Short Stories

Short stories from 100 Selected Stories, by O Henry
 The Gift of the Magi

 A Cosmopolite in a Café
 Between Rounds
 The Skylight Room
 A Service of Love
 The Coming-Out of Maggie
 The Cop and the Anthem
 Memoirs of a Yellow Dog
 The Love-philtre of Ikey Shoenstein
 The Furnished Room
 The Last Leaf
 The Poet and the Peasant
 A Ramble in Aphasia
 A Municipal Report
 Proof of the Pudding
O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 1
The Gift of the Magi
ONE DOLLAR AND EIGHTY-SEVEN CENTS. That was all. And sixty cents of
it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and
the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheek burned with the silent
imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted
it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing left to do but flop down on the shabby little couch
and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up
of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to
the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not
exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the look out for the
mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter box into which no letter would go, and
an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining
thereunto was a card bearing the name 'Mr. James Dillingham Young.'
The 'Dillingham' had been flung to the breeze during a former period of
prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income
was shrunk to $20, the letters of 'Dillingham' looked blurred, as though they were
thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr.
James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called 'Jim'
and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as
Della. Which is all very good.
Delia finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She
stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey fence in a
grey backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with
which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could formonths,
with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater
than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her
Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him.
Something fine and rare and sterling something just a little bit near to being worthy
of the honour of being owned by Jim.
2 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES
There was a pier glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have
seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing
his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate
conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes
were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its colour within twenty seconds.
Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which
they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's
and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in
the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window
someday to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King
Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would
have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard
from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like a
cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made it self almost a
garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she
faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red
carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of
skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out of the door and
down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: 'Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.'
One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white,
chilly, hardly looked the 'Sofronie.
'Will you buy my hair?' asked Della.
'I buy hair,' said Madame. 'Take your hat off and let's have a sight at the
looks of it.'
Down rippled the brown cascade.
'Twenty dollars,' said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
'Give it to me quick,' said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed
metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There
was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out.
It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its
value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation as all good things
should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that
it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value the description applied to
both. Twentyone dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the
87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the
time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly
on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence
and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work
repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a
tremendous task, dear friends a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close lying curls that
made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in
the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
'If Jim doesn't kill me,' she said to herself, 'before he takes a second look at
me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do, oh! what
could I do with a dollar and eightyseven cents?'
At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying pan was on the back of
the stove, hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the
corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on
the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She
had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and
now she whispered: 'Please God, make him think I am still pretty.'
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very
serious. Poor fellow, he was only twentytwo and to be burdened with a family! He
needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stepped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at
the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in
them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise,
nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared
for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
'Jim, darling,' she cried, 'don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and
sold it because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a
present. It'll grow out again - you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair
grows awfully fast. Say "Merry Christmas!" Jim, and let's be happy. You don't
know what a nice what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you.'
'You've cut off your hair?' asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at
that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labour.
'Cut it off and sold it,' said Della. 'Don't you like me just as well, anyhow?
I'm me without my hair, ain't I?'
Jim looked about the room curiously.
'You say your hair is gone?' he said with an air almost of idiocy.
'You needn't look for it,' said Della. 'It's sold, I tell you sold and gone, too.
It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my
head were numbered,' she went on with a sudden serious sweetness, 'but nobody
could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?'
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For
ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the
other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year what is the difference? A
mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought
valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated
later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
'Don't make any mistake, Dell,' he said, 'about me. I don't think there's
anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like
my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me
going awhile at first.'
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic
scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails,
necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord
of the flat.
For there lay The Combs the set of combs, side and back, that Della had
worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoiseshell,
with jewelled rims - just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were
expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over
them without the least hope of possession. And now they were hers, but the tresses
that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up
with dim eyes and a smile and say: 'My hair grows so fast, Jim!'
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, 'Oh, oh!'
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly
upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of
her bright and ardent spirit.
'Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look
at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it
looks on it.'
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under
the back of his head and smiled.
'Dell,' said he, 'let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em awhile.
They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your
combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.'
The magi, as you know, were wise men wonderfully wise men who brought
gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents.
Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of
exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the
uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed
for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of
these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all
who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest.
They are the magi.
II
A Cosmopolite in a Café
AT MIDNIGHT THE CAFÉ was crowded. By some chance the little table at which
I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at it extended their
arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons.
And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a theory
that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We hear of them, and we
see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find travellers instead of cosmopolites.
I invoke your consideration of the scene the marble topped tables, the range
of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demi state
toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art,
the sedulous and largess loving garçons, the music wisely catering to all with its
raids upon the composers; the mélange of talk and laughter and, if you will, the
Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on
its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk
that the scene was truly Parisian.
My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from
next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new 'attraction' there, he informed
me, offering kingly diversion. And then his conversation rang along parallels of
latitude and longitude. He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak,
familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino
cherry in a table-d'hôte grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the equator, he
skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high
seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar
in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lap land. Zip! Now you rode
the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an
Arkansas postoak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho
ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he would be
telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila
cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You would
haveaddressed the letter to 'E. Rushmore Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the
Universe,' and have mailed it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.
I was sure that I had at last found the one true cosmopolite since Adam, and
I listened to his world-wide discourse fearful lest I should discover in it the local
note of the mere globe trotter. But his opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was
as impartial to cities, countries and continents as the winds or gravitation.
And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with glee
of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and dedicated himself
to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is pride and rivalry between the cities
of the earth, and that 'the men that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but
cling to their cities' hem as a child to the mother's gown.' And whenever they walk
'by roaring streets unknown' they remember their native city 'most faithful, foolish,
fond; making her mere-breathed name their bond upon their bond.' And my glee
was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not
made from dust; one who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who,
if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and
the inhabitants of the Moon.
ekspression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan
by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing to me the topography
along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air
was 'Dixie,' and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth they were almost over
powered by a great clapping of hands from almost every table.
It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed
every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons of brew have been
consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all
Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés at nightfall. This applause of the 'rebel'
air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with
Spain, many years' generous mint and water-melon crops, a few long shot winners
at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and
Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society, have made the South
rather a 'fad' in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger
reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a
lady has to work now the war, you know.When 'Dixie' was being played a dark
haired young man sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and
waved frantically his soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke,
dropped into the vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.
The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us mentioned
three Wurzburgers to the waiter; the dark haired young man acknowledged his
inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I hastened to ask him a question because
I wanted to try out a theory I had.
'Would you mind telling me,' I began, 'whether you are from ' The fist of E.
Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was jarred into silence.
'Excuse me,' said he, 'but that's a question I never like to hear asked. What
does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a man by his post-office
address? Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whisky, Virginians who weren't
descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who
didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny
Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold blooded Southerners, narrow minded
Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street
to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be
a man and don't handicap him with the label of any section.'
'Pardon me,' I said, 'but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one. I know
the South, and when the band plays "Dixie" I like to observe. I have formed the
belief that the man who applauds that air with special violence and ostensible
sectional loyalty is invariably a native of either Secaucus, N.J., or the district
between Murray Hill Lyceum and the Harlem River, this city. I was about to put
my opinion to the test by inquiring of this gentleman when you interrupted with
your own larger theory, I must confess.'
And now the dark haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident
that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.
'I should like to be a periwinkle,' said he, mysteriously, 'on the top of a
valley, and sing too-ralloo-ralloo.'
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.
'I've been around the world twelve times,' said he. 'I know an Esquimau in
Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a goat herder in
Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food puzzle competition. I
pay rent on a room in
Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all the year round. I've got slippers
waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I don't have to tell 'em how to cook
my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It's a mighty little old world. What's the use
of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor-house in
the dale, or Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, or Pike's Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or
Hooligan's Flats or any place? It'll be a better world when we quit being fools about
some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be
born there.'
'You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,' I said admiringly. 'But it also seems

that you would decry patriotism.'
'A relic of the stone age,' declared Coglan warmly. 'We are all brothers -
Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians, and the people in the bend of the Kaw
River. Someday all this petty pride in one's city or state or section or country will
be wiped out, and we'll all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be.'
'But while you are wandering in foreign lands,' I persisted, 'do not your
thoughts revert to some spot - some dear and - '
'Nary a spot,' interrupted E. R. Coglan flippantly. 'The terrestrial, globular,
planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and known as the Earth, is
my abode. I've met a good many object bound citizens of this country abroad. I've
seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag
about their drainage canal. I've seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King
of England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his
grandaunt on his mother's side was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of
Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some
Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money and he came back to Kabul
with the agent. "Afghanistan?" the natives said to him through an interpreter. "Well,
not so slow, do you think?" "Oh, I don't know," says he, and he begins to tell them
about a cab-driver at Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don't suit me. I'm
not tied down to anything that isn't 8,000 miles in diameter. Just put me down as E.
Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere.'
My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought that he saw
someone through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I was left with the
would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Würzburger without further ability to
voice his aspirations to perch, melodious, upon the summit of a valley.
I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering how the poet
had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and I believed in him. How was
it? 'The men that breed from them they traffic up and down, but cling to their cities'
hem as a child to the mother's gown.'
Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his.
My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and conflict in
another part of the café. I saw above the heads of the seated patrons E. Rushmore
Coglan and a stranger to me engaged in terrific battle. They fought between the
tables like Titans, and glasses crashed, and men caught their hats up and were
knocked down, and a brunette screamed, and a blonde began to sing 'Teasing.'
My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the Earth when
the waiters closed in on both combatants with their famous flying wedge formation
and bore them outside, still resisting.
I called McCarthy, one of the French garçons, and asked him the cause of
the conflict.
'The man with the red tie' (that was my cosmopolite), said he, 'got hot on
account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supply of the place he
come from by the other guy.'
'Why,' said I, bewildered, 'that man is a citizen of the world a cosmopolite.
He '
'Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said,' continued McCarthy, 'and
he wouldn't stand for no knockin' the place.'
III
Between Round
THE MAY MOON SHONE BRIGHT upon the private boarding-house of Mrs.
Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of territory will be discovered
upon which its rays also fell. Spring was in its heyday, with hay fever soon to
follow. The parks were green with new leaves and buyers for the Western and
Southern trade. Flowers and summer resort agents were blowing; the air and
answers to Lawson were growing milder; hand organs, fountains and pinochle were
playing everywhere.
The windows of Mrs. Murphy's boarding house were open. A group of
boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like German pancakes.
In one of the second floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey awaited her
husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went into Mrs. McCaskey.
At nine Mr. McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and his pipe in
his teeth; and he apologized for disturbing the boarders on the steps as he selected
spots of stone between them on which to set his size 9, width Ds.
As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise. Instead of the
usual stove lid or potato masher for him to dodge, came only words.
Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened the breast
of his spouse.
'I heard ye,' came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. 'Ye can apollygize to
riff-raff of the streets for settin' yer unhandy feet on the tails of their frocks, but ye'd
walk on the neck of yer wife the length of a clothes line without so much as a "Kiss
me fut," and I'm sure, it's that long from rubberin' out the windy for ye and the
victuals cold such as there's money to buy after drinkin' up yer wages at Gallegher's
every Saturday evenin', and the gas man here twice to day for his.'
'Woman!' said Mr. McCaskey, dashing his coat and hat upon a chair, 'the
noise of ye is an insult to me appetite. When ye run down politeness ye take the
mortar from between the bricks of the foundations of society. 'This no more than
exercisin' the acrimony of a gentleman when ye ask the dissent of ladies blockin'
the way for steppin' between them. Will ye bring the pig's face of ye out of the
windy and see to the food?'
Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily and went to the stove. There was something
in her manner that warned Mr. McCaskey. When the corners of her mouth went
down suddenly like a barometer it usually foretold a fall of crockery and tinware.
'Pig's face, is it?' said Mrs. McCaskey, and hurled a stewpan full of bacon
and turnips at her lord.
Mr. McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what should follow the
entree. On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, garnished with shamrocks. He
retorted with this, and drew the appropriate return of a bread pudding in an earthen
dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese accurately thrown by her husband struck Mrs.
McCaskey below one eye. When she replied with a well aimed coffee pot full of a
hot, black, semi fragrant liquid the battle, according to courses, should have ended.
But Mr. McCaskey was no 50 cent table d'hôter. Let cheap Bohemians
consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make that faux pas. He was foxier
still. Finger bowls were not beyond the compass of his experience. They were not
to be had in the Pension Murphy; but their equivalent was at hand. Triumphantly
he sent the granite-ware wash-basin at the head of his matrimonial adversary. Mrs.
McCaskey dodged in time. She reached for a flat-iron, with which, as a sort of
cordial, she hoped to bring the gastronomical duel to a close. But a loud, wailing
scream downstairs caused both her and Mr. McCaskey to pause in a sort of
involuntary armistice.
On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman Cleary was standing
with one ear upturned, listening to the crash of household utensils.
' This Jawn McCaskey and his missus at it again,' meditated the policeman.
'I wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will not. Married folks they are; and few
pleasures they have. 'Twill not last long. Sure, they'll have to borrow more dishes
to keep it up with.'
And just then came the loud scream below stairs, betokening fear or dire
extremity. ' 'Tis probably the cat,' said Policeman Cleary, and walked hastily in the
other direction.
The boarders on the steps were fluttered. Mr. Toomey, an insurance solicitor
by birth and an investigator by profession, went inside to analyse the scream. He
returned with the news that Mrs. Murphy's little boy Mike was lost. Following the
messenger, out bounced Mrs. Murphy - two hundred pounds in tears and hysterics,
clutching the air and howling to the sky for the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and
mischief. Bathos, truly; but Mr. Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy,
milliner, and their hands came together in sympathy. The two old maids,
MissesWalsh, who complained every day about the noise in the halls, inquired
immediately if anybody had looked behind the clock.
Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose and buttoned his
coat. 'The little one lost?' he exclaimed. 'I will scour the city.' His wife never
allowed him out after dark. But now she said: 'Go, Ludovic!' in a baritone voice.
'Whoever can look upon that mother's grief without springing to her relief has a
heart of stone.' 'Give me some thirty or - sixty cents, my love,' said the Major. 'Lost
children sometimes stray far. I may need car-fares.'
Old man Denny, hall-room, fourth floor back, who sat on the lowest step,
trying to read a paper by the street lamp, turned over a page to follow up the article
about the carpenters' strike. Mrs. Murphy shrieked to the moon: 'Oh, ar-r-Mike, f'r
Gawd's sake, where is me little bit av a boy?' 'When'd ye see him last?' asked old
man Denny, with one eye on the report of the Building Trades League.
'Oh,' wailed Mrs. Murphy,.' 'twas yisterday, or maybe four hours ago! I
dunno. But it's lost he is, me little boy Mike. He was playin' on the sidewalk only
this mornin' - or was it Wednesday? I'm that busy with work 'tis hard to keep up
with dates. But I've looked the house over from top to cellar, and it's gone he is.
Oh, for the love av Hiven - '
Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers. They
call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom; they compare
its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the
lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would
have been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence. We would call no one a lobster
without good and sufficient claws.
No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as does the straying
of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain and feeble; the ways are so steep and
strange.
Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue into Billy's
place. 'Gimme a rye-high,' he said to the servitor. 'Haven't seen a bow-legged, dirty-
faced little devil of a six-yearold lost kid around here anywhere, have you?'
Mr. Toomey retained Miss Purdy's hand on the steps. 'Think of that dear
little babe,' said Miss Purdy, 'lost from his mother's side - perhaps already fallen
beneath the iron hoofs of galloping steeds - oh, isn't it dreadful?'
'Ain't that right?' agreed Mr. Toomey, squeezing her hand. 'Say I start out
and help look for um!'
'Perhaps,' said Miss Purdy, 'you should. But oh, Mr. Toomey, you are so
dashing so reckless suppose in your enthusiasm some accident should befall you,
then what - '
Old man Denny read on about the arbitration agreement, with one finger on
the lines.
In the second floor front Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey came to the window to
recover their second wind. Mr. McCaskey was scooping turnips out of his vest with
a crooked forefinger, and his lady was wiping an eye that the salt of the roast pork
had not benefited. They heard the outcry below, and thrust their heads out of the
window.
' 'This little Mike is lost,' said Mrs. McCaskey in a hushed voice, 'the
beautiful, little, trouble making angel of a gossoon!'
'The bit of a boy mislaid?' said Mr. McCaskey leaning out of the window.
'Why, now, that's bad enough, entirely. The childer, they be different. If 'twas a
woman I'd be willin', for they leave peace behind 'em when they go.'
Disregarding the thrust, Mrs. McCaskey caught her husband's arm.
'Jawn,' she said sentimentally, 'Missis Murphy's little bye is lost. 'Tis a great
city for losing little boys. Six years old he was. Jawn, 'tis the same age our little bye
would have been if we had had one six years ago.'
'We never did,' said Mr. McCaskey, lingering with the fact.
'But if we had, Jawn, think what sorrow would be in our hearts this night,
with our little Phelan run away and stolen in the city nowheres at all.'
'Ye talk foolishness,' said Mr. McCaskey. ' 'This Pat he would be named,
after me old father in Cantrim.'
'Ye lie!' said Mrs. McCaskey, without anger. 'Me brother was worth tin
dozen bog trotting McCaskeys. After him would the bye be named.' She leaned
over the window-sill and looked down at the hurrying and bustle below.
'Jawn,' said Mrs. McCaskey softly, 'I'm sorry I was hasty wid ye.'
' 'Twas hasty puddin', as ye say,' said her husband, 'and hurry up turnips and
get a move on your coffee. 'That was what we could call a quick lunch, all right,
and tell no lie.'
Mrs. McCaskey slipped her arm inside her husband's and took his rough
hand in hers.
'Listen at the cryin' of poor Mrs. Murphy,' she said. ' 'Tis an awful thing for
a bit of a bye to be lost in this great big city. If 'twas our little Phelan, Jawn, I'd be
breakin' me heart.'
Awkwardly Mr. McCaskey withdrew his hand. But he laid it around the
nearing shoulders of his wife.
' 'This foolishness, of course,' said he, roughly, 'but I'd be cut up some
myself, if our little Pet was kidnapped or anything. But there never was any
children for us. Sometimes I've been ugly and hard with you, Judy. Forget it.'
They leaned together, and looked down at the heart drama being acted
below.
Long they sat thus. People surged along the sidewalk,crowding,
questioning, filling the air with rumours and inconsequent surmises. Mrs. Murphy
ploughed back and forth in their midst, like a soft mountain down which plunged
an audible cataract of tears. Couriers came and went.
Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the boarding-
house.
'What's up now, Judy?' asked Mr. McCaskey.
' 'This Missis Murphy's voice,' said Mrs. McCaskey, harking. 'She says she's
after finding little Mike asleep behind the roll of old linoleum under the bed in her
room.'
Mr. McCaskey laughed loudly.
'That's your Phelan,' he shouted sardonically, 'Devil a bit would a pet have
done that trick if the by we never had is strayed and stole, by the powers, call him
Phelan, and see him hide out under the bed like a mangy pup.'
Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily, and went toward the dish closet, with the
corners of her mouth drawn down.
Policeman Cleary came back around the corner as the crowd dispersed.
Surprised, he upturned an ear toward the McCaskey apartment where the crash of
irons and chinaware and the ring of hurled kitchen utensils seemed as loud as
before. Policeman Cleary took out his timepiece.
'By the deported snakes!' he exclaimed, 'Jawn McCaskey and his lady have
been fightin' for an hour and a quarter by the watch. The missis could give him forty
pounds weight. Strength to his arm.'
Policeman cleary strolled back around the corner.
Old man denny folded his papper and hurried up the steps just as Mrs.
Murphy was about to lock the door for the night.
IV
The Skylight Room
First Mrs. Parker would show you the double parlours. You would not dare
to interrupt her description of their advantages and of the merits of the gentleman
who had occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth
the confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker's manner of
receiving the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain the same
feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up in one of the
professions that fitted Mrs. Parker's parlours.
Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second floor back
at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the $12 that Mr.
Toosenberry always paid for it until he left to take charge of his brother's orange
plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent the
winters that had the double front room with private bath, you managed to babble
that you wanted something still cheaper.
If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to look at Mr. Skidder's
large hall room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder's room was not vacant. He wrote
plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long. But every room hunter was made to
visit his room to admire the lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the
fright caused by possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.
Then oh, then if you still stood on one foot with your hot hand clutching
the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely proclaimed your hideous and
culpable poverty, never more would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would
honk loudly the word 'Clara,' she would show you her back, and march downstairs.
Then Clara, the coloured maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served
for the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7 by 8 feet of
floorspace at the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber closet or
store room.
In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the dresser. Its
four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coin. Your hand
crept to your throat, you gasped, you looked up as from a well and breathed once
more. Through the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity.
'Two dollars, suh,' Clara would say in her half contemptuous, half
Tuskegeenial tones.
One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter
made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She was a very little girl, with
eyes and hair that kept on growing after she had stopped and that always looked as
if they were saying: 'Goodness me. Why didn't you keep up with us?'
Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. 'In this closet,' she said, 'one
could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal . '
'But I am neither a doctor not a dentist,' said Miss Leeson with a shiver.
Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she
kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and let the way to the
second floor back.
'Eight dollars?' said Miss Leeson. 'Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I do look green.
I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me something higher and lower.'
Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap on
his door.
'Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,' said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's smile at his
pale looks. 'I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your
lambrequins.'
'They're too lovely for anything,' said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly the
way the angels do.
After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall, black haired
heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and inserting a small, roguish one with
heavy, bright hair and vivacious features.
'Anna Held'll jump at it,' said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up
against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial
cuttlefish.
Presently the tocsin call of 'Clara!' sounded to the world the state of Miss
Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her
into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and
cabalistic words 'Two dollars!'
'I'll take it!' sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron bed.
Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers
with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter. Sometimes she had
no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the
other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a skylight room when the plans
were drawn for her creation. She was guy hearted and full of tender, whimsical
fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished)
comedy, 'It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway.'
There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson
had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde
who taught in a public school and said 'Well, really!' to everything you said, sat on
the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney
every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed.
Miss Leeson sat on the middle step, and the men would quickly group around her.
Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a
private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And especially Mr. Hoover, who
was forty-five, fat, flushed and foolish. And especially very young Mr. Evans, who
set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men
voted her 'the funniest and jolliest ever,' but the sniffs on the top step and the lower
step were implacable.
• • • •
I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and drops
an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of
tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have
rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo's rickety ribs to the
ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat
men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52inch belt. Avaunt,
Hoover! Hoover, fortyfive, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself;
Hoover, fourtyfive, flush, foolish and fat, is meat for perdition. There was never a
chance for you, Hoover.
As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss Leeson
looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:
'Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too.'
All looked up - some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for
an airship, Jackson-guided
'It's that star,' explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. 'Not the
big one that twinkles - the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through
my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson.''Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'I didn't
know you were an astronomer, Miss Leeson.'
'Oh, yes,' said the small star-gazer, 'I know as much as any of them about
the style of sleeves they're going to wear next fall in Mars.'
'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'The star you refer to is Gamma, of the
constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude, and its meridian
passage is - '
'Oh,' said the very young Mr. Evans, 'I think Billy Jackson is a much better
name for it.
'Same here,' said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss
Longnecker. 'I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as any of
those old astrologers had.'
'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker.
'I wonder whether it's a shooting star,' remarked Miss Dorn. 'I hit nine ducks
and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday.'
'He doesn't show up very well from down here,' said Miss Leeson. 'You
ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the daytime
from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of a coal-mine, and it
makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono
with.'
There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no for midable
papers home to copy. And when she went in the morning, instead of working, she
went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals
transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.
There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop at the
hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But she had had
no dinner.
As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance. He
asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche. She
dodged, and caught the balustrade. He tried for her hand, and she raised it and smote
him weakly in the face. Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing.
She passed Mr. Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle
Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to 'pirouette across stage from
L to the side of the Count.' Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened
the door of the skylight room.
She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the iron cot,
her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in that Erebus of a room
she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled
For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant
through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of
blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she had so
whimsically, and oh, so in effectually, named. Miss Longnecker must be right; it
was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she
could not let it be Gamma.
As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she
got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson.
Her arm fell back limply.
'Goodbye, Billy,' she murmured faintly. 'You're millions of miles away and
you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time
up there when there wasn't anything else but darkness to look at, didn't you? . . .
Millions of miles. . . . Good-bye, Billy Jackson.'
Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at ten the next day, and they
forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and even burnt feathers, proving
of no avail, someone ran to 'phone for an ambulance.
In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the
capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident, with his
smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps.
'Ambulance call to 49,' he said briefly. 'What's the trouble?'
'Oh yes, doctor,' sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there should
be trouble in the house was the greater. 'I can't think what can be the matter with
her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It's a young woman, a Miss Elsie -
yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never before in my house - '
'What room?' cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker was
a stranger.
'The skylight room. It . '
Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of skylight
rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker followed slowly, as
her dignity demanded.
On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in his
arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue, not loudly.
Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail. Ever
afterwards there remained crumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her curious
roomers would ask her what the doctor said to her.
'Let that be,' she would answer. 'If I can get forgiveness for having heard it
I will be satisfied.'
The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of hounds
that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along the sidewalk abashed,
for his face was that of one who bears his own dead.
They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in the
ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was: 'Drive like h - l,
Wilson,' to the driver.
That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw a little news item,
and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me) to weld the incidents
together.
It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who
had been removed from No. 49 East - Street, suffering from debility induced by
starvation. It concluded with these words:
'Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case, says
the patient will recover.'
A Service of Love
WHEN ONE LOVES ONES ART no service seems too hard.

