the golden circlet conspicuous in the place whence it
was soon to slide and become a soaring and coveted
guerdon -- then it was that the audience rose in its
seat as a single man -- or presumably so -- and in-
dorsed the specialty that made Miss Ray's name a
favorite in the booking-offices.
At the end of the two years Miss Ray suddenly an-
nounced to her dear friend, Miss D'Armande, that
she was going to spend the summer at an antediluvian
village on the north shore of Long Island, and that
the stage would see her no more.
Seventeen minutes after Miss Lynnette D'Armande
had expressed her wish to know the whereabouts of
her old chum, there were sharp raps at her door.
Doubt not that it was Rosalie Ray. At the shrill
command to enter she did so, with something of a
tired flutter, and dropped a heavy hand-bag on the
floor. Upon my word, it was Rosalie, in a loose,
travel-stained automobileless coat, closely tied brown
veil with yard-long, flying ends, gray walking-suit and
tan oxfords with lavender overgaiters.
When she threw off her veil and hat, you saw a
pretty enough face, now flushed and disturbed by
some unusual emotion, and restless, large eyes with
discontent marring their brightness. A heavy pile
of dull auburn hair, hastily put up, was escaping in
crinkly, waving strands and curling, small locks from
the confining combs and pins.
The meeting of the two was not marked by the
effusion vocal, gymnastical, osculatory and catecheti-
cal that distinguishes the greetings of their unpro-
fessional sisters in society. There was a brief clinch,
two simultaneous labial dabs and they stood on the
same footing of the old days. Very much like the
short salutations of soldiers or of travellers in for-
eign wilds are the welcomes between the strollers at
the corners of their crisscross roads.
"I've got the hall-room two flights up above
yours," said Rosalie, "but I came straight to see you
before going up. I didn't know you were here till
they told me."
"I've been in since the last of April," said Lyn-
nette. "And I'm going on the road with a 'Fatal
Inheritance' company. We open next week in Eliz-
abeth. I thought you'd quit the stage, Lee. Tell
me about yourself."
Rosalie settled herself with a skilful wriggle on
the top of Miss D'Armande's wardrobe trunk, and
leaned her head against the papered wall. From
long habit, thus can peripatetic leading ladies
and their sisters make themselves as comfort.
able as though the deepest armchairs embraced them.
"I'm going to tell you, Lynn," she said, with a
strangely sardonic and yet carelessly resigned look
on her youthful face. "And then to-morrow I'll
strike the old Broadway trail again, and wear some
more paint off the chairs in the agents' offices. If
anybody had told me any time in the last three months
up to four o'clock this afternoon that I'd ever listen
to that 'Leave-your-name-and-address' rot of the
booking bunch again, I'd have given 'em the real Mrs.
Fiske laugh. Loan me a handkerchief, Lynn. Gee!
but those Long Island trains are fierce. I've got
enough soft-coal cinders on my face to go on and play
Topsy without using the cork. And, speaking of
corks -- got anything to drink, Lynn?"
Miss D'Armande opened a door of the wash-stand
and took out a bottle.
"There's nearly a pint of Manhattan. There's a
cluster of carnations in the drinking glass, but -- "
"Oh, pass the bottle. Save the glass for com-
pany. Thanks! That hits the spot. The same to
you. My first drink in three months!"
"Yes, Lynn, I quit the stage at the end of last
season. I quit it because I was sick of the life. And
especially because my heart and soul were sick of men
of the kind of men we stage people have to be up
against. You know what the game is to us -- it's a
fight against 'em all the way down the line from the
manager who wants us to try his new motor-car to the
bill-posters who want to call us by our front names.
"And the men we have to meet after the show are
the worst of all. The stage-door kind, and the man-
ager's friends who take us to supper and show their
diamonds and talk about seeing 'Dan' and 'Dave'
and 'Charlie' for us. They're beasts, and I hate 'em.
"I tell you, Lynn, it's the girls like us on the stage
that ought to be pitied. It's girls from good homes
that are honestly ambitious and work hard to rise in
the profession, but never do get there. You bear a
lot of sympathy sloshed around on chorus girls and
their fifteen dollars a week. Piffle! There ain't a
sorrow in the chorus that a lobster cannot heal.