That is our promise. This story shall draw a conclusion from it, and show at the
same time that the premise is incorrect. That will be a new thing in logic, and a feat
in story telling some what older than the Great Wall of China.
Joe Larrabee came out of the post oak flats of the Middle West pulsing with
a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a picture of the town pump with a
prominent citizen passing it hastily. This effort was framed and hung in the drug
store window by the side of the ear of corn with an uneven number of rows. At
twenty he left for New York with a flowing necktie and a capital tied up somewhat
closer.
Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a pine tree
village in the South that her relatives chipped in enough in her chip hat for her to
go 'North' and 'finish.' They could not see her f -, but that is our story.
Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music students
had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, Rembrandt's works pictures,
Waldteufel, wall-paper, Chopin, and Oolong.
Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other or each of the other, as
you please, and in a short time were married for (see above), when one loves one's
Art no service seem too hard.
Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a lonesome flat
- something like the A sharp way down at the lefthand end of the keyboard. And
they were happy; for they had their Art and they had each other. And my advice to
the rich young man would be - sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor - janitor for
the privilege of living in a flat with your Art and your Delia.
Flat dwellers shall endorse my dictum that theirs is the only true happiness.
If a home is happy it cannot fit too close let the dresser collapse and become a
billiard table,let the mantel turn to a rowing machine, the escritoire to a spare
bedchamber, the washstand to an upright piano, let the four walls come together, if
they will, so you and your Delia are between. But if home be the other kind, let it
be wide and long enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras, your
cape on Cape Horn, and go out by Labrador.
Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister ,you know his fame. His
fees are high, his lessons are light,his high lights have brought him renown. Delia
was studying under Rosenstock - you know his repute as a disturber of the piano
keys.
They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is every - but I
will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and defined. Joe was to become
capable very soon of turning out pictures that old gentlemen with thin side-whiskers
and thick pocket books would sandbag one another in his studio for the privilege
of buying. Delia was to become familiar and then contemptuous with Music, so that
when she saw the orchestra seats and boxes unsold she could have sore throat and
lobster in a private dining-room and refuse to go on the stage.
But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat the ardent,
voluble chats after the day's study, the cosy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts, the
interchange of ambitions - ambitions interwoven each with the other's or else
inconsiderable the mutual help and inspiration,and overlook my artlessness stuffed
olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 p.m.
But after awhile Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some switchman
doesn't flag it. Everything going out and nothing coming in, as the vulgarians say.
Money was lacking to pay Mr. Magister and Herr Rosenstock their prices. When
one loves one's Art no service seems too hard. So, Delia said she must give music
lessons to keep the chafing dish bubbling.
For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils. One evening she
came home elated.
'Joe, dear,' she said gleefully, 'I've a pupil. And, oh, the loveliest people!
General. General A. B. Pinkney's daughter on Seventyfirst Street. Such a splendid
house, Joe you ought to see the front door! Byzantine I think you would call it.
And inside! Oh, Joe, I never saw anything like it before.
'My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already. She's a
delicate thing - dresses always in white; and the sweetest, simplest manners! Only
eighteen years old. I'm to give three lessons a week; and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson.
I don't mind it a bit; for when I get two or three more pupils I can resume my lessons
with Herr Rosenstock. Now, smooth out that wrinkle between your brows, dear,
and let's have a nice supper.'
'That's all right for you, Dele,' said Joe, attacking a can of peas with a
carving knife and a hatchet, 'but how about me? Do you think I'm going to let you
hustle for wages while I philander in the regions of high art? Not by the bones of
Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a
dollar or two.'
Delia came and hung about his neck.'Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at
your studies. It is not as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else.
While I teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily as
millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn't think of leaving Mr. Magister.'
'All right,' said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish. 'But I hate for
you to be giving lessons. It isn't Art. But you're a trump and a dear to do it.'
'When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard,' said Delia.
'Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,' said Joe. 'And
Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I may sell one if
the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.'
'I'm sure you will,' said Delia sweetly. 'And now let's be thankful for General
Pinkney and this veal roast.'
During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe was
enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in Central Park, and
Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised, and kissed at seven o'clock. Art
is an engaging mistress. It was most times seven o'clock when he returned in the
evening.
At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid, triumphantly
tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8 by 10 (inches) centre table of the 8 by 10 (feet)
flat parlour.
'Sometimes,' she said, a little wearily, 'Clementina tries me. I'm afraid she
doesn't practise enough, and I have to tell her the same things so often. And then
she always dresses entirely in white, and that does get monotonous. But General
Pinkney is the dearest old man! I wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in
sometimes when I am with Clementina at the piano - he is a widower, you know -
and stands there pulling his white goatee. "And how are the semiquavers and the
demi-semiquavers progressing?" he always asks.
'I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, Joe! And those
Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina has such a funny little cough. I hope she
is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am getting attached to her, she is so gentle
and high bred. General Pinkney's brother was once Minister to Bolivia.'
And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a five, a two
and a one - all legal tender notes - and laid them beside Delia's earnings.
'Sold that water colour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,' he announced
overwhelmingly.
'Don't joke with me,' said Delia - 'not from Peoria!'
'All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen
muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle's window and thought it
was a windmill at first. He was game, though, and bought it anyhow. He ordered
another - an oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight depot - to take back with him.
Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.'
'I'm so glad you've kept on,' said Delia heartily. 'You're bound to win, dear.
Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend before. We'll have oysters to-
night.'
'And filet mignon with champignons,' said Joe. 'Where is the olive fork?'
On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his $18 on
the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of dark paint from his
hands.
Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless bundle
of wraps and bandages.
'How is this?' asked Joe after the usual greetings.
Delia laughed, but not very joyously.
'Clementina,' she explained, 'insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her lesson.
She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at five in the afternoon. The General was
there. You should have seen him run for the chafing dish, Joe, just as if there wasn't
a servant in the house. I know Clementina isn't in good health; she is so nervous. In
serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist.
It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But General Pinkney! - Joe,
that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody -
they said the furnace man or somebody in the basement - out to a drug store for
some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesn't hurt so much now.'
'What's this?' asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some white
strands beneath the bandages.
'It's something soft,' said Delia, 'that had oil on it.
Oh, Joe, did you sell another sketch?' She had seen the money on the table.
'Did I?' said Joe. 'Just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot to-day, and
he isn't sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a view on the Hudson.
What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?'
'Five o'clock, I think,' said Dele plaintively. 'The iron I mean the rabbit
came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen General Pinkney, Joe,
when - '
'Sit down here a moment, Dele,' said Joe. He drew her to the couch, sat
down beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.
'What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?' he asked.
She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and stubbornness,
and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of General Pinkney; but at length down
went her head and out came the truth and tears.
'I couldn't get any pupils,' she confessed. 'And I couldn't bear to have you
give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big Twenty-fourth Street
laundry. And I think I did very well to make up both General Pinkney and
Clementina, don't you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on
my hand this afternoon I was all the way home making up that story about the
Welsh rabbit. You're not angry are you, Joe? And if I hadn't got the work you
mightn't have sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.'
'He wasn't from Peoria,' said Joe slowly.
'Well, it doesn't matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe - and -
kiss me, Joe - and what made you ever suspect that I wasn't giving music lessons
to Clementina?'
'I didn't,' said Joe, 'until to-night. And I wouldn't have then, only I sent up
this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon for a girl upstairs who
had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron. I've been firing the engine in that
laundry for the last two weeks.'
'And then you didn't - '
'My purchaser from Peoria,' said Joe, 'and General Pinkney are both
creations of the same art - but you wouldn't call it either painting or music.
And then they both laughed, and Joe began:
'When one loves one's Art no service seems - '
But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. 'No,' she said 'just "When
one loves." '
VI
The Coming out of Maggi
Every Saturday night the Clover Leaf Social Club gave a hop in the hall of
the Give and Take Athletic Association on the East Side. In order to attend one of
these dances you must be a member of the Give and Take, or if you belong to the
division that starts off with the right foot in waltzing, you must work in Rhinegold's
paper box factory. Still, any Clover Leaf was privileged to escort or be escorted by
an outsider to a single dance. But mostly each Give and Take brought the paper box
girl that he affected, and few strangers could boast of having shaken a foot at the
regular hops.
Maggie Toole, on account of her dull eyes, broad mouth and left handed
style of footwork in the two step, went to the dances with Anna McCarty and her
'fellow.' Anna and Maggie worked side by side in the factory, and were the greatest
chums ever. So Anna always made Jimmy Burns take her by Maggie's house every
Saturday night so that her friend could go to the dance with them.
The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of
the association in Orchard Street was fitted out with muscle making inventions.
With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and
rival social and athletic organizations in joyous combat. Between these more
serious occupations the Saturday night hops with the paper-box factory girls came
as a refining influence and as an efficient screen. For sometimes the tip went 'round,
and if you were among the elect that tiptoed up the dark back stairway you might
see as neat and satisfying a little welter-weight affair to a finish as ever happened
inside the ropes.
On Saturdays Rhinegold's paper-box factory closed at 3 p.m. On one such
afternoon Anna and Maggie walked homeward together. At Maggie's door Anna
said, as usual: 'Be ready at seven, sharp, Mag; and Jimmy and me'll come by for
you.'
But what was this? Instead of the customary humble and grateful thanks
from the non-escorted one there was to be perceived a high-poised head, a prideful
dimpling at the corners of a broad mouth, and almost a sparkle in a dull brown eye.
'Thanks, Anna,' said Maggie; 'but you and Jimmy needn't bother to-night.
I've a gentleman friend that's coming 'round to escort me to the hop.'
The comely Anna pounced upon her friend, shook her, chided and
beseeched her. Maggie Toole catch a fellow! Plain, dear, loyal,unattractive Maggie,
so sweet as a chum, so unsought for a two step or a moonlit bench in the little park.
How was it? When did it happen? Who was it?
'You'll see tonight,' said Maggie, flushed with the wine of the first grapes
she had gathered in Cupid's vineyard. 'He's swell all right. He's two inches taller
than Jimmy, and an up to date dresser. I'll introduce him, Anna, just as soon as we
get to the hall.'
Anna and Jimmy were among the first Clover Leafs to arrive that evening.
Anna's eyes were brightly fixed upon the door of the hall to catch the first glimpse
of her friend's 'catch.'
At 8.30 Miss Toole swept into the hall with her escort. Quickly her
triumphant eye discovered her chum under the wing of her faithful Jimmy.
'Oh, gee!' cried Anna, 'Mag ain't made a hit - oh, no! Swell fellow? Well, I
guess! Style? Look at 'um.'
'Go as far as you like,' said Jimmy, with sandpaper in his voice. 'Cop him
out if you want him. These new guys always win out with the push. Don't mind me.
He don't squeeze all the limes, I guess. Huh!'
'Shut up, Jimmy. You know what I mean. I'm glad for Mag. First fellow she
ever had. Oh, here they come.'
Across the floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht convoyed by a stately
cruiser. And truly, her companion justified the encomiums of the faithful chum. He
stood two inches taller than the average Give and Take athlete; his dark hair curled;
his eyes and his teeth flashed whenever he bestowed his frequent smiles. The young
men of the Clover Leaf Club pinned not their faith to the graces of person as much
as they did to its prowess, its achievements in hand-to-hand conflicts, and its
preservation from the legal duress that constantly menaced it. The member of the
association who would bind a paper-box maiden to his conquering chariot scorned
to employ Beau Brummel airs. They were not considered honourable methods of
warfare. The swelling biceps, the coat straining at its buttons over the chest, the air
of conscious conviction of the super-eminence of the male in the cosmogony of
creation, even a calm display of bow legs as subduing and enchanting agents in the
gentle tourneys of Cupid - these were the approved arms and ammunition of the
Clover Leaf gallants. They viewed, then, the genuflexions and alluring poses of this
visitor with their chins at a new angle.
'A friend of mine, Mr. Terry O'Sullivan,' was Maggie's formula of

introduction. She led him around the room, presenting him to each new-arriving
Clover Leaf. Almost was she pretty now, with the unique luminosity in her eyes
that comes to a girl with her first suitor and a kitten with its first mouse.
'Maggie Toole's got a fellow at last,' was the word that went round among
the paper-box girls. 'Pipe Mag's floor-walker' - thus the Give and Takes expressed
their indifferent contempt.
Usually at the weekly hops Maggie kept a spot on the wall warm with her
back. She felt and showed so much gratitude whenever a self-sacrificing partner
invited her to dance that his pleasure was cheapened and diminished. She had even
grown used to noticing Anna joggle the reluctant Jimmy with her elbow as a signal
for him to invite her chum to walk over his feet through a two-step.
But tonight the pumpkin had turned to a coach and six. Terry O'Sullivan
was a victorious Prince Charming, and Maggie Toole winged her first butterfly
flight. And though our tropes of fairyland be mixed with those of entomology they
shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from the rose-crowned melody of Maggie's one
perfect night.
The girls besieged her for introductions to her 'fellow.' The Clover Leaf
young men, after two years of blindness, suddenly perceived charms in Miss Toole.
They flexed their compelling muscles before her and bespoke her for the dance.
Thus she scored; but to Terry O'Sullivan the honours of the evening fell
thick and fast. He shook his curls; he smiled and went easily through the seven
motions for acquiring grace in your own room before an open window ten minutes
each day. He danced like a faun; he introduced manner and style and atmosphere;
his words came trippingly upon his tongue, and - he waltzed twice in succession
with the paper-box girl that Dempsey Donovan brought.
Dempsey was the leader of the association. He wore a dress suit, and could
chin the bar twice with one hand. He was one of 'Big Mike' O'Sullivan's lieutenants,
and was never troubled by trouble. No cop dared to arrest him. Whenever he broke
a push cart man's head or shot a member of the Heinrick B.Sweeney Outing and
Literary Association in the kneecap, an officer would drop around and say:
'The Cap'n'd like to see ye a few minutes round to the office whin ye have
time, Dempsey, me boy.'
But there would be sundry gentlemen there with large gold fob chains and
black cigars; and somebody would tell a funny story, and then Dempsey would go
back and work half an hour with the six-pound dumb bells. So, doing a tight rope
act on a wire stretched across Niagara was a safe terpsichorean performance

compared with waltzing twice with Dempsey Donovan's paper box girl. At ten
o'clock the jolly round face of 'Big Mike' O'Sullivan shone at the door for five
minutes upon the scene. He always looked in for five minutes, smiled at the girls
and handed out real perfectos to the delighted boys.
Dempsey Donovan was at his elbow instantly, talking rapidly. 'Big Mike'
looked carefully at the dancers, smiled, shook his head and departed.
The music stopped. The dancers scattered to the chairs along the walls.
Terry O'Sullivan, with his entrancing bow, relinquished a pretty girl in blue to her
partner and started back to find Maggie. Dempsey intercepted him in the middle of
the floor.
Some fine instinct that Rome must have bequeathed to us caused nearly
every one to turn and look at them - there was a subtle feeling that two gladiators
had met in the arena. Two or three Give and Takes with tight coat-sleeves drew
nearer.
'One moment, Mr. O'Sullivan,' said Dempsey. 'I hope you're enjoying
yourself. Where did you say you lived?
The two gladiators were well matched. Dempsey had, perhaps, ten pounds
of weight to give away. The O'Sullivan had breadth with quickness. Dempsey had
a glacial eye, a dominating slit of a mouth, an indestructible jaw, a complexion like
a belle's and the coolness of a champion. The visitor showed more fire in his
contempt and less control over his conspicuous sneer. They were enemies by the
law written when the rocks were molten. They were each too splendid, too mighty,
too incomparable to divide preeminence. One only must survive.
'I live on Grand,' said O'Sullivan insolently; 'and no trouble to find me at
home. Where do you live?'
Dempsey ignored the question.
'You say your name's O'Sullivan,' he went on. 'Well, "Big Mike" says he
never saw you before.'
'Lots of things he never saw,' said the favourite of the hop.
'As a rule,' went on Dempsey, huskily sweet, 'O'Sullivans in this district
know one another. You escorted one of our lady members here, and we want a
chance to make good. If you've got a family tree let's see a few historical O'Sullivan
buds come out on it. Or do you want us to dig it out of you by the roots?'
'Suppose you mind your own business,' suggested O'Sullivan blandly.
Dempsey's eyes brightened. He held up an inspired fore finger as though a

brilliant idea had struck him.
'I've got it now,' he said cordially. 'It was just a little mistake. You ain't no
O'Sullivan. You are a ring tailed monkey. Excuse us for not recognizing you at
first.'
O'Sullivan's eye flashed. He made a quick movement, but Andy Geoghan
was ready and caught his arm.
Dempsey nodded at Andy and William McMahan, the secretary of the club,
and walked rapidly toward a door at the rear of the hall. Two other members of the
Give and Take Association swiftly joined the little group. Terry O'Sullivan was
now in the hands of the Board of Rules and Social Referees. They spoke to him
briefly and softly, and conducted him out through the same door at the rear.
This movement on the part of the Clover Leaf members requires a word of
elucidation. Back of the association hall was a smaller room rented by the club. In
this room personal difficulties that arose on the ballroom floor were settled, man to
man, with the weapons of nature, under the supervision of the Board. No lady could
say that she had witnessed a fight at a Clover Leaf hop in several years. Its
gentlemen members guaranteed that.
So easily and smoothly had Dempsey and the Board done their preliminary
work that many in the hall had not noticed the checking of the fascinating
O'Sullivan's social triumph. Among these was Maggie. She looked about for her
escort.
'Smoke up!' said Rose Cassidy. 'Wasn't you on? Demps Donovan picked a
scrap with your Lizzie-boy, and they've waltzed out to the slaughter room with him.
How's my hair look done up this way, Mag?'
Maggie laid a hand on the bosom of her cheesecloth waist.
'Gone to fight with Dempsey!' she said breathlessly. 'They've got to be
stopped. Dempsey Donovan can't fight him. Why, he'll kill him!'
'Ah, what do you care?' said Rosa. 'Don't some of 'em fight every hop?'
But Maggie was off, darting her zigzag way through the maze of dancers.
She burst through the rear door into the dark hall and then threw her solid shoulder
against the door of the room of single combat. It gave way, and in the instant that
she entered her eye caught the scene the Board standing about with open watches;
Dempsey Donovan in his shirt-sleeves dancing, lightfooted, with the wary grace of
the modern pugilist, within easy reach of his adversary; Terry O'Sullivan standing
with arm folded and a murderous look in his dark eyes. And without slacking the
speed of her entrance she leaped forward with a scream leaped in time to catch and
hang upon the arm of O'Sullivan that was suddenly uplifted, and to whisk from it
the long, bright stiletto that he had drawn from his bosom.
The knife fell and rang upon the floor. Cold steel drawn in the rooms of the
Give and Take Association! Such a thing had never happened before. Every one
stood motionless for a minute. Andy Geoghan kicked the stiletto with the toe of his
shoe curiously, like an antiquarian who has come upon some ancient weapon
unknown to his learning.
And then O'Sullivan hissed something unintelligible between his teeth.
Dempsey and the Board exchanged looks. And then Dempsey looked at O'Sullivan
without anger as one looks at a stray dog, and nodded his head in the direction of
the door.
'The back stairs, Giuseppi,' he said briefly. 'Somebody'll pitch your hat
down after you.'
Maggie walked up to Dempsey Donovan. There was a brilliant spot of red
in her cheeks, down which slow tears were running. But she looked him bravely in
the eye.
'I knew it, Dempsey,' she said, as her eyes grew dull even in their tears. 'I
knew he was a Guinea. His name's Tony Spinelli. I hurried in when they told me
you and him was scrappin'. Them Guineas always carries knives. But you don't
understand, Dempsey. I never had a fellow in my life. I got tired of comin' with
Anna and Jimmy every night, so I fixed it with him to call himself O'Sullivan, and
brought him along. I knew there'd be nothin' doin' for him if he came as a Dago. I
guess I'll resign from the club now.'
Dempsey turned to Andy Geoghan.
'Chuck that cheese slicer out of the window,' he said, 'and tell 'em inside that
Mr. O'Sullivan has had a telephone message to go down to Tammany Hall.'
And then he turned back to Maggie. 'Say, Mag,' he said, 'I'll see you home.
And how about next Saturday night? Will you come to the hop with me if I call
around for you?'
It was remarkable how quickly Maggie's eyes could change from dull to a
shining brown.
'With you, Dempsey?' she stammered. 'Say will a duck swim?'
VII
The Cop and the Anthem
On his bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily. When wild goose honk
high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their
husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know
that winter is near at hand.
A dead leaf fell in Soapy's lap. That was Jack Frost's card. Jack is kind to
the regular denizens of Madison Square, and gives fair warning of his annual call.
At the corners of four streets he hands his pasteboard to the North Wind, footman
of the mansion of All Outdoors, so that the inhabitants thereof may make ready.
Soapy's mind became cognizant of the fact that the time had come for him
to resolve himself into a singular Committee of Ways and Means to provide against
the coming rigour. And therefore he moved uneasily on his bench.
The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In them were
no considerations of Mediterranean cruises, of soporific Southern skies or drifting
in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months on the Island was what his soul craved. Three
months of assured board and bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and
bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the essence of things desirable.
For years the hospitable Blackwell's had been his winter quarters. Just as
his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm Beach and
the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his humble arrangements for his annual
hegira to the Island. And now the time was come. On the previous night three
Sabbath newspapers, distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles and over his lap,
had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting fountain in
the ancient square. So the Island loomed large and timely in Soapy's mind. He
scorned the provisions made in the name of charity for the city's dependents.
In Soapy's opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There was
an endless round of institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might
set out and receive lodging and food accordant with the simple life. But to one of
Soapy's proud spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you must pay
in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy. As
Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf
of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is
better to be a guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle
unduly with a gentleman's private affairs.
Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing
his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine
luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and then, after declaring insolvency, be
handed over quietly and without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating
magistrate would do the rest.
Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the level sea
of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together, Up Broadway he
turned, and halted at a glittering cafe, where are gathered together nightly the
choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm.
Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest upward.
He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, ready-tied four-in-hand
had been presented to him by a lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could
reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him
that would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter's mind. A
roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing - with a bottle of
Chablis, and then Camembert, a demy tasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar
would be enough. The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme
manifestation of revenge from the cafe management; and yet the meat would leave
him filled and happy for the journey to his winter refuge.
But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter's eye fell
upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him
about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble
fate of the menaced mallard.
Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted Island
was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo must be thought
of.
At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed wares
behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took a cobblestone
and dashed it through the glass. People came running round the corner, a policeman
in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands in his pockets, and smiled at the sight
of brass buttons.
'Where's the man that done that?' inquired the officer excitedly.
'Don't you figure out that I might have had something to do with it?' said
Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good fortune.
The policeman's mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who
smash windows do not remain to parley with the law's minions. They take to their
heels. The policeman saw a man halfway down the block running to catch a car.
With drawn club he joined in the pursuit. Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed
along, twice unsuccessful.
On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great pretensions.
It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its crockery and atmosphere were
thick; its soup and napery thin. Into this place Soapy took his accusive shoes and
tell-tale trousers without challenge. At a table he sat and consumed beefsteak,
flapjacks, doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter he betrayed the fact that the
minutest coin and himself were strangers.
'Now, get busy and call a cop,' said Soapy. 'And don't keep a gentleman
waiting.'
'No cop for youse,' said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes and an eye
like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. 'Hey, Con!'
Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched Soapy.
He arose, joint by joint, as a carpenter's rule opens, and beat the dust from his
clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The Island seemed very far away. A
policeman who stood before a drug store two doors away laughed and walked down
the street.
Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted him to woo
capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he fatuously termed to
himself a 'cinch.' A young woman of a modest and pleasing guise was standing
before a show window gazing with sprightly interest at its display of shaving mugs
and inkstands, and two yards from the window a large policeman of severe
demeanour leaned against a water-plug.
It was Soapy's design to assume the role of the despicable and execrated
'masher.' The refined and elegant appearance of his victim and the contiguity of the
conscientious cop encouraged him to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant
official clutch upon his arm that would ensure his winter quarters on the right little,
tight little isle.
Soapy straightened the lady missionary's ready-made tie, dragged his
shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled toward the
young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden coughs and 'hems,'
smiled, smirked and went brazenly through the impudent and contemptible litany
of the 'masher.' With half an eye Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him
fixedly. The young woman moved away a few steps, and again bestowed her
absorbed attention upon the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her
side, raised his hat and said:
'Ah there, Bedelia! Don't you want to come and play in my yard?'
The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but to
beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular haven.
Already he imagined he could feel the cosy warmth of the station house. The young
woman faced him and, stretching out a hand, caught Soapy's coat sleeve.
'Sure, Mike,' she said joyfully, 'if you'll blow me to a pail of suds. I'd have
spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.'
With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked
past the policeman, overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty.
At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the
district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows and librettos.
Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry air. A sudden fear
seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had rendered him immune to arrest.
The thought brought a little of panic upon it, and when he came upon another
policeman lounging grandly in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the
immediate straw of 'disorderly conduct.'
On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his
harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise disturbed the welkin.
The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked to
a citizen:
' 'Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin' the goose egg they give to the
Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We've instructions to lave them be.'
Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a policeman
lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an unattainable Arcadia. He
buttoned his thin coat against the chilling wind.
In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a swinging
light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering. Soapy stepped inside,
secured the umbrella and sauntered off with it slowly. The man at the cigar light
followed hastily.
'My umbrella,' he said sternly.
'Oh, is it?' sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. 'Well, why don't
you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don't you call a cop? There
stands one at the corner.'
The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did like wise, with a
presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman looked at the
two curiously.
'Of course,' said the umbrella man - 'that is - well, you know how these
mistakes occur - I if it's your umbrella I hope you'll excuse me . I picked it up this
morning in a restaurant - If you recognize it as yours, why - I hope you'll - '
'Of course it's mine,' said Soapy viciously.
The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall blonde
in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car that was approaching two
blocks away.
Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He
hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men
who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall into their clutches,
they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong.
At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and
turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the
homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench.
But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an
old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet-stained window a
soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the organist loitered over the keys, making sure
of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy's ears
sweet music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of the
iron fence.
The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were
few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves - for a little while the scene might have
been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented
Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it well in the days when his life contained
such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate
thoughts and collars.
The conjunction of Soapy's receptive state of mind and the influences about
the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with
swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires,
dead hopes, wrecked faculties and base motives that made up his existence.
And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood.
An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate.
He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of himself again; he
would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was
comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue
them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution
in him. To-morrow he would go into the roaring down-town district and find work.
A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him to-
morrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would –
Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad
face of a policeman.
'What are you doin' here?' asked the officer.
'Nothin',' said Soapy.
'Then come along,' said the policeman.
'Three months on the Island,' said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next
morning.
VIII
Memories of a Yellow Dog
I don’t suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read a contribution
from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others have demonstrated the fact
that animals can express themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes
to press nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that
are still running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pelée horror.
But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as Bearoo
the bear, and Snakoo the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk in the jungle books.
A yellow dog that's spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a
corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady
Longshoremen's banquet), mustn't be expected to perform any tricks with the art of
speech.
I was born a yellow pup, date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown. The
first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at Broadway and
Twentythird trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me
to beat the band as a genuine Pomeranian Hambletonian Red Irish Cochin China
Stoke Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros
grain flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From that
moment I was a pet a mamma's own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle reader, did
you ever have a 200 pound woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese and
Peau d'Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the
time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: 'Oh, oo's um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum,
toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?'
From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur
looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my mistress
never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that Noah chased into the
ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her
from entering me at the Madison Square Garden for the Siberian bloodhound prize.
I'll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New York,
paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones above the first floor.
Our flat was three fl well, not flights climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished,
and put in the regular things - 1903 antique upholstered parlour set, oil chromo of
geishas in a Harlem tea-house, rubber plant and husband.
By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with sandy
hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Hen-pecked? - well, toucans and
flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the dishes and listened
to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin
coat on the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And every evening while she
was getting supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.
If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they'd never
marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck muscles,
dishes unwashed, half an hour's talk with the iceman, reading a package of old
letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through
a hole in the window shade into the flat across the airshaft - that's about all there is
to it. Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she straightens
up the house, fixes her rat so it won't show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-
minute bluff.
I led a dog's life in that flat. 'Most all day I lay there in my corner watching
the fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams about being out
chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog
was intended to do. Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling
poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose - but what could I do? A dog can't chew
cloves.
I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We looked so much
alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the streets that Morgan's
cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles of last December's snow on the
streets where cheap people live.
One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look like
a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn't have
murdered the. first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn's wedding-march, I
looked up at him and said, in my way:
'What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She don't
kiss you. You don't have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make the
book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus. You ought to be
thankful you're not a dog. Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues begone.'
The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine intelligence
in his face.
'Why, doggie,' says he, 'good doggie. You almost look like you could speak.
What is it, doggie - Cats?'
Cats! Could speak!