"If there's any tears to shed, let 'em fall for the
actress that gets a salary of from thirty to forty-five
dollars a week for taking a leading part in a bum
show. She knows she'll never do any better; but she
hangs on for years, hoping for the 'chance I that
never comes.
"And the fool plays we have to work in! Having
another girl roll you around the stage by the hind legs
in a 'Wheelbarrow Chorus' in a musical comedy is
dignified drama compared with the idiotic things I've
had to do in the thirty-centers.
"But what I hated most was the men -- the men
leering and blathering at you across tables, trying
to buy you with Wurzburger or Extra Dry, accord-
ing to their estimate of your price. And the men in
the audiences, clapping, yelling, snarling, crowding,
writhing, gloating -- like a lot of wild beasts, with
their eyes fixed on you, ready to eat you up if you
come in reach of their claws. Oh, how I hate 'em!
"Well, I'm not telling you much about myself, am
I, Lynn ?
"I had two hundred dollars saved up, and I cut
the stage the first of the summer. I went over on
Long Island and found the sweetest little village that
ever was, called Soundport, right on the water. I was
going to spend the summer there, and study up on
elocution, and try to get a class in the fall. There
was an old widow lady with a cottage near the beach
who sometimes rented a room or two just for com-
pany, and she took me in. She had another boarder,
too -- the Reverend Arthur Lyle.
"Yes, he was the head-liner. You're on, Lynn.
I'll tell you all of it in a minute. It's only a one-act
play.
"The first time he walked on, Lynn, I felt myself
going; the first lines he spoke, he had me. He was
different from the men in audiences. He was tall and
slim, and you never heard him come in the room, but
you felt him. He had a face like a picture of a knight
-- like one of that Round Table bunch -- and a voice
like a 'cello solo. And his manners!
"Lynn, if you'd take John Drew in his best draw-
ing-room scene and compare the two, you'd have John
arrested for disturbing the peace.
"I'll spare you the particulars; but in less than a
month Arthur and I were engaged. He preached at a
little one-night stand of a Methodist church. There
was to be a parsonage the size of a lunch-wagon, and
hens and honeysuckles when we were married. Ar-
thur used to preach to me a good deal about Heaven,
but be never could get my mind quite off those honey-
suckles and hens.
"No; I didn't tell him I'd been on the stage. I
hated the business and all that went with it; I'd
cut it out forever, and I didn't see any use of stirring
things up. I was a good girl, and I didn't have any-
thing to confess, except being an elocutionist, and
that was about all the strain my conscience would
stand.
"Oh, I tell you, Lynn, I was happy. I sang in
the choir and attended the sewing society, and re-
cited that 'Annie Laurie' thing with the whistling
stunt in it, 'in a manner bordering upon the profes-
sional,' as the weekly village paper reported it. And
Arthur and I went rowing, and walking in the woods,
and clamming, and that poky little village seemed to
me the best place in the world. I'd have been happy
to live there always, too, if --
"But one morning old Mrs. Gurley, the widow
lady, got gossipy while I was helping her string beans
on the back porch, and began to gush information, as
folks who rent out their rooms usually do. Mr. Lyle
was her idea of a saint on earth -- as he was mine,
too. She went over all his virtues and graces, and
wound up by telling me that Arthur had had an ex-
tremely romantic love-affair, not long before, that had
ended unhappily. She didn't seem to be on to the de-
tails, but she knew that he had been hit pretty hard.
He was paler and thinner, she said, and he had some
kind of a remembrance or keepsake of the lady in a
little rosewood box that he kept locked in his desk
drawer in his study.
"'Several times," says she, "I've seen him
gloomerin' over that box of evenings, and he always
locks it up right away if anybody comes into the
room.'
"Well, you can imagine how long it was before I
got Arthur by the wrist and led him down stage and
hissed in his ear.
"That same afternoon we were lazying around in a
boat among the water-lilies at the edge of the bay.
"'Arthur,' says I, 'you never told me you'd had
another love-affair. But Mrs. Gurley did,' I went on,
to let him know I knew. I hate to bear a man lie.
"' Before you came,' says he, looking me frankly
in the eye, 'there was a previous affection - a strong
one. Since you know of it, I will be perfectly candid
with you.'