But, of course, he couldn't understand. Humans were denied the speech of
animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men
can get together is in fiction.
In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black and than terrier.
Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he always came home
cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall,
and I struck him for an elucidation.
'See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,' I says, 'you know that it ain't the nature of a
real man to play dry-nurse to a dog in public. I never saw one leashed to a bow-
wow yet that didn't look like he'd like to lick every other man that looked at him.
But your boss comes in every day as perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator
doing the egg trick. How does he do it? Don't tell me he likes it.'
'Him?' says the black-and-tan. 'Why, he uses Nature's Own Remedy. He gets
spifflicated. At first when we go out he's as shy as the man on the steamer who
would rather play pedro when they make 'em all jackpots. By the time we've been
in eight saloons he don't care whether the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a
catfish. I've lost two inches of my tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors.'
The pointer I got from that terrier vaudeville please copy set me to thinking.
One evening about six o'clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do
the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is what she called
me. The black-and-tan was called 'Tweetness.' I consider that I have the bulge on
him as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still 'Lovey' is something of a nomenclatural
tin-can on the tail of one's self-respect.
At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian in front
of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead ahead scramble for the doors, whining
like a dog in the press despatches that lets the family know that little Alice is bogged
while gathering lilies in the brook.
'Why, darn my eyes,' says the old man, with a grin; 'darn my eyes if the
saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain't asking me in to take a drink.
Lemme see - how long's it been since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on
the footrest? I believe I'll - '
I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour he
kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter with my tail,
and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never equalled with her homemade
truck bought at a delicatessen store eight minutes before papa comes home.
When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread the
old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like a fisherman
plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it into the street.
'Poor doggie,' says he; 'good doggie. She shan't kiss you anymore. Is a
darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street car and be happy.'
I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man's legs happy as a
pug on a rug.
'You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,' I said to him 'you moon baying,
rabbit pointing, egg stealing old beagle, can't you see that I don't want to leave you?
Can't you see that we're both Pups in the Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle
after you with the dish towel and me with the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie on
my tail. Why not cut that all out and be pards for evermore?'
Maybe you'll say he didn't understand maybe he didn't. But he kind of got
a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute, thinking.
'Doggie,' says he finally, 'we don't live more than a dozen lives on this earth,
and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see that flat any more I'm a
flat, and if you do you're flatter; and that's no flattery. I'm offering 60 to 1 that
Westward Ho wins out by the length of a dachshund.'
There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the Twenty-
third Street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to give thanks that prehensile
claws had been given them.
On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood eating a currant
bun:
'Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.'
But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my ears
until I howled, and said:
'You common, monkey headed, rat tailed, Sulphur coloured son of a door
mat, do you know what I'm going to call you?'
I thought of 'Lovey,' and I whined dolefully.
'I'm going to call you "Pete," ' says my master; and if I'd had five tails I
couldn't have done enough wagging to do justice to the occasion.
IX
The Love-philtre of Ikey Schoenstei
The blue light drug store is down town, between the Bowery and First Avenue,
where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not
consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you
ask it for a pain-killer it will not give you a bonbon.
The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It
macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day
pills are made behind its tall prescription desk pills rolled out on its own pill tile,
divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined
magnesia and delivered in little round, pasteboard pill boxes. The store is on a
corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become
candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.
Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend of his
customers. This it is on the East Side, where the heart of pharmacy is not glacé.
There, as it should be, the druggist is a counsellor, a confessor, an adviser, an able
and willing missionary and mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult
wisdom is venerated and whose medicine is often poured, untasted, into the gutter.
There fore Ikey's corniform, bespectacled nose and narrow, knowledge bowed
figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice
were much desired.
Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle's, two squares away. Mrs.
Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in vain - you must
have guessed it - Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all his thoughts; she was the
compound extract of all that was chemically pure and officinal - the dispensatory
contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey was timid, and his hopes remained
insoluble in the menstruum of his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he
was a superior being, calmly conscious of special knowledge and worth; outside,
he was a weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting clothes
stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and valerianate of ammonia.
The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk
McGowan.
Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed about by
Rosy. But he was no out-fielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the bat. At the
same time he was Ikey's friend and customer, and often dropped in at the Blue Light
Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a
pleasant evening spent along the Bowery.
One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way, and sat, comely,
smoothed-faced, hard, indomitable, good-natured, upon a stool.
'Ikey,' said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat opposite,
grinding gum benzoin to a powder, 'get busy with your ear. It's drugs for me if
you've got the line I need.'
Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr. McGowan for the usual evidences of
conflict, but found none.
'Take your coat off,' he ordered. 'I guess already that you have been stuck
in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you those Dagoes would do you up.'
Mr. McGowan smiled. 'Not them,' he said. 'Not any Dagoes. But you've
located the diagnosis all right enough - it's under my coat, near the ribs. Say! Ikey
- Rosy and me are goin' to run away and get married to-night.'
Ikey's left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding it
steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt it not. Meanwhile Mr.
McGowan's smile faded to a look of perplexed gloom.
'That is,' he continued, 'if she keeps in the notion until the time comes. We've
been layin' pipes for the gateway for two weeks. One day she says she will; the
same evenin' she says nixy. We've agreed on to-night, and Rosy's stuck to the
affirmative this time for two whole days. But it's five hours yet till the time, and I'm
afraid she'll stand me up when it comes to the scratch.'
'You said you wanted drugs,' remarked Ikey.
Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed - a condition opposed to his
usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll and fitted
it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.
'I wouldn't have this double handicap make a false start tonight for a
million,' he said. 'I've got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with chrysanthemums
on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I've engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready
at his house for us at 9.30. It's got to come off. And if Rosy don't change her mind
again!' Mr. McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.
'I don't see then yet,' said Ikey shortly, 'what makes it that you talk of drugs,
or what I can be doing about it.'
'Old man Riddle don't like me a little bit,' went on the uneasy suitor, bent
upon marshalling his arguments. 'For a week he hasn't let Rosy step outside the
door with me. If it wasn't for losin' a boarder they'd have bounced me long ago. I'm
makin' $20 a week and she'll never regret flyin' the coop with Chunk McGowan.'
'You will excuse me, Chunk,' said Ikey. 'I must make a prescription that is
to be called for soon.'
'Say,' said McGowan, looking up suddenly, 'say, Ikey, ain't there a drug of
some kind - some kind of powders that'll make a girl like you better if you give 'em
to her?'
Ikey's lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior enlightenment;
but before he could answer, McGowan continued:
'Tim Lacy told me once that he got some from a croaker up town and fed
'em to his girl in soda water. From the very first dose he was ace-high and
everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They was married in less than two
weeks.'
Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men than Ikey
was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon fine wires. Like a good
general who was about to invade the enemy's territory he was seeking to guard
every point against possible failure.
'I thought,' went on Chunk hopefully, 'that if I had one of them powders to
give Rosy when I see her at supper tonight it might brace her up and keep her from
reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess she don't need a mule team to drag her
away, but women are better at coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff'll
work just for a couple of hours it'll do the trick.'
'When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?' asked Ikey.
'Nine o'clock,' said Mr. McGowan. 'Supper's at seven. At eight Rosy goes
to bed with a headache. At nine old Parvenzano lets me through to his backyard,
where there's a board off Riddle's fence, next door. I go under her window and help
her down the fire escape. We've got to make it early on the preacher's account. It's
all dead easy if Rosy don't balk when the flag drops. Can you fix me one of them
powders, Ikey?'
Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.
'Chunk,' said he, 'it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists must have
much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I entrust a powder like
that. But for you I shall make it, and you shall see how it makes Rosy to think of
you.'
Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a powder two
soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia. To them he added
a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk, and folded the mixture neatly in a white
paper. Taken by an adult this powder would ensure several hours of heavy slumber
without danger to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to
administer it in a liquid, if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the backyard
Lochinvar.
The subtlety of Ikey's action becomes apparent upon recital of his
subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle and disclosed the plans of
McGowan for eloping with Rosy. Mr. Riddle was a stout man, brick-dusty of
complexion and sudden in action.
'Much obliged,' he said briefly to Ikey. 'The lazy Irish loafer! My own
room's just above Rosy's, I'll just go up there myself after supper and load the shot-
gun and wait. If he comes in my backyard he'll go away in an ambulance instead of
a bridal chaise.'
With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many hours' deep slumber,
and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival
was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.
All night in the Blue Light Store he waited at his duties for chance news of
the tragedy, but none came.
At eight o'clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey started
hurriedly for Mrs. Riddle's to learn the outcome. And, lo! as he stepped out of the
store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing street-car and grasped his
hand - Chunk McGowan with a victor's smile and flushed with joy.
'Pulled it off,' said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. 'Rosy hit the fire-escape
on time to a second and we was under the wire at the Reverend's at 9.3 0 1/4 . She's
up at the flat - she cooked eggs this mornin' in a blue kimono - Lord! how lucky I
am! You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I've got a job down near
the bridge, and that's where I'm heading for now.'
'The - the powder?' stammered Ikey.
'Oh, that stuff you gave me!' said Chunk broadening his grin; 'well, it was
this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy,
and I say to myself, "Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square - don't try any
hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her." And I keep the papers you give me in
my pocket. And then my lamps fall on another party present, who, I say to myself,
is failin' in a proper affection toward his comin' son-in-law, so I watches my chance
and dumps that powder in old man Riddle's coffee , see?'
moment immovable. For this odour belonged to Miss Leslie; it was her own,
and hers only.
The odour brought her vividly, almost tangibly before him. The world of
finance dwindled suddenly to a speck. And she was in the next room - twenty steps
away.
'By George, I'll do it now,' said Maxwell, half aloud. 'I'll ask her now. I
wonder I didn't do it long ago.'
He dashed into the inner office with the haste of a short trying to cover. He
charged upon the desk of the stenographer.
She looked up at him with a smile. A soft pink crept over her cheek, and her
eyes were kind and frank. Maxwell leaned one elbow on her desk. He still clutched
fluttering papers with both hands and the pen was above his ear.
'Miss Leslie,' he began hurriedly, 'I have but a moment to spare. I want to
say something in that moment. Will you be my wife? I haven't had time to make
love to you in the ordinary way, but I really do love you. Talk quick, please - those
fellows are clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific.'
'Oh, what are you talking about?' exclaimed the young lady. She rose to her
feet and gazed upon him, round eyed.
'Don't you understand?' said Maxwell restively. 'I want you to marry me. I
love you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and I snatched a minute when things
had slackened up a bit. They're calling me for the 'phone now. Tell 'em to wait a
minute, Pitcher. Won't you, Miss Leslie?'
The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed overcome with
amazement; then tears flowed from her wondering eyes; and then she smiled
sunnily through them, and one of her arms slid tenderly about the broker's neck.
arms slid tenderly about the broker's neck. 'I know now,' she said softly. 'It's
this old business that has driven everything else out of your head for the time. I was
frightened at first. Don't you remember, Harvey? We were married last evening at
eight o'clock in the Little Church Around the Corner.'
XVI
The Furnished Room
Restless, Shifthing, Fugacious as time itself, is a certain vast bulk of the population
of the redbrick district of the lower West Side.
Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to
furnished room, transients for ever - transients in abode, transients in heart and
mind. They sing 'Home Sweet Home' in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in
a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should
have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if
there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant ghosts.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red
mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon
the step and wiped the dust from his hat-band and forehead. The bell sounded faint
and far away in some remote, hollow depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a
housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had
eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
He asked if there was a room to let. 'Come in,' said the housekeeper. Her
voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. 'I have the third floor
back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?'
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular
source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet
that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to
have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew
in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each
turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set
within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues
of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils
had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some
furnished pit below.
'This is the room,' said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. 'It's a nice
room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer - no
trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water at the end of the hall.
Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months.They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss
B'retta Sprowls you may have heard of her .Oh, that was just the stage names right
there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is
here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It's a room everybody likes. It never
stays idle long.'
'Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?' asked the young man.
'They come and goes.A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with
the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long
anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes.'
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said,
and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The room had been
made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away
he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
'A young girl Miss Vashner ,Miss Eloise Vashner do you remember such a
one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair
girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish gold hair and a dark mole near her
left eyebrow.'
'No, I don't remember the name. Them stage people has names they change
as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don't call that one to mind.'
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable
negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and
choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to
music-halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had
loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from
home this great water girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous
quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation,its upper granules of
today buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo
hospitality,a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a
demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed
furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a footwide
cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and
a brass bedstead in a corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as
though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant flowered, rectangular, tropical islet

lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were
those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house.The Huguenot
Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The
mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery
drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some
desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne
them to a fresh port a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle,
some stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little
signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance.
The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had
marched in the throng. Tiny finger-prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying
to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a
bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its
contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond
in staggering letters the name 'Marie.' It seemed that the succession of dwellers in
the furnished room had turned in fury - perhaps tempted beyond for bearance by its
garish coldness - and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and
bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that
had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent
upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor
owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It
seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room
by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the
cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods
that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and
cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod,
through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished
scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others
the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above
him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roare
intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the
breath of the house - a dank savour rather than a smell a cold, musty effluvium as
from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and
mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong,
sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such
sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And
the man cried aloud, 'What, dear?' as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced
about. The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him about. He reached out his
arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be
peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not
the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
'She has been in this room,' he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token,
for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that
she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette, the odour that she had loved
and made her own - whence came it?
The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy
dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins - those discreet, indistinguishable friends
of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense.
These he ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the
drawers of the dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He
pressed it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the
floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a pawnbroker's
card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a
woman's black satin hair-bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But
the black satin hair-bow also is femininity's demure,impersonal,common ornament,
and tells no tales.
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the
walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees,
rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the
corner, for a visible sign unable to perceive that she was there beside, around,
against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly
through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognizant of the call.
Once again he answered loudly, 'Yes, dear!' and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on
vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched
arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that odour, and since when have
odours had a voice to call? This he groped.
He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. These
he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half
smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath.
He sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of
many a peripatetic tenant,but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged
there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace.
And then he thought of the housekeeper.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack
of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.
'Will you tell me, madam,' he besought her, 'who occupied the room I have
before I came?'
'Yes, sir. I can tell you again. 'Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss
B'retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was. My house is well
known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over - '
'What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls in looks, I mean?'
'Why, black-haired, sir, short and stout, with a comical face. They left a
week ago Tuesday.'
'And before they occupied it?'
'Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business.
He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children,
that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for
him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not
remember.'
He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence
that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place
was the old, stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing
gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With
the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and
door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on
again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.
• • • • •
It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and
sat with Mrs.Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where housekeepers
foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
I rented out my third floor back, this evening,said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine
circle of foam. 'A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago.
'Now,did you,Mrs.Purdy,ma'am?said Mrs.McCool,with intense admiration.
'You do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?' she
concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.
'Rooms,' said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, 'are furnished for to rent. I
did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.'
' 'This right you are, ma'am; 'this by renting rooms we keep alive.You have
the rale sense for business, ma'am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin' of
a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin' in the bed of it.'
'As you say, we has our living to be making,' remarked Mrs, Purdy.
'Yes, ma'am; 'this true. 'This just one waeek ago this day I helped you lay
out the third floor back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin' herself width
the gas a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am.'
'She'd a been called handsome, as you say,' said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but
critical, 'but for that mole she had a growin' by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your
glass again, Mrs. McCool.'
XVII
The Brief Debut of Tildy
If you do not know Bogle's Chop House and Family Restaurant it is your loss. For
if you are one of the fortunate ones who dine expensively you should be interested
to know how the other half consumes provisions. And if you belong to the half to
whom waiters' checks are things of moment, you should know Bogle's, for there
you get your money's worth - in quantity, at least.
Bogle's is situated in that highway of bourgeoisie, that boulevard of Brown-
Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two rows of tables in the room, six
in each row. On each table is a castor-stand, containing cruets of condiments and
seasons. From the pepper cruet you may shake a cloud of something tasteless and
melancholy, like volcanic dust. From the salt cruet you may 'A very sad one,' says
he, laying the points of his manicured fingers together. 'An utterly incorrigible girl.
I am Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones. The case was assigned to me.
The girl murdered her fiancé and committed suicide. She had no defence. My report
to the court relates the facts in detail, all of which are substantiated by reliable
witnesses. The wages of sin is death. Praise the Lord.'
The court officer opened the door and stepped out.
'Poor girl,' said Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones, with a tear
in his eye. 'It was one of the saddest cases that I ever met with. Of course she was'
'Discharged,' said the court officer. 'Come here, Jonesy. First thing you
know you'll be switched to the pot-pie squad. How would you like to be on the
missionary force in the South Sea Islands - hey? Now, you quit making these false
arrests, or you'll be transferred - see? The guilty party you've got to look for in this
case is a red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by the window reading, in his
stocking feet, while his children play in the streets. Get a move on you.'
Now, wasn't that a silly dream?
XXXIII
The Last Leaf
In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken
themselves into small strips called 'places.' These 'places' make strange angles and
curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable
possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas
should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent
having been paid on account!
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling,
hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low
rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth
Avenue, and became a 'colony.'
At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio.
'Johnsy' was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine, the other from California.
They had met at the table d'hôte of an Eighth Street 'Delmonico's,' and found their
tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio
resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors
called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his
icy finger. Over on the East Side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by
scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown
'places.'
Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A
mite of a little woman with blood thinned by Californian zephyrs was hardly fair
game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she
lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch
window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy,
grey eyebrow.
'She has one chance in - let us say, ten,' he said, as he shook down the
mercury in his clinical thermometer. 'And that chance is for her to want to live. This
way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire
pharmacopœia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she's not going
to get well. Has she anything on her mind?'
'She , she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,' said Sue.
'Paint? bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice a
man, for instance?'
'A man?' said Sue, with a jews' harp twang in her voice. 'Is a man worth but,
no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.'
'Well, it is the weakness, then,' said the doctor. 'I will do all that science, so
far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient
begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from
the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the
new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her,
instead of one in ten.'
After the doctor had gone, Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese
napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy's room with her drawing-board,
whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face
toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a
magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for
magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.
As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a
monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several
times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
Johnsy's eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and
counting - counting backward.
'Twelve,' she said, and a little later, 'eleven'; and then 'ten,' and 'nine'; and
then 'eight' and 'seven,' almost together.
Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to count? There
was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty
feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half-way
up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine
until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
'What is it, dear?' asked Sue.
'Six,' said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. 'They're falling faster now. Three
days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But
now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.'
'Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.'
'Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go too. I've known
that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?'
'Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,' complained Sue, with magnificent
scorn. 'What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love
that vine so, you naughty girl. Don't be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this
morning that your chances for getting well real soon were - let's see exactly what
he said he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that's almost as good a chance
as we have in New York when we ride on the street-cars or walk past a new
building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she
can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops
for her greedy self.'
'You needn't get any more wine,' said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the
window.
'There goes another. No, I don't want any broth. That leaves just four. I want
to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I'll go too.'
'Johnsy, dear,' said Sue, bending over her, 'will you promise me to keep your
eyes closed, and not look out of the window until I am done working? I must hand
those drawings in by to-morrow. I need the light or I would draw the shade down.'
'Couldn't you draw in the other room?' asked Johnsy coldly.
'I'd rather be here by you,' said Sue. 'Besides, I don't want you to keep
looking at those silly ivy leaves.'
'Tell me as soon as you have finished,' said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and
lying white and still as a fallen statue, 'because I want to see the last one fall. I'm
tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything,
and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.'
'Try to sleep,' said Sue. 'I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old
hermit miner. I'll not be gone a minute. Don't try to move till I come back.'
Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He
was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo's Moses beard curling down from the head
of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he
had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his
Mistress's robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet
begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in
the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to
those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He
drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was
a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in anyone, and who regarded
himself as especial mastiff in waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio
above.
Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly-lighted
den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that had been waiting there
for twentyfive years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of
Johnsy's fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf
herself, float away when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.
Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and
derision for such idiotic imaginings.
'Vass!' he cried. 'Is there people in the world meet there foolishness to die
because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I have not heard of such a
thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool hermit dunderhead.Why do you
allow dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of her? Ach, dot poor little Miss
Yohnsy.'
'She is very ill arid weak,' said Sue, 'and the fever has left her mind morbid
and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman, if you do not care to pose for
me, you needn't. But I think you are a horrid old ,old flibberti gibbet.'
'You are just like a woman!' yelled Behrman. 'Who said I vill not bose? Go
on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am ready to bose.
Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some
day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go avay. Gott! yes.'
Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to
the window-sill and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered
out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a
moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow.
Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned
kettle for a rock.
When Sue awoke from an hour's sleep the next morning she found Johnsy
with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
'Pull it up! I want to see,' she ordered, in a whisper.
Wearily Sue obeyed.
But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured
through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the brick wall one ivy leaf. It
was the last on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, but with its serrated edges
tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some
twenty feet above the ground.
'It is the last one,' said Johnsy. 'I thought it would surely fall during the night.
I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time.'
'Dear, dear!' said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow; 'think of
me, if you won't think of yourself.What would I do?'
But Johnsy did not answer.The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul
when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.The fancy seemed to
possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to
earth were loosed.
The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone
ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night
the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and
pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.
When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade
be raised.
The ivy leaf was still there.
Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who
was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
'I've been a bad girl, Sudie,' said Johnsy. 'Something has made that last leaf
stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring
me a little broth now, and some milk with a little port in it, and - no; bring me a
hand mirror first; and then pack some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch
you cook.'
An hour later she said ,
'Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.'
The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the
hallway as he left.
'Even chances,' said the doctor, talking Sue's thin, shaking hand in his. 'With
good nursing you'll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs.
Behrman, his name is some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an
old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him, but he goes to the
hospital today to be made more comfortable.'
The next day the doctor said to Sue: 'She's out of danger. You've won.
Nutrition and care now , that's all.'
And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay,contentedly
knitting a very blue and very useless woollen shoulder scarf, and put one arm
around her, pillows and all.
'I have something to tell you, white mouse,' she said. 'Mr. Behrman died of
pneumonia today in hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him on
the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes
and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn't imagine where he had
been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a
ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a
palette with green and yellow colours mixed on it, and - look out the window, dear,
at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn't you wonder why it never fluttered or moved
when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it's Behrman's masterpiece, he painted it there
the night that the last leaf fell.'
Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and thoughtfully felt an
abrasion or two on his knees and elbows.
'Say, Annie,' said he confidentially, 'maybe it's one of the last dreams of the
booze, but I've a kind of a recollection of riding in an automobile with a swell guy
that took me to a house full of eagles and arc lights. He fed me on biscuits and hot
air, and then kicked me down the front steps. If it was the d t's, why am I so sore?'
'Shut up, you fool,' said Annie.
'If I could find that funny guy's house,' said Thomas, in conclusion, i'd go
up there some day and punch his nose for him.'
XLVII
The Poet and the Peasant
The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communication with
nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor.
It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the song of
birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.
When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a beef steak dinner
in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment:
'Too artificial.'
Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, and
swallowed indignation with the slippery forkfuls.
And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a well arrived
writer of fiction, a man who had trod on asphalt all his life, and who had never
looked upon bucolic scenes except with sensations of disgust from the windows of
express trains.
Conant wrote a poem and called it 'The Doe and the Brook.' It was a fine
specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet who had strayed with
Amaryllis only as far as the florist's windows, and whose sole ornithological
discussion had been carried on with a waiter. Conant signed this poem, and we sent
it to the same editor.
But this has very little to do with the story.
Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next morning,
a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped slowly up Forty-second
Street.
The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip, and hair
the exact colour of the little orphan's (afterward discovered to be the earl's daughter)
in one of Mr. Blaney's plays. His trousers were corduroy, his coat short-sleeved,
with buttons in the middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You
looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its shape
inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor.
In his hand was a valise - description of it is an impossible task; a Boston man
would not have carried his lunch and law books to his office in it. And above one
ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay, the rustic's letter of credit, his badge of innocence,
the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the goldbrick men.
Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw the raw
stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall buildings. At this they
ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It had been done so often. A few glanced
at the antique valise to see what Coney 'attraction' or brand of chewing gum he
might be thus dinning into his memory. But for the most part he was ignored. Even
the news boys looked bored when he scampered like a circus clown out of the way
of cabs and street-cars.
At Eighth Avenue stood 'Bunco Harry,' with his dyed moustache and shiny,
good natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be pained at the sight of an
actor overdoing his part. He edged up to the countryman, who had stopped to open
his mouth at a jewellery store window, and shook his head.
'Too thick, pal,' he said critically , 'too thick by a couple of inches. I don't
know what your lay is; but you've got the properties on too thick. That hay, now
why, they don't even allow that on Proctor's circuit anymore.'
'I don't understand you, mister,' said the green one. 'I'm not lookin' for any
circus. I've just run down from Ulster County to look at the town, bein' that the
hayin's over with. Gosh! but it's a whopper. I thought Poughkeepsie was some
punkins; but this here town is five times as big.'
'Oh, well,' said 'Bunco Harry,' raising his eyebrows, 'I didn't mean to butt
in. You don't have to tell. I thought you ought to tone down a little, so I tried to put
you wise. Wish you success at your graft, whatever it is. Come and have a drink,
anyhow.'
'I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager beer,' acknowledged the other.
They went to a café frequented by men with smooth faces and shifty eyes,
and sat at their drinks.
'I'm glad I come across you, mister,' said Haylocks. 'How'd you like to play
a game or two of seven up? I've got the keerds.'
He fished them out of Noah's valise a rare, inimitable deck, greasy with
bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields.
'Bunco Harry' laughed loud and briefly.
'Not for me, sport,' he said firmly. 'I don't go against that make-up of yours
for a cent. But I still say you've overdone it. The Reubs haven't dressed like that
since '79. I doubt if you could work Brooklyn for a key-winding watch with that
lay-out.'
'Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the money,' boasted Haylocks. He drew
forth a tightly rolled mass or bills as large as a teacup, and laid it on the table.
'Got that for my share of grandmother's farm,' he announced. 'There's $950

in that roll. Thought I'd come into the city and look around for a likely business to
go into.'
'Bunco Harry' took up the roll of money and looked at it with almost respect
in his smiling eyes.
'I've seen worse,' he said critically. 'But you'll never do it in them clothes.
You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a straw hat with a coloured
band, and talk a good deal about Pittsburg and freight differentials, and drink sherry
for breakfast in order to work off phony stuff like that.'
'What's his line?' asked two or three shifty-eyed men of 'Bunco Harry' after
Haylocks had gathered up his impugned money and departed.
'The queer, I guess,' said Harry. 'Or else he's one of Jerome's men. Or some
guy with a new graft. He's too much hayseed. Maybe that his - I wonder now - oh
no, it couldn't have been real money.'
Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he dived into
a dark groggery on a side-street and bought beer. Several sinister fellows hung upon
one end of the bar. At first sight of him their eyes brightened; but when his insistent
and exaggerated rusticity became apparent their expressions changed to wary
suspicion.
Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.
'Keep that awhile for me, mister,' he said, chewing at the end of a virulent
claybank cigar. 'I'll be back after I knock around a spell. And keep your eye on it,
for there's $950 inside of it, though maybe you wouldn't think so to look at me.'
Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and Haylocks was
off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back.
'Divvy? Mike,' said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly at one
another.
'Honest, now,' said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. 'You don't
think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain't no jay. One of McAdoo's
come-on squad, I guess. He's a shine if he made himself up. There ain't no parts of
the country now where they dress like that since they run rural free delivery to
Providence, Rhode Island. If he's got ninefifty in that valise it's a ninety eight cent
Waterbury that's stopped at ten minutes to ten.'
When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he
returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling the sights
with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt
glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the 'gags' that the city must
endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra-rustic, so exaggerated beyond the
most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that
he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so
genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural, that even a
shellgame man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it.
Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once more
exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer one, a twenty, he
shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.
'Son,' said he, 'run somewhere and get this changed for me. I'm mighty night
out of chicken feed; I guess you'll get a nickel if you'll hurry up.'
A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy's face.
'Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer funny bill changed yourself.They ain't
no farm clothes your got on. G'wan with your stage money.'
On a corner lounged a keen eyed steerer for a gambling house. He saw
Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous.
'Mister,' said the rural one. 'I've heard of places in this here town where a
fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card at keno. I got $950 in
this valise, and I come down from old Ulster to see the sights. Know where a fellow
could get action on about $9 or $10? I'm goin' to have some sport, and then maybe
I'll buy out a business of some kind.'
The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left
forefinger nail.
'Cheese it, old man,' he murmured reproachfully. 'The Central Office must
be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. You couldn't get within two
blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them Tony Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty
from Death Valley has got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan
scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no
gilded halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace.'
Rebuffed again by the great city that is so swift to detect artificialities,
Haylocks sat upon the kerb and presented his thoughts to hold a conference.
'It's my clothes,' said he; 'durned if it ain't. They think I'm a hayseed and
won't have nothin' to do with me. Nobody never made fun of this hat in Ulster
County. I guess if you want folks to notice you in New York you must dress up like
they do.'
So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake through their
noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line ecstatically over the bulge in his
inside pocket where reposed a red nubbin of corn with an even number of rows.
And messengers bearing parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on Broadway
within the lights of Long Acre.
At nine o'clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk whom Ulster
County would have forsworn. Bright tan were his shoes; his hat the latest block.
His light grey trousers were deeply creased; a gay blue silk handkerchief flapped
from the breast pocket of his elegant English walking-coat. His collar might have
graced a laundry window; his blond hair was trimmed close; the wisp of hay was
gone.
For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of a boulevardier
concocting in his mind the route for his evening pleasures. And then he turned down
the gay, bright street with the easy and graceful tread of a millionaire.
But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes in the city
had enveloped him in their field of vision. A stout man with grey eyes picked two
of his friends with a lift of his eyebrows from the row of loungers in front of the
hotel.
'The juiciest jay I've seen in six months,' said the man with grey eyes. 'Come
along.'
It was half past eleven when a man galloped into the West Forty seventh
Street police station with the story of his wrongs.
'Nine hundred and fifty dollars,' he gasped, 'all my share of grandmother's
farm.'
The desk sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue, of Locust
Valley Farm, Ulster County, and then began to take descriptions of the strong-arm
gentlemen.
When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he was
received over the head of the office boy into the inner office that is decorated with
the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown.
'When I read the first line of "The Doe and the Brook," ' said the editor, 'I
knew it to be the work of one whose life has been heart to heart with nature. The
finished art of the line did not blind me to that fact. To use a somewhat homely
comparison, it was as if a wild, free child of the woods and fields were to don the
garb of fashion and walk down Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man would
show.'
'Thanks,' said Conant. 'I suppose the cheque will be round on Thursday, as
usual.'
The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can take your
choice of 'Stay on the Farm' or 'Don't write Poetry.'
XLVIII
The Thing's the Play
Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free passes, I got
to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses.
One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much
past forty, but with very grey, thick hair. Not being afflicted with a taste for music,
I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded the man.
'There was a story about that chap a month or two ago,' said the reporter.
'They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was to be on the
extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to like the funny touch I give
to local happenings. Oh yes, I'm working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went
down to the house and got all the details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I
went back and turned in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh,
I couldn't seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could
make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the details.'
After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts over
the Würzburger.
racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of
the noblest. The daws may peck upon one's sleeve without in injury, but whoever
wears his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far from the neck.
This music and the musician called her, and at her side honour and the old
love held her back.
'Forgive me,' he pleaded.
'Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say you love,'
she declared, with a purgatorial touch.
'How could I tell?' he begged. 'I will conceal nothing from you. That night
when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark street I struck him
down. He did not rise. I examined him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend
to kill him. I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance
take him away. Although you married him, Helen - '
'Who are you?' cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching her hand
away. 'Don't you remember me, Helen - the one who has always loved you the best?
I am John Delaney. If you can forgive - '
But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs toward
the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for his in each of his
two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang: 'Frank! Frank!
Frank!'
Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiard balls,
and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it!
XLIX
A Ramble in Aphasia
My wife and i parted on that morning in precisely our usual manner. She left her
second cup of tea to follow me to the front of the door. There she plucked from my
lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership)
and bade me take care of my cold. I had no cold. Next came her kiss of parting the
level kiss of domesticity flavoured with Young Hyson. There was no fear of the
extemporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite custom. With the deft touch of long
malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf-pin; and then, as I closed the door,
I heard her morning slippers pattering back to her cooling tea.
When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to occur. The
attack came suddenly.
For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a famous
railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few days previously. In fact, I had
been digging away at the law almost without cessation for many years. Once or
twice good Doctor Volney, my friend and physician, had warned me.
'If you don't slacken up, Bellford,' he said, 'you'll go suddenly to pieces.
Either your nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me, does a week pass in which
you don’t read in the papers of a case of aphasia of some man lost, wondering
nameless, with his past and his identity blotted out, and all from that little brain clot
made by overwork or worry?'
'I always thought,' said I, 'that the clot in those instances was really to be
found on the brains of the newspaper reporters.'
Dr. Volney shook his head.
'The disease exists,' he said. 'You need a change or a rest. Court room, office
and home there is the only route you travel. For recreation you read law books.
Better take warning in time.'
'On Thursday nights,' I said defensively, 'my wife and I play cribbage. On
Sundays she reads to me the weekly letter from her mother. That law books are not
a recreation remains yet to be established.'
That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney's words. I was
feeling as well as I usually did possibly in better spirits than usual.
I awoke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept long on the
incommodious seat of a day coach. I leaned my head against the seat and tried to
think. After a long time I said to myself: 'I must have a name of some sort.' I
searched my pockets. Not a card; not a letter; not a paper or monogram could I find.
But I found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000 in bills of large denomination. 'I must
be someone, of course,' I repeated to myself, and began again to consider.
The car was well crowded with man, among whom I told myself, there must
have been some common interest, for they intermingled freely, and seemed in the
best good humour and spirits. One of them a stout, spectacled gentleman enveloped
in a decided odour of cinnamon and aloes took the vacant half of my seat with a
friendly nod, and unfolded a newspaper. In the intervals between his periods of
reading, we conversed, as travellers will, on current affairs. I found myself able to
sustain the conversation on such subjects with credit, at least to my memory. By
and by my companion said:
'You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the West sends in this time.
I'm glad they held the convention in New York; I've never been East before. My
name's R. P. Bolder. Bolder & Son, of Hickory Grove, Missouri.'
Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men will when put to it.
Now must I hold a christening, and be at once babe, parson and parent. My senses
came to the rescue of my slower brain. The insistent odour of drugs from my
companion supplied one idea; a glance at his newspaper, where my eye met a
conspicuous advertisement, assisted me further.
'My name,' said I glibly, 'is Edward Pink hammer. I am a druggist, and my
home is in Cornopolis, Kansas.'
'I knew you were a druggist,' said my fellow traveller affably. 'I saw the
callous spot on your right forefinger where the handle of the pestle rubs. Of course,
you are a delegate to our National Convention.'
'Are all these men druggists?' I asked wonderingly.
'They are. This car came through from the west. And they're your old time
druggists, too none of your patent tablet and granule pharmashootists that use slot
machines instead of a prescription desk. We percolate our own paregoric and roll
our own pills, and we ain't above handling a few garden seeds in the spring, and
carrying a sideline of confectionery and shoes. I tell you, Hampinker, I've got an
idea to spring on this convention new ideas is what they want. Now, you know the
shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt ant at Pot. Tart. and Sod. t Pot. Tart
one's poison, you know, and the other's harmless. It's easy to mistake one label for
the other.Where do druggists mostly keep them? Why, as far apart as possible, on
different shelves. That's wrong. I say keep them side by side so when you want one
you can always compare it with the other and avoid mistakes. Do you catch the
idea?'
'It seems to me a very good one,' I said.
'All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it up. We'll make
some of these Eastern orange phosphate and massage cream professors that think
they're the only lozenges in the market look like hypodermic tablets.'
'If I can be of any aid,' I said, warming, 'the two bottles of - er - '
'Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and potash.'
'Shall henceforth sit side by side,' I concluded firmly.
'Now,there's another thing,'said Mr.Bolder,'For an excipient in
manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer the magnesia carbonate or the
pulverized glycerrhiza radix?'
'They are magnesia,' I said. It was easier to say than the other word.
Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.
'Give me the glycerrhiza,' said he. 'Magnesia cakes.'
'Here's another one of these fake aphasia cases,' he said, presently, handing
me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon an article. 'I don't believe in them. I
put nine out of ten of them down as frauds. A man gets sick of his business and his
folks and wants to have a good time. He skips out somewhere, and when they find
him he pretends to have lost his memory don't know his own name, and won't even
recognize the strawberry mark on his wife's left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why can't
they stay at home and forget?'
I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the following:
'DENVER, June 12. - Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, is
mysteriously missing from his home since three days ago, and all efforts to locate
him have been in vain. Mr. Bellford is a well known citizen of the highest standing,
and has enjoyed a large and lucrative law practice. He is married and owns a fine
home and the most extensive private library in the State. On the day of his
disappearance, he drew quite a large sum of money from his bank. No one can be
found who saw him after he left the bank. Mr. Bellford was a man of singularly
quiet and domestic tastes, and seemed to find his happiness in his home and
profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange disappearance, it may be found in
the fact that for some months he had been deeply absorbed in an important law case
in connection with the Q,Y, and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared that overwork
may have affected his mind. Every effort is being made to discover the whereabouts
of the missing man.
'It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical Mr. Bolder,' I said, after I
had read the despatch. 'This has the sound, to me, of a genuine case. Why should
this man, prosperous, happily married and respected, choose suddenly to abandon
everything? I know that these lapses of memory do occur, and that men do find
themselves adrift without a name, a history or a home.'
'Oh, gammon and jalap!' said Mr. Bolder. 'It's larks they're after. There's too
much education nowadays. Men know about aphasia, and they use it for an excuse.
The women are wise, too.
When it's all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as you please, and
say: "He hypnotized me." '
Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid me with his comments and
philosophy.
We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in a cab to an hotel, and
I wrote my name 'Edward PinkHammer' in the register. As I did so I felt pervade
me a splendid, wild, intoxicating buoyancy - a sense of unlimited freedom, of newly
attained possibilities. I was just born into the world. The old fetters - whatever they
had been - were stricken from my hands and feet. The future lay before me a clear
road such as an infant enters, and I could set out upon it equipped with a man's
learning and experience.
I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too long. I had no
baggage.
'The Druggists' Convention,' I said. 'My trunk has somehow failed to arrive.'
I drew out a roll of money.
'Ah!' said he, showing an auriferous tooth, 'we have quite a number of the
Western delegates stopping here.' He struck a bell for the boy.
I endeavoured to give colour to my rôle.
'There is an important movement on foot among us Westerners,' I said, 'in