"'I am waiting,' says I.
"'My dear Ida,' says Arthur -- of course I went
by my real name, while I was in Soundport -- 'this
former affection was a spiritual one, in fact. Al-
though the lady aroused my deepest sentiments, and
was, as I thought, my ideal woman, I never met her,
and never spoke to her. It was an ideal love. My
love for you, while no less ideal, is different. You
wouldn't let that come between us.'
"'Was she pretty?' i asked.
"' She was very beautiful,' said Arthur.
"'Did you see her often?' I asked.
"' Something like a dozen times,' says he.
"'Always from a distance?' says I.
"'Always from quite a distance,' says he.
"'And you loved her?' I asked.
"'She seemed my ideal of beauty and grace -- and
soul," says Arthur.
"'And this keepsake that you keep under lock and
key, and moon over at times, is that a remembrance
from her?'
"'A memento,' says Arthur, 'that I have
treasured.'
"'Did she send it to you?'
"'It came to me from her' says be.
"'In a roundabout way?' I asked.
"'Somewhat roundabout,' says he, 'and yet rather
direct.'
"'Why didn't you ever meet her?' I asked.
'Were your positions in life so different?'
"She was far above me,' says Arthur. 'Now,
Ida,' he goes on, 'this is all of the past. You're not
going to be jealous, are you?'
'Jealous!' says I. 'Why, man, what are you
talking about? It makes me think ten times as much
of you as I did before I knew about it.'
"And it did, Lynn - if you can understand it.
That ideal love was a new one on me, but it struck me
as being the most beautiful and glorious thing I'd
ever heard of. Think of a man loving a woman he'd
never even spoken to, and being faithful just to what
his mind and heart pictured her! Oh, it sounded
great to me. The men I'd always known come at
you with either diamonds, knock-out-drops or a raise
of salary, -- and their ideals! -- well, we'll say no
more."
"Yes, it made me think more of Arthur than I did
before. I couldn't be jealous of that far-away divin-
ity that he used to worship, for I was going to have
him myself. And I began to look upon him as a saint
on earth, just as old lady Gurley did.
"About four o'clock this afternoon a man came to
the house for Arthur to go and see somebody that was
sick among his church bunch. Old lady Gurley was
taking her afternoon snore on a couch, so that left me
pretty much alone.
"In passing by Arthur's study I looked in, and
saw his bunch of keys hanging in the drawer of his
desk, where he'd forgotten 'em. Well, I guess we're
all to the Mrs. Bluebeard now and then, ain't we,
Lynn? I made up my mind I'd have a look at that
memento he kept so secret. Not that I cared what it
was -- it was just curiosity.
"While I was opening the drawer I imagined one
or two things it might be. I thought it might be a
dried rosebud she'd dropped down to him from
a balcony, or maybe a picture of her he'd cut
out of a magazine, she being so high up in the
world.
"I opened the drawer, and there was the rosewood
casket about the size of a gent's collar box. I found
the little key in the bunch that fitted it, and unlocked
it and raised the lid.
"I took one look at that memento, and then I went
to my room and packed my trunk. I threw a few
things into my grip, gave my hair a flirt or two with
a side-comb, put on my hat, and went in and gave the
old lady's foot a kick. I'd tried awfully hard to use
proper and correct language while I was there for
Arthur's sake, and I had the habit down pat, but it
left me then.
"Stop sawing gourds," says I, "and sit up and
take notice. The ghost's about to walk. I'm going
away from here, and I owe you eight dollars. The
expressman will call for my trunk.'
"I handed her the money.
"'Dear me, Miss Crosby!' says she. 'Is any-
thing wrong? I thought you were pleased here.
Dear me, young women are so hard to understand,
and so different from what you expect 'em
to be.'
"'You're damn right,' says I. 'Some of 'em are.
But you can't say that about men. When you know
one man you know 'em all! That settles the human-
race question.'
"And then I caught the four-thirty-eight, soft-
coal unlimited; and here I am."
"You didn't tell me what was in the box, Lee," said
Miss D'armande, anxiously.
"One of those yellow silk garters that I used to
kick off my leg into the audience during that old
vaudeville swing act of mine. Is there any of the
cocktail left, Lynn?"
End