regard to a recommendation to the convention that the bottles containing the tartrate
of antimony and potash, and the tartrate of sodium and potash, be kept in a
contiguous position on the shelf.'
'Gentleman to three-fourteen,' said the clerk hastily. I was whisked away to
my room.
The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to live the life of
Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax my brain with endeavours to solve problems of
the past.
It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held up to my
lips. I drank of it gratefully. The keys of Manhattan belong to him who is able to
bear them. You must be either the city's guest or its victim.
The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward Pinkhammer, yet
counting back to his birth by hours only, knew the rare joy of having come upon so
diverting a world full-fledged and unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic carpets
provided in theatres and roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and
delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and grotesque, drolly
extravagant parodies upon humankind. I went here and there at my own dear will,
bound by no limits of space, time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at
weirder tables d'hôte to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of
mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life quivers in the electric
glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery of the world, and its jewels, and
the ones whom they adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for
good cheer and the spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I have
mentioned I learned one thing that I never knew before. And that is that the key to
liberty is not in the hands of Licence, but Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-
gate at which you must pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the
glitter, the seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law, unobtrusive,
yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey these unwritten laws,
and then you will be freest of the free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put
on shackles.
Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly
murmuring palm rooms, redolent with high born life and delicate restraint, in which
to dine. Again I would go down to the waterways in steamers packed with
vociferous, bedecked, unchecked, love-making clerks and shop-girls to their crude
pleasures on the island shores. And there was always Broadway - glistening,
opulent, wily, varying, desirable Broadway growing upon one like an opium habit.
One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose and a black
moustache blocked my way in the corridor. When I would have passed around him,
he greeted me with offensive familiarity.
'Hallo, Bellford!' he cried loudly. 'What the deuce are you doing in New
York? Didn't know anything could drag you away from that old book then of yours.
Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little business run alone, eh?'
'You have made a mistake, sir,' I said coldly, releasing my hand from his
grasp. 'My name is Pinkhammer. You will excuse me.'
The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I walked to the
clerk's desk I heard him call to a bell boy and say something about telegraph blanks.
'You will give me my bill,' I said to the clerk, 'and have my baggage brought
down in half an hour. I dont care to remain where I am annoyed by confidence men.'
I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old fashioned one on lower
Fifth Avenue.
There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could be served
almost alfresco in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet and luxury and a perfect
service made it an ideal place in which to take luncheon or refreshment. One
afternoon I was there picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my
sleeve caught.
'Mr. Bellford!' exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.
I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone a lady of about thirty, with
exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as though I had been her very dear
friend.
'You were about to pass me,' she said accusingly. 'Don't tell me you did’nt
know me. Why should we not shake hands at least once in fifteen years?'
I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the table. I
summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady was philandering with
an orange ice. I ordered a creme de menthe. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could
not look at it, because you could not look away from her eyes. But you were
conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while you look into the profundities
of a wood at twilight.
'Are you sure you know me?' I asked.
'No,' she said, smiling, 'I was never sure of that.'
'What would you think,' I said, a little anxiously, 'if I were to tell you that
my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, Kansas.'
'What would I think?' she repeated, with a merry glance. 'Why, that you had
not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of course. I do wish you had. I
would have liked to see Marian.' Her voice lowered slightly . 'You haven't changed
much, Elwyn.'
I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more closely.
'Yes, you have,' she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note in her latest
tones; 'I see it now. You haven't forgotten. You haven't forgotten for a year or a day
or an hour. I told you you never could.'
I poked my straw anxiously in the crème de menthe.
'I'm sure I beg your pardon,' I said, a little uneasy at her gaze. 'But that is
just the trouble. I have forgotten. I've forgotten everything.'
She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she seemed to
see in my face.
'I've heard of you at times,' she went on. 'You're quite a big lawyer out West
Denver, isn't it, or Los Angeles? Marian must be very proud of you. You knew, I
suppose, that I married six months after you did. You may have seen it in the papers.
The flowers alone cost two thousand dollars.'
She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time.
'Would it be too late,' I asked somewhat timorously, 'to offer you
congratulations?'
'Not if you dare do it,' she answered, with such fine intrepidity that I was
silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb-nail.
'Tell me one thing,' she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly a thing I have
wanted to know for many years just from a woman's curiosity’, of course, have
you ever dared since that night to touch, smell or look at white roses at white roses
wet with rain and dew?'
I took a sip of crème de menthe.
It would be useless, I suppose,' I said, with a sigh, 'for me to repeat that I
have no recollection at all about these things. My memory is completely at fault. I
need not say how much I regret it.'
The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes disdained my
words and went travelling by their own route direct to my soul. She laughed softly,
with a strange quality in the sound - it was a laugh of happiness yes, and of content
- and of misery. I tried to look away from her.
'You lie, Elwyn Bellford,' she breathed blissfully. 'Oh, I know you lie!'
I gazed dully into the ferns.
'My name is Edward Pinkhammer,' I said. 'I came with the delegates to the
Druggists' National Convention. There is a movement on foot for arranging a new
position for the bottles of tartrate of antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very
likely, you would take little interest.'
A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I took her
hand, and bowed.
'I am deeply sorry,' I said to her, 'that I cannot remember. I could explain,
but fear you would not understand. You will not concede Pinkhammer; and I really
cannot at all conceive of the roses and other things.'
'Good bye, Mr. Bellford,' she said, with her happy, sorrowful smile, as she
stepped into her carriage.
I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel, a quiet man
in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his finger-nails with a silk
handkerchief, appeared, magically, at my side.
'Mr. Pinkhammer,' he said casually, giving the bulk of his attention to his
forefinger, 'may I request you to step aside with me for a little conversation? There
is a room here.'
'Certainly,' I answered.
He conducted me into a small, private parlour. A lady and a gentleman were
there. The lady, I surmised, would have been unusually good-looking had her
features not been clouded by an expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was of
a style of figure and possessed colouring and features that were agreeable to my
fancy. She was in a travelling-dress; she fixed upon me an earnest look of extreme
anxiety, and pressed an unsteady hand to her bosom. I think she would have started
forward, but the gentleman arrested her movement with an authoritative motion of
his hand. He then came, himself, to meet me. He was a man of forty, a little grey
about the temples, and with a strong, thoughtful face.
'Bellford, old man,' he said cordially, 'I'm glad to see you again. Of course
we know everything is all right. I warned you, you know, that you were overdoing
it. Now, you'll go back with us, and be yourself again in no time.'
I smiled ironically.
'I have been "Bellforded" so often,' I said, 'that it has lost its edge. Still, in
the end, it may grow wearisome. Would you be willing at all to entertain the
hypothesis that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, and that I never saw you before
in my life?'
Before the man could reply a wailing cry came from the woman. She sprang
past his detaining arm. 'Elwyn!' she sobbed, and cast herself upon me, and clung
tight. 'Elwyn,' she cried again, 'don't break my heart. I am your wife - call my name
once just once! I could see you dead rather than this way.'
I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.
'Madam,' I said severely, 'pardon me if I suggest that you accept a
resemblance too precipitately. It is a pity,' I went on, with an amused laugh, as the
thought occurred to me, 'that this Bellford and I could not be kept side by side upon
the same shelf like tartrates of sodium and antimony for purposes of identification.
In order to understand the allusion,' I concluded airily, 'it may be necessary for you
to keep an eye on the proceedings of the Druggists' National Convention.'
The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm.
'What is it, Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it?' she moaned.
He led her to the door.
'Go to your room for a while,' I heard him say. 'I will remain and talk with
him. His mind? No, I think not - only a portion of the brain. Yes, I am sure he will
recover. Go to your room and leave me with him.'
The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went outside, still
manicuring himself in a thoughtful way. I think he waited in the hall.
'I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pinkhammer, if I may,' said the
gentleman who remained.
'Very well, if you care to,' I replied, 'and will excuse me if I take it
comfortably; I am rather tired.' I stretched myself upon a couch by a window and
lit a cigar. He drew a chair nearby.
'Let us speak to the point,' he said soothingly. 'Your name is not
Pinkhammer.'
'I know that as well as you do,' I said coolly. 'But a man must have a name
of some sort. I can assure you that I do not extravagantly admire the name of
Pinkhammer. But when one christens one's self, suddenly the fine names do not
seem to suggest themselves. But suppose it had been Scheringhausen or Scroggins!
I think I did very well with Pinkhammer.'
'Your name,' said the other man seriously, 'is Elwyn C. Bellford. You are
one of the first lawyers in Denver. You are suffering from an attack of aphasia,
which has caused you to forget your identity. The cause of it was over-application
to your profession, and, perhaps, a life too bare of natural recreation and pleasures.
The lady who has just left the room is your wife.'
'She is what I would call a fine-looking woman,' I said, after a judicial pause.
'I particularly admire the shade of brown in her hair.'
'She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance, nearly two weeks
ago, she has scarcely closed her eyes. We learned that you were in New York
through a telegram sent by Isidore Newman, a travelling man from Denver. He said
that he had met you in an hotel here, and that you did not recognize him.'
'I think I remember the occasion,' I said. 'The fellow called me "Bellford,"
if I am not mistaken. But don't you think it about time, now, for you to introduce
yourself?'
'I am Robert Volney.Doctor Volney. I have been your close friend for
twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I came with Mrs. Bellford to trace you
as soon as we got the telegram. Try, Elwyn, old man - try to remember!'
'What's the use to try!' I asked, with a little frown. 'You say you are a
physician. Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his memory, does it return slowly,
or suddenly?'
'Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as suddenly as it went.'
'Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor Volney?' I asked.
'Old friend,' said he, 'I'll do everything in my power, and will have done
everything that science can do to cure you.'
'Very well,' said I. 'Then you will consider that I am your patient. Everything
is in confidence now ,professional confidence.'
'Of course,' said Doctor Volney.
I got up from the couch. Someone had set a vase of white roses on the centre
table ,a cluster of white roses freshly sprinkled and fragrant. I threw them far out of
the window, and then I laid myself upon the couch again.
'It will be best, Bobby,' I said, 'to have this cure happen suddenly. I'm rather
tired of it all, anyway. You may go now and bring Marian in. But, oh, Doc,' I said,
with a sigh, as I kicked him on the shin , 'good old Doc, it was glorious!'
A Municipal Report
The cities are full of pride,

Challenging each to each,
This from her mountainside,
That from her burthened beach.
R. KIPLING.
Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee!

There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities' - New York,
of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco. - FRANK NORRIS.
East is east, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are
a race of people,they are not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners
of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city, but when you ask them
why, they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But
Californians go into detail.
Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half an
hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as
they come to mistake your silence for conviction, madness comes upon them, and
they picture the city of the Golden Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far,
as a matter of opinion, no refutation is necessary. But, dear cousins all (from Adam
and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and say: 'In
this town there can be no romance ,what could happen here?' Yes, it is a bold and
a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand and McNally.
NASHVILLE. a city, port of delivery, and the capital of the State of
Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N.C. & St. L. and the L. & N.
railroads. This city is regarded as the most important educational centre in the
South.
I stepped off the train at 8 p.m. Having searched the thesaurus in vain for
adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison in the form of a recipe.
Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops,
gathered in a brickyard at sunrise, 25 parts; odour of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.
The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle.

It is not so fragrant as a moth ball nor as thick as pea soup; but 'tis enough,'twill
serve.
I went to an hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self suppression for me to
keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation of Sidney Carton. The
vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone era and driven by something dark and
emancipated.
I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid it the fifty
cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure you). I knew its habits;
and I did not want to hear it prate about its old 'marster' or anything that happened
'befo' de wah.'
The hotel was one of the kind described as 'renovated.' That means $20,000
worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights and brass cuspidors in the lobby,
and a new L. & N. time table and a lithograph of Lookout Mountain in each one of
the great rooms above. The management was without reproach, the attention full of
exquisite Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and as
good-humoured as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth travelling a thousand
miles for. There is no other hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers
en brochette.
At dinner I asked a negro waiter if there was anything doing in town. He
pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: 'Well, boss, I don't really reckon
there's anything at all doin' after sundown.'
Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the drizzle long
before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went forth upon the streets in the
drizzle to see what might be there.
It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted by electricity at
a cost of $32,470 per annum.
As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged a company
of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus, armed with - no, I saw with relief that they were
not rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a caravan of black, clumsy vehicles; and at
the reassuring shouts, 'Kyar you anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents,' I
reasoned that I was merely a 'fare' instead of a victim.
I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I wondered how those
streets ever came down again. Perhaps they didn't until they were 'graded.' On a
few of the 'main streets' I saw lights in stores here and there; saw street,cars go by
conveying worthy burghers hither and yon; saw people pass engaged in the art of
conversation, and heard a burst of semi lively laughter issuing from a soda-water
and ice cream parlour. The streets other than 'main' seemed to have enticed upon
their borders houses consecrated to peace and domesticity. In many of them lights
shone behind discreetly drawn window shades, in a few pianos tinkled orderly and
irreproachable music. There was, indeed, little 'doing.' I wished I had come before
sundown. So I returned to my hotel.
In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced against
Nashville, where he shut up a National force under General Thomas. The latter then
sallied forth and defeated the confederates in a terrible conflict.
All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine markmanship
of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the tobaccochewing regions. But in my hotel
a surprise awaited me. There were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass
cuspidors in the great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so widemouthed that
the crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should
have been able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces distant. But,
although a terrible battle had raged and was still raging, the enemy had not suffered.
Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched, they stood. But shades of Jefferson
Brick! the tile floor the beautiful tile floor! I could’nt avoid thinking of the battle
of Nashville, and trying to draw, as is my foolish habit, some deductions about
hereditary markmanship.
Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Wentworth Caswell. I knew
him for a type the moment my eyes suffered from the sight of him. A rat has no
geographical habitat. My old friend, A. Tennyson, said, as he so well said almost
everything:
'Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,
And curse me the British vermin, the rat.'
Let us regard the word 'British' as interchangeable ad lib. A rat is a rat.
This man was hunting about the hotel lobby like a starved dog that had
forgotten where he had buried a bone. He had a face of great acreage, red, pulpy,
and with a kind of sleepy massiveness like that of Buddha. He possessed one single
virtue - he was very smoothly shaven. The mark of the beast is not indelible upon
a man until he goes about with a stubble. I think that if he had not used his razor
that day I would have repulsed his advances, and the criminal calendar of the world
would have been spared the addition of one murder.
I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when Major Caswell
opened fire upon it. I had been observant enough to perceive that the attacking force
was using Gatlings instead of squirrel rifles,so I side stepped so promptly that the
major seized the opportunity to apologize to a non combatant. He had the blabbing
lip. In four minutes he had become my friend and had dragged me to the bar.
I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not one by
profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat, the Prince Albert, the
number of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman, and plug chewing. When the
orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer. I slide a little lower on the leather cornered
seat and, well, order another Würzburger and wish that Longstreet had - but what's
the use?
Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at Fort Sumter
re-echoed. When he fired the last one at Appomattox I began to hope. But then he
began on family trees, and demonstrated that Adam was only a third cousin of a
collateral branch of the Caswell family. Genealogy disposed of, he took up, to my
distaste, his private family matters. He spoke of his wife, traced her descent back
to Eve, and profanely denied any possible rumour that she may have had relations
in the land of Nod.
By this time I began to suspect that he was trying to obscure by noise the
fact that he had ordered the drinks, on the chance that I would be bewildered into
paying for them. But when they were down he crashed a silver dollar loudly upon
the bar. Then, of course, another serving was obligatory. And when I had paid for
that I took leave of him brusquely, for I wanted no more of him. But before I had
obtained my release he had prated loudly of an income that his wife received, and
showed a handful of silver money.
When I got my key at the desk the clerk said to me courteously: 'If that man
Caswell has annoyed you, and if you would like to make a complaint, we will have
him ejected. He is a nuisance, a loafer, and without any known means of support,
although he seems to have some money most the time. But we don't seem to be able
to hit upon any means of throwing him out legally.'
'Why, no,' said I, after some reflection; 'I don't see my way clear to making
a complaint. But I would like to place myself on record as asserting that I do not
care for his company. Your town,' I continued, 'seems to be a quiet one. What
manner of entertainment, adventure, or excitement have you to offer to the stranger
within your gates?'
'Well, sir,' said the clerk, 'there will be a show here next Thursday. It is I'll
look it up and have the announcement sent up to your room with the ice water.
Good night.'
After I went up to my room I looked out of the window. It was only about
ten o'clock, but I looked upon a silent town. The drizzle continued, spangled with
dim lights, as far apart as currants in a cake sold at the Ladies' Exchange.
'A quiet place,' I said to myself, as my first shoe struck the ceiling of the
occupant of the room beneath mine. 'Nothing of the life here that gives colour and
variety to the cities in the East and West. Just a good, ordinary, humdrum business
town.'
Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing centres of
the country. It is the fifth boot and shoe market in the United States, the largest
candy and cracker manufacturing city in the South, and does an enormous
wholesale dry goods, grocery and drug business.
I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and assure you the digression
brings as much tedium to me as it does to you. I was travelling elsewhere on my
own business, but I had a commission from a Northern literary magazine to stop
over there and establish a personal connection between the publication and one of
its contributors, Azalea Adair.
Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the handwriting) had sent
in some essays (lost art!) and poems that had made the editors swear approvingly
over their one o'clock luncheon. So they had commissioned me to round up said
Adair and corner by contract his or her output at two cents a word before some
other publisher offered her ten or twenty.
At nine o'clock the next morning, after my chicken livers en brochette (try
them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into the drizzle, which was still on for
an unlimited run. At the first corner I came upon Uncle Cæsar. He was a stalwart
negro, older than the pyramids, with grey wool and a face that reminded me of
Brutus, and a second afterwards of the late King Cetewayo. He wore the most
remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to see. It reached to his ankles and
had once been a Confederate grey in colours. But rain and sun and age had so
variegated it that Joseph's coat, beside it, would have faded to a pale monochrome.
I must linger with that coat for it has to do with the story - the story that is so long
in coming, because you can hardly expect anything to happen in Nashville.
Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape of it had
vanished, but all adown its front it had been frogged and tasselled magnificently.
But now the frogs and tassels were gone. In their stead had been patiently stitched
(I surmised by some surviving 'black mammy') new frogs made of cunningly
twisted common hempen twine. This twine was frayed and dishevelled. It must
have been added to the coat as a substitute for vanished splendours, with tasteless
but painstaking devotion, for it followed faithfully the curves of the long-missing
frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its buttons were
gone save one. The second button from the top alone remained. The coat was
fastened by other twine strings tied through the buttonholes and other holes rudely
pierced in the opposite side. There was never such a weird garment so fantastically
bedecked and of so many mottled hues. The lone button was the size of a half-
dollar, made of yellow horn and sewed on with coarse twine.
This negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might have started
a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two animals hitched to it. As I
approached he threw open the door, drew out a leather duster, waved it, without
using it, and said in deep, rumbling tones:
'Step right in, suh; ain't a speck of dust in it - jus' back from a funeral, suh.'
I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages were given an extra cleaning.
I looked up and down the street and perceived that there was little choice among
the vehicles for hire that lined the kerb. I looked in my memorandum book for the
address of Azalea Adair.
'I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street,' I said, and was about to step into the
hack. But for an instant the thick, long,like gorillas arm of the old negro barred me.
On his massive and saturnine face a look of sudden suspicion and enmity flashed
for a moment. Then, with quickly returning conviction, he asked blandishingly:
'What are you gwine there for, boss?'
'What is that to you?' I asked a little sharply.
'Nothin', suh, jus' nothin'. Only it's a lonesome kind of part of town and few
folks ever has business out there. Step right in. The seats is clean ,just got back from
a funeral, suh.' A mile and a half it must have been to our journey's end. I could
hear nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient hack over the uneven brick paving;
I could smell nothing but the drizzle, now further flavoured with coal smoke and
something like a mixture of tar and oleander blossoms. All I could see through the
streaming windows were two rows of dim houses.
The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets, of which 137
miles are paved; a system of waterworks that cost $2,000,000, with 77 miles of
mains.
Eight sixty one Jessamine Street was a decayed mansion. Thirty yards back
from the street it stood, outmerged in a splendid grove of trees and untrimmed
shrubbery. A row of box bushes overflowed and almost hid the paling fence from
sight; the gate was kept closed by a rope noose that encircled the gate post and the
first paling of the gate. But when you got inside you saw that 861 was a shell, a
shadow, a ghost of former grandeur and excellence. But in the story, I have not yet
got inside.
When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary quadrupeds came to
a rest I handed my jehu his fifty cents with an additional quarter, feeling a glow of
conscious generosity as I did so. He refused it.
'It's two dollars, suh,' he said.
'How's that?' I asked. 'I plainly heard you call out at the hotel: "Fifty cents
to any part of the town." '
'It's two dollars, suh,' he repeated obstinately. 'It's a long ways from the
hotel.'
'It is within the city limits and well within them,' I argued. 'Don't think that
you have picked up a greenhorn Yankee. Do you see those hills over there?' I went
on, pointing toward the east (I could not see them, myself, for the drizzle); 'well, I
was born and raised on their other side. You old fool nigger, can't you tell people
from other people when you see em?'
The grim face of King Cetewayo softened. 'Is you from the South, suh? I
reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. There is somethin' sharp in the toes
for a Southern gen'l'man to wear.'
'Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?' said I inexorably.
His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility, returned,
remained ten minutes, and vanished.
'Boss,' he said, 'fifty cents is right; but I needs two dollars, suh; I'm obleeged
to have two dollars. I ain't demandin' it now, suh; after I knows whar you's from;
I'm jus' sayin' that I has to have two dollars to-night, and business is mighty po'.'
Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had been luckier
than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a greenhorn, ignorant of rates, he
had come upon an inheritance.
'You confounded old rascal,' I said, reaching down into my pocket, 'you
ought to be turned over to the police.'
For the first time I saw him smile. He knew, he knew, he knew.
I gave him two one dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed that one of
them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand corner was missing, and it had
been torn through in the middle but joined again. A strip of blue tissue paper, pasted
over the split, preserved its negotiability.
Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy, lifted the
rope and opened the creaky gate.
The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint-brush had not touched it in twenty
years. I could not see why a strong wind should not have bowled it over like a house
of cards until I looked again at the trees that hugged it close - the trees that saw the
battle of Nashville and still drew their protecting branches around it against storm
and enemy and cold.
Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descendant of the cavaliers, as
thin and frail as the house she lived in, robed in the cheapest and cleanest dress I
ever saw, with an air as simple as a queen's, received me.
The reception-room seemed a mile square, because there was nothing in it
except some rows of books, on unpainted, white-pine bookshelves, a cracked,
marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless horsehair sofa and two or three chairs. Yes,
there was a picture on the wall, a coloured crayon drawing of a cluster of pansies.
I looked around for the portrait of Andrew Jackson and the pine-cone hanging
basket, but they were not there.
Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which will be repeated to
you. She was a product of the old South, gently nurtured in the sheltered life. Her
learning was not broad, but was deep and of splendid originality in its somewhat
narrow scope. She had been educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was
derived from inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of
essayists made. While she talked to me, I kept brushing my fingers, trying,
unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the half-calf backs of
Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and Hood. She was exquisite,
she was a valuable discovery. Nearly everybody nowadays knows too much - oh,
so much too much - of real life.
I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A house and a
dress she had, not much else, I fancied. So, divided between my duty to the
magazine and my loyalty to the poets and essayists who fought Thomas in the
valley of the Cumberland, I listened to her voice, which was like a harpsichord's,
and found that I could not speak of contracts. In the presence of the Nine Muses
and the Three Graces one hesitated to lower the topic to two cents. There would
have to be another colloquy after I had regained my commercialism. But I spoke of
my mission, and three o'clock of the next afternoon was set for the discussion of
the business proposition.
'Your town,' I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is the time for
smooth generalities), 'seems to be a quiet, sedate place. A home town, I should say,
where few things out of the ordinary ever happen.'
It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with the West and
South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more than 2,000 barrels.
Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.
'I have never thought of it that way,' she said, with a kind of sincere intensity
that seemed to belong to her. 'Isn't it in the still, quiet places that things do happen?
I fancy that when God began to create the earth on the first Monday morning one
could have leaned out one's windows and heard the drop of mud splashing from His
trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world
- I mean the building of the tower of Babel - result in finally? A page and a half of
Esperanto in the North American Review.'
'Of course,' said I platitudinously, 'human nature is the same everywhere;
but there is more colour,three more drama and movement and there romance in
some cities than in others.'
'On the surface,' said Azalea Adair. 'I have travelled many times around the
world in a golden airship wafted on two wings - print and dreams. I have seen (on
one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of Turkey bow-string with his own hands
one of his wives who had uncovered her face in public. I have seen a man in
Nashville tear up his theatre tickets because his wife was going out with her face
covered - with rice powder. In San Francisco's Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing
Yee dipped slowly, inch by inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she would
never see her American lover again. She gave in when the boiling oil had reached
three inches above her knee. At a euchre party in East Nashville the other night I
saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her schoolmates and lifelong friends
because she had married a house painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as her
heart; but I wish you could have seen the fine little smile that she carried from table
to table. Oh yes, it is a humdrum town. Just a few miles of redbrick houses and mud
and stores and lumber yards.'
Someone knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea Adair breathed
a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. She came back in three minutes
with brightened eyes, a faint flush on her cheeks, and ten years lifted from her
shoulders.
'You must have a cup of tea before you go,' she said, 'and a sugar cake.'
She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small negro girl about
twelve, bare-foot, not very tidy, glowering at me with thumb in mouth and bulging
eyes.
Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar bill, a dollar
bill with the upper right hand corner missing, torn in two pieces and pasted together
again with a strip of blue tissuepaper. It was one of the bills I had given the piratical
negro,there was no doubt of it.
'Go up to Mr. Baker's store on the corner, Impy,' she said, handing the girl
the dollar bill, 'and get a quarter of a pound of tea - the kind he always sends me
and ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry. The supply of tea in the house
happens to be exhausted,' she explained to me.
Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet had died
away on the back porch, a wild shriek .I was sure it was hers filled the hollow
house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry man's voice mingled with the girl's
further squeals and unintelligible words.
Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared. For two
minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man's voice,then something like an oath
and a light scuffle, and she returned calmly to her chair.
'This is a roomy house,' she said, 'and I have a tenant for part of it. I am
sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible to get the kind I
always use at the store. Perhaps tomorrow Mr. Baker will be able to supply me.'
I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I inquired
concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After I was well on my way I
remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair's name. But tomorrow would do.
That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this uneventful city
forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, but in that time I managed to lie
shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an accomplice ,after the fact, if that is the
correct legal term to a murder.
As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of the
polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the dungeony door of his
peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster and began his ritual: 'Step right
in, boss. Carriage is clean just got back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any - '
And then he knew me and grinned broadly. ' 'excusme me boss, you is the
gentleman what ride out with me this morning. Thank you kindly, suh.'
'I am going out to 861 again tomorrow afternoon at three,' said I, 'and if you
will be here, I'll let you drive me. So you know Miss Adair?' I concluded, thinking
of my dollar bill.
'I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh,' he replied.
'I judge that she is pretty poor,' I said. 'She hasn't much money to speak of,
has she?'
For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King Cetewayo,
and then he changed back to an extortionate old negro hack-driver.
'She a'n't gwine to starve, suh,' he said slowly. 'She has reso'ces, suh; she
has reso'ces.'
'I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,' said I.
thaat is perfectly correct, suh,' he answered humbly; 'I just had to have that
two dollars this morning, boss.'
I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: 'A. Adair
holds out for eight cents a word.'
The answer that came back was: 'Give it to her quick, you duffer.'
Just before dinner 'Major' Wentworth Caswell bore down upon me with the
greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men whom I have so instantaneously
hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was standing at the bar when he
invaded me; therefore I could not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would have
paid gladly for the drinks, hoping thereby to escape another, but he was one of those
despicable, roaring, advertising bibbers who must have brass bands and fireworks
attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.
With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills from a pocket
and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once more at the dollar bill with the
upper right-hand corner missing, torn through the middle, and patched with a strip
of blue tissue-paper. It was my dollar bill again. It could have been no other.
I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary, eventless
Southern town had made me tired and listless. I remember that just before I went
to bed I mentally disposed of the mysterious dollar bill (which might have formed
the clue to a tremendously fine detective story of San Francisco) by saying to
myself sleepily: 'Seems as if a lot of people here own stock in the Hack Driver's
Trust. Pays dividends promptly, too. Wonder if - ' Then I fell asleep.
King Cetewayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones over the
stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back again when I was ready.
Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had looked on
the day before. After she had signed the contract at eight cents per word she grew
still paler and began to slip out of her chair. Without much trouble I managed to get
her up on the antediluvian horsehair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and
yelled to the coffee coloured Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not
suspected in him, he abandoned his team and struck off up the street afoot, realizing
the value of speed. In ten minutes he returned with a grave, grey-haired and capable
man of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight cents each) I
explained to him my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He bowed with
stately understanding, and turned to the old negro.
'Uncle Cæsar,' he said calmly, 'run up to my house and ask Miss Lucy to
give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler of port wine. And
hurry back. Don't drive - run. I want you to get back some time this week.'
It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the speeding
powers of the landpirate's steeds. After Uncle Cæsar was gone, lumberingly, but
swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me over with great politeness and as much
careful calculation until he had decided that I might do.
'It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,' he said. 'In other words, the result
of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell has many devoted friends who
would be glad to aid her, but she will accept nothing except from that old negro,
Uncle Cæsar, who was once owned by her family.'
'Mrs. Caswell!' said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract and saw
that she had signed it 'Azalea Adair Caswell.' 'I thought she was Miss Adair,' I said.
'Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,' said the doctor. 'It is said that
he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant contributes toward her
support.'
When the milk and wine had been brought, the doctor soon revived Azalea
Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the autumn leaves that were then in
season, and their height of colour. She referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the
outcome of an old palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa.
The doctor was due elsewhere, and I followed him to the door. I told him that it
was within my power and intentions to make a reasonable advance of money to
Azalea Adair on future contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased.
'By the way,' he said, 'perhaps you would like to know that you have had
royalty for a coachman. Old Cæsar's grandfather was a king in Congo. Cæsar
himself has royal ways, as you may have observed.'
As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar's voice inside: 'Did he
git bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis' Zalea?'
'Yes, Cæsar,' I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I went in and
concluded business negotiations with our contributor. I assumed the responsibility
of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a necessary formality in binding our bargain.
And then Uncle Cæsar drove me back to the hotel.
Here ends all the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The rest must be
only bare statements of facts.
At about six o'clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Cæsar was at his corner.
He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his duster and began his
depressing formula: 'Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to anywhere in the city - hack's
puffickly clean, suh - jus' got back from a funeral - '
And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad. His coat
had taken on a few more faded shades of colour, the twine strings were more frayed
and ragged, the last remaining button - the button of yellow horn - was gone. A
motley descendant of kings was Uncle Caesar.
About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front of a drug
store. In a desert where nothing happens this was manna,so i edged my way inside.
On an extemporized couch of empty boxes and chairs was stretched the mortal
corporeality of Major Wentworth Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the
immortal ingredient. His decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence.
The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by
curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The late human being had been
engaged in terrific battle the details showed that. Loafer and reprobate though he
had been, he had been also a warrior. But he had lost. His hands were yet clenched
so tightly that his fingers would not be opened. The gentle citizens who had known
him stood about and searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were
possible, to speak of him. One kind-looking man said, after much thought: 'When
"Cas" was about fo'teen he was one of the best spellers in school.'
While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of 'the man that was,' which
hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and dropped something at my feet.
I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little later on I picked it up and pocketed it.
I reasoned that in his last struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly
and held it in a death grip.
At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the possible
exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of Major Caswell. I heard
one man say to a group of listeners:
'In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these no
account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this afternoon which he showed
to several gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found the money was not on his
person.'
I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing the
bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow, horn, overcoat
button the size of a fifty cent piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from
it, and cast it out of the window into the slow, muddy waters below.
I wonder what's doing in Buffalo!
LI
Compliments of the Season
There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper
items the next best, are manufactured by clever young Journalists who have married
early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable
diversion, we are reduced to two very questionable sources - facts and philosophy.
We will begin with - whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a
bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm
them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and
then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and
ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one
understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.
ow come the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion, and the
Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her rag-doll.
There were many servants in the Millionaire's palace on the Hudson, and these
ransacked the house and grounds, but without finding the lost treasure. The Child
was a girl of five, and one of those perverse little beasts that often wound the
sensibilities of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar,
'P-pardon, lady,' he said, 'but couldn't leave without exchangin' comp'ments
sheason with lady th' house. ' 'Gainst princ'ples gen'leman do sho.'
And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in the House
when men wore lace ruffles and powder.
'The blessings of another year - '
Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted:
'- Be upon this hearth.'
'- The guest - ' stammered Fuzzy.
'- And upon her who - ' continued the Lady, with a leading smile.
'Oh, cut it out,' said Fuzzy ill-manneredly. 'I can't remember. Drink hearty.'
Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again the smile of
her caste. James enveloped Fuzzy and re-conducted him toward the front door. The
harp music still softly drifted through the house
Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the gate.
'I wonder,' said the Lady to herself, musing 'who - but there were so many
who came. I wonder whether memory is a curse or a blessing to them after they
have fallen so low.'
Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called: 'James!'
James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting unsteadily, with
his brief spark of the divine fire gone.
Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip on his
section of gas-pipe.
'You will conduct this gentleman,' said the Lady, 'downstairs. Then tell
Louis to get out the Mercedes and take him to whatever place he wishes to go.'
LII
Proof of the Puddin
Spring winked a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook, of the Minerva Magazine, and
deflected him from his course. He had lunched in his favourite corner of a
Broadway hotel, and was returning to his office when his feet became entangled in
the lure of the vernal coquette. Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward
in Twenty sixth Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles in Fifth Avenue,
and meandered along the walks of budding Madison Square.
The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed a pastoral,
the colour motif was green, the presiding shade at the creation of man and
vegetation.
The callow grass between the walks was the colour of verdigris, a poisonous
green, reminiscent of the horde of derelict humans that had breathed upon the soil
during the summer and autumn. The bursting tree buds looked strangely familiar to
those who had botanized among the garnishings of the fish course of a forty cent
dinner. The sky above was of that pale aquamarine tint that hallroom poets rhyme
with 'true' and 'Sue' and 'coo.' The one natural and frank colour visible was the
ostensible green of the newly painted benches a shade between the colour of a
pickled cucumber and that of a last year's fast back cravenette raincoat. But, to the
city bred eye of Editor Westbrook, the landscape appeared a masterpiece.
And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the gentle concourse
that fears to tread, you must follow in a brief invasion of the editor's mind.
Editor Westbrook's spirit was contented and serene. The April number of
the Minerva had sold its entire edition before the tenth day of the month a news
dealer in Keokuk had written that he could have sold fifty copies more if he had
had them. The owners of the magazine had raised his (the editor's) salary; he had
just installed in his home a jewel of a recently imported cook who was afraid of
policeman, and the morning papers had published in full a speech he had made at a
publishers' banquet. Also there were echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a
splendid song that his charming young wife had sung to him before he left his
uptown apartment that morning. She was taking enthusiastic interest in her music
of late, practising early and diligently. When he had complimented her on the
improvement in her voice she had fairly hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt,
too, the benign, tonic medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly
adown the wards of the convalescent city.
While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between rows of park benches
(already filling with vagrants and the guardians of lawless childhood) he felt his
sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he was about to be panhandled, he turned
a cold and unprofitable face, and saw that his captor was Dawe.Shackleford Dawe,
dingy, almost ragged, the genteel scarcely visible in him through the deeper lines
of the shabby.
While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight biography
of Dawe is offered.
He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old acquaintances. At one
time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe had some money in those
days, and lived in a decent apartment-house near Westbrook's. The two families
often went to theatres and dinners together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became
'dearest' friends. Then one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself,
ingurgitated Dawe's capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park neighbourhood,
where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one's trunk under eightbranched
chandeliers and opposite Carrara marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the
floor. Dawe thought to live by writing fiction. Now and then he sold a story. He
submitted many to Westbrook. The Minerva printed one or two of them; the rest
were returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious personal letter with each
rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for considering it unavailable.
Editor Westbrook had his own clear conception of what constituted good fiction.
So had Dawe. Mrs. Dawe was mainly concerned about the constituents of the scanty
dishes of food that she managed to scrape together. One day Dawe had been
spouting to her about the excellences of certain French writers. At dinner they sat
down to a dish that a hungry schoolboy could have encompassed at a gulp. Dawe
commented.
'It's Maupassant hash,' said Mrs. Dawe. 'It may not be art, but I do wish you
would do a five course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet
for dessert. I'm hungry.'
As far as this from success was Shackleford Dawe when he plucked Editor
Westbrook's sleeve in Madison Square. That was the first time the editor had seen
Dawe in several months.
'Why, Shack, is this you?' said Westbrook somewhat awkwardly, for the
form of this phrase seemed to touch upon the other's changed appearance.
'Sit down for a minute,' said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve. 'This is my office.
I can't come to yours, looking as I do. Oh, sit down - you won't be disgraced. Those
half-plucked birds on the other benches will take you for a swell porch climber.
They won't know you are only an editor.'
'Smoke, Shack?' said Editor Westbrook, sinking cautiously upon the
virulent green bench. He always yielded gracefully when he did yield.
Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a sunperch, or a girl pecks
at a chocolate cream.
'I have just began the edit’.
'Oh, I know, don't finish,' said Dawe. 'Give me a match. You have just ten
minutes to spare. How did you manage to get past my office-boy and invade my
sanctum? There he goes now, throwing his club at a dog that couldn't read the "Keep
off the Grass" signs.'
'How goes the writing?' asked the editor.
'Look at me,' said Dawe, 'for your answer. Now don't put on that
embarrassed, friendly but honest look and ask me why I don't get a job as a wine
agent or a cab driver. I'm in the fight to a finish. I know I can write good fiction and
I'll force you fellows to admit it yet. I'll make you change the spelling of "regrets"
to C-H-E-Q-U-E" before I'm done with you.'
Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose glasses with a sweetly sorrowful,
omniscient, sympathetic, sceptical expression, the copyrighted expression of the
editor beleaguered by the unavailable contributor.
'Have you read the last story I sent you , "The Alarum of the Soul"?' asked
Dawe.
'Carefully. I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did. It had some good
points. I was writing you a letter to send with it when it goes back to you. I regret.
'Never mind the regrets,' said Dawe grimly. 'There's neither salve nor sting
in them any more. What I want to know is why. Come,now out with the good points
first.'
'The story,' said Westbrook deliberately, after a suppressed sigh, 'is written
around an almost original plot. Characterization the best you have done.
Construction almost as good, except for a few weak joints which might be
strengthened by a few changes and touches. It was a good story, except - '
'I can write English, can't I?' interrupted Dawe.
'I have always told you,' said the editor, 'that you had a style.
'Then the trouble is the ''same old thing,' said Editor Westbrook. 'You work
up to your climax like an artist. And then you turn yourself into a photographer. I
don't know what form of obstinate madness possesses you, Shack, but that is what
you do with everything that you write. No, I will retract the comparison with the
photographer. Now and then photography, in spite of its impossible perspective,
manages to record a fleeting glimpse of truth. But you spoil every denouement by
those flat, drab, obliterating strokes of your brush that I have so often complained
of. If you would rise to the literary pinnacle of your dramatic scenes, and paint them
in the high colours that art requires, the postman would leave fewer bulky, self
addressed envelopes at your door.''Oh, fiddles and footlights!' cried Dawe
derisively. 'You've got that old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet. When the man
with the black moustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie you are bound to have the
mother kneel and raise her hands in the spotlight and say: "May high heaven witness
that I will rest neither night nor day till the heartless villain that has stolen me child
feels the weight of a mother's vengeance!" '
Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency.
'I think,' said he, 'that in real life the woman would express herself in those
words or in very similar ones.'
'Not in a six hundred nights' run anywhere but on the stage,' said Dawe
hotly. 'I'll tell you what she'd say in real life. She'd say: "What! Bessie led away by
a strange man? Good Lord! It's one trouble after another! Get my other hat, I must
hurry around to the police station. Why wasn't somebody looking after her, I'd like
to know? For God's sake, get out of my way or I'll never get ready. Not that hat,the
brown one with the velvet bows. Bessie must have been craz, she's usually shy of
strangers. Is that too much powder? Lordy! How I'm upset!"
'That's the way she'd talk,' continued Dawe. 'People in real life don't fly into
heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They simply can't do it. If they talk at
all on such occasions they draw from the same vocabulary that they use every day,
and muddle up their words and ideas a little more, that's all.'
'Shack,' said Editor Westbrook impressively, 'did you ever pick up the
mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of a street car, and carry
it in your arms and lay it down before the distracted mother? Did you ever do that
and listen to the words of grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her
lips?'
'I never did,' said Dawe. 'Did you?'
'Well, no,' said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. 'But I can well
imagine what she would say.'
'So can I,' said Dawe.
And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play the oracle
and silence his opinionated contributor. It was not for an unarrived fictionist to
dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and heroines of the Minerva Magazine,
contrary to the theories of the editor thereof.
'My dear Shack,' said he, 'if I know anything of life I know that every
sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls forth an apposite,
concordant, conformable, and proportionate expression of feeling? How much of
this inevitable accord between expression and feeling should be attributed to nature,
and how much to the influence of art, it would be difficult to say. The sublimely
terrible roar of the lioness that has been deprived of her cubs is dramatically as far
above her customary whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent utterances of
Lear are above the level of his senile vapourings. But it is also true that all men and
women have what may be called a subconscious dramatic sense that is awakened
by a sufficiently deep and powerful emotion - a sense unconsciously acquired from
literature and the stage that prompts them to express those emotions in language
befitting their importance and histrionic value.'
'And in the name of seven sacred saddle blankets of Sagittarius, where did
the stage and literature get the stunt?' asked Dawe.
'From life,' answered the editor triumphantly.
The story writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently but
dumbly. He was beggared for words with which to formulate adequately his dissent.
On a bench near by a frowsy loafer opened his red eyes and perceived that
his moral support was due to a down-trodden brother.
'Punch him one, Jack,' he called hoarsely to Dawe. 'What's he come making
a noise like a penny arcade for amongst gentlemen that comes in the Square to set
and think?'
Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of leisure.
'Tell me,' asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, 'what especial faults in "The
Alarum of the Soul" caused you to throw it down.'
'When Gabriel Murray,' said Westbrook, 'goes to his telephone and is told
that his fiancée has been shot by a burglar, he says, I don’t recall the exact words,
but - '
'I do,' said Dawe. 'He says: "Damn Central; she always cuts me off." (And
then to his friend): "Say, Tommy, does a thirty-two bullet make a big hole? It's kind
of hard luck, ain't it? Could you get me a drink from the sideboard, Tommy? No;
straight; nothing on the side." '
'And again,' continued the editor, without pausing for argument, 'when
Berenice opens the letter from her husband informing her that he has fled with the
manicure girl, her words are - let me see - '
'She says,' interposed the author: ' "Well, what do you think of that!" '
'Absurdly inappropriate words,' said Westbrook, 'presenting an anti-climax
- plunging the story into hopeless bathos. Worse yet; they mirror life falsely. No
human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms when confronted by sudden
tragedy.'
'Wrong,' said Dawe, closing his unshaven jaws doggedly. 'I say no man or
woman ever spouts highfalutin talk when they go up against a real climax. They
talk naturally, and a little worse.'
The editor rose from the bench with his air of indulgence and inside
information.
'Say, Westbrook,' said Dawe, pinning him by the lapel, 'would you have
accepted "The Alarum of the Soul" if you had believed that the actions and words
of the characters were true to life in the parts of the story that we discussed?'
'It is very likely that I would, if I believed that way,' said the editor. 'But I
have explained to you that I do not.'
'If I could prove to you that I am right?'
'I'm sorry, Shack, but I'm afraid I haven't time to argue any further just now.'
'I don't want to argue,' said Dawe. 'I want to demonstrate to you from life
itself that my view is the correct one.'
'How could you do that?' asked Westbrook in a surprised tone.
'Listen,' said the writer seriously. 'I have thought of a way. It is important to
me that my theory of true-to-life fiction be recognized as correct by the magazines.
I've fought for it for three years, and I'm down to my last dollar, with two months'
rent due.'
'I have applied the opposite of your theory,' said the editor, 'in selecting the
fiction for the Minerva Magazine. The circulation has gone up from ninety thousand
to - '
'Four hundred thousand,' said Dawe. 'Whereas it should have been boosted
to a million.'
'You said something to me just now about demonstrating your pet theory.'
'I will. If you'll give me about half an hour of your time I'll prove to you that
I am right. I'll prove it by Louise.'
'Your wife!' exclaimed Westbrook. 'How?'
'Well, not exactly by her, but with her,' said Dawe. 'Now, you know how
devoted and loving Louise has always been. She thinks I'm the only genuine
preparation on the market that bears the old doctor's signature. She's been fonder
and more faithful than ever, since I've been cast for the neglected genius part.'
'Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion,' agreed the editor.
'I remember what inseparable friends she and Mrs. Westbrook once were. We are
both lucky chaps, Shack, to have such wives. You must bring Mrs. Dawe up some
evening soon, and we'll have one of those informal chafing dish suppers that we
used to enjoy so much.'
'Later,' said Dawe. 'When I get another shirt. And now I'll tell you my
scheme. When I was about to leave home after breakfast , if you can call tea and
oatmeal breakfast. Louise told me she was going to visit her aunt in Eighty ninth
Street. She said she would return home at three o'clock. She is always on time to a
minute. It is now - '
Dawe glanced toward the editor's watch pocket.
'Twenty seven minutes to three,' said Westbrook, scanning his timepiece.
'We have just enough time,' said Dawe. 'We will go to my flat at once. I will
write a note, address it to her and leave it on the table where she will see it as she
enters the door. You and I will be in the dining-room concealed by the portieres. In
that note I'll say that I have fled from her for ever with an affinity who understands
the needs of my artisticsoul as she never did. When she reads it we will observe her
actions and hear her words. Then we will know which theory is the correct one,
yours or mine.!
'Oh, never!' exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. 'That would be
inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have Mrs. Dawe's feelings played upon in
such a manner.'
'Brace up,' said the writer. 'I guess I think as much of her as you do. It's for
her benefit as well as mine. I've got to get a market for my stories in some way. It
won't hurt Louise. She's healthy and sound. Her heart goes as strong as a ninety-
eight cent watch. It'll last for only a minute, and then I'll step out and explain to her.
You really owe it to me to give me the chance, Westbrook.'
Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half willingly. And in the
half of him that consented lurked the vivisectionist that is in all of us.
Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his place. Pity 'tis that
there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs to go around.
The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried eastward and then
to the south until they arrived in the Gramercy neighbourhood. Within its high iron
railings the little park had put on its smart coat of vernal green, and was admiring
itself in its fountain minor. Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling
houses, shells of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the forgotten
doings of the vanished quality. Sic transit gloria urbis
A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor again eastward,
then, after covering a short distance, into a lofty but narrow flathouse burdened with
a floridly over-decorated façade. To the fifth story they toiled, and Dawe, panting,
pushed his latch-key into the door of one of the front flats.
When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feelings of pity, how
meanly and meagrely the rooms were furnished.
'Get a chair, if you can find one,' said Dawe, 'while I hunt up pen and ink.
Hallo, what's this? Here's a note from Louise. She must have left it there when she
went out this morning.'
He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre table and tore it open. He
began to read the letter that he drew out of it; and once having begun it aloud he so
read it through to the end. These are the words that Editor Westbrook heard:
DEAR SHACKLEFORD, -
'By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles away and still a-
going. I've got a place in the chorus of the Occidental Opera Co., and we start on
the road to-day at twelve o'clock. I didn't want to starve to death, and so I decided
to make my own living. I'm not coming back. Mrs. Westbrook is going with me.
She said she was tired of living with a combination phonograph, iceberg and
dictionary, and she's not coming back, either. We've been practising the songs and
dances for two months on the quiet. I hope you will be successful, and get along all
right. Good bye.
'LOUISE.'
Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his trembling hands, and
cried out in a deep vibrating voice:
'My God, why hast Thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is false,
then let Thy Heaven's fairest gifts, faith and love, become the jesting bywords of
traitors and friends!'
Editor Westbrook's glasses fell to the floor. The fingers of one hand fumbled
with a button on his coat as he blurted between his pale lips:
'Say, Shack, ain't that a hell of a note? Wouldn't that knock you off your
perch, Shack? Ain't it hell, now, Shack ,ain't it?'
LIII
Past One at Rooney's
ONLY ON THE LOWER East Side of New York do the Houses of Capulet and
Montague survive. There they do not fight by the book of arithmetic. If you but bite
your thumb at an upholder of your opposing house you have work cut out for your
steel. On Broadway you may drag your man along a dozen blocks by his nose, and
he will only bawl for the watch; but in the domain of the East Side Tybalts and
Mercutios you must observe the niceties of deportment to the wink of an eyelash
and to an inch of elbowroom at the bar when its patrons include foes of your house
and kin.
So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork McManus,
drifted into Dutch Mike's for a stein of beer, and came upon a bunch of Montagues
making merry with the suds, he began to observe the strictest parliamentary rules.
Courtesy forbade his leaving the saloon with his thirst unslaked; caution steered
him to a place at the bar where the mirror supplied the cognizance of the enemy's
movements that his indifferent gaze seemed to disdain; experience whispered to
him that the finger of trouble would be busy among the chattering steins at Dutch
Mike's that night. Close by his side drew Brick Cleary, his Mercutio, companion of
his perambulations. Thus they stood, four of the Mulberry Hill Gang and two of the
Dry Dock Gang minding their P's and Q's so solicitously that Dutch Mike kept one
eye on his customers and the other on an open space beneath his bar in which it was
his custom to seek safety whenever the ominous politeness of the rival associations
congealed into the shapes of bullets and cold steel.
But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry Hills and the Dry
Docks. We must to Rooney's, where, on the most blighted dead branch of the tree
of life, a little pale orchid shall bloom.
Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known who first
overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the consequences were immediate. Buck
Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a Dewey-like swiftness, got an eight-inch gun
swung round from his

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Short stories from 100 Selected Stories, by O Henry

 The Gift of the Magi

The Gift of the Magi

'You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,' I said admiringly. 'But it also seems

The Skylight Room

WHEN ONE LOVES ONES ART no service seems too hard.

The Coming out of Maggi

'A friend of mine, Mr. Terry O'Sullivan,' was Maggie's formula of

act on a wire stretched across Niagara was a safe terpsichorean performance

Dempsey's eyes brightened. He held up an inspired fore finger as though a

The Cop and the Anthem

Memories of a Yellow Dog

Cats! Could speak!

The Love-philtre of Ikey Schoenstei

The Furnished Room

A polychromatic rug like some brilliant flowered, rectangular, tropical islet

The Brief Debut of Tildy

The Last Leaf

The Poet and the Peasant

'Got that for my share of grandmother's farm,' he announced. 'There's $950

The Thing's the Play

'There is an important movement on foot among us Westerners,' I said, 'in

The cities are full of pride,

Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee!

The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle.

Compliments of the Season

Proof of the Puddin

Past One at Rooney's

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