It was half-after six when I entered Martin's from the Broadway side. I
chose a table by the north wall and sat down on the cushioned seat. I
ordered dinner, and the ample proportions of it completely hoodwinked
the waiter as to the condition of my cardiac affliction: being, as I
was, desperately and hopelessly and miserably in love. Old owls say that
a man can not eat when he is in love. He can if he is mad at the way the
object of his affections has treated him; and I was mad. To be sure, I
can not recall what my order was, but the amount of the waiter's check
is still vivid to my recollection.
I glanced about. The café was crowded, as it usually is at this hour.
Here and there I caught glimpses of celebrities and familiar faces:
journalists, musicians, authors, artists and actors. This is the time
they drop in to be pointed out to strangers from out of town. It's a
capital advertisement. To-night, however, none of these interested me in
the slightest degree; rather, their animated countenances angered me.
How _could_ they laugh and look happy!
At my left sat a young man about my own age. He was also in evening
dress. At my right a benevolent old gentleman, whose eye-glasses
balanced neatly upon the end of his nose, was deeply interested in _The
Law Journal_ and a pint of mineral water. A little beyond my table was
an exiled Frenchman, and the irritating odor of absinthe drifted at
times across my nostrils.
With my coffee I ordered a glass of Dantzic, and watched the flakes of
beaten gold waver and settle; and presently I devoted myself entirely to
my own particularly miserable thoughts.... To be in love and in debt! To
be with the gods one moment and hunted by a bill-collector the next! To
have the girl you love snub and dismiss you for no more lucid reason
than that you did not attend the dance at the Country Club when you
promised you would! It did not matter that you had a case on that night
from which depended a large slice of your bread and butter; no, that did
not matter. Neither did the fact that you had mixed the dates. You had
promised to go, and you hadn't gone or notified the girl that you
wouldn't go. Your apologetic telegram she had torn into halves and
returned the following morning, together with a curt note to the effect
that she could not value the friendship of a man who made and broke a
promise so easily. It was all over. It was a dashed hard world. How the
deuce do you win a girl, anyhow?
Supposing, besides, that you possessed a rich uncle who said that on the
day of your wedding he would make over to you fifty thousand in
Government three per cents? Hard, wasn't it? Suppose that you were
earning about two thousand a year, and that the struggle to keep up
smart appearances was a keen one. Wouldn't you have been eager to
marry, especially the girl you loved? A man can not buy flowers twice a
week, dine before and take supper after the theater twice a week, belong
(and pay dues and house-accounts) to a country club, a town club and
keep respectable bachelor apartments on two thousand ... and save
anything. And suppose the girl was independently rich? Heigh-ho!
I find that a man needs more money in love than he does in debt. This is
not to say that I was ever very hard pressed; but I hated to pay ten
dollars "on account" when the total was only twenty. You understand me,
don't you? If you don't, somebody who reads this will. Of course, the
girl knew nothing about these things. A young man always falls into the
fault of magnifying his earning capacity to the girl he loves. You see,
I hadn't told her yet that I loved her, though I was studying up
somebody on Moral and Physical Courage for that purpose.
And now it was all over!
I did not care so much about my uncle's gold-bonds, but I did think a
powerful lot of the girl. Why, when I recall the annoyances I've put up
with from that kid brother of hers!... Pshaw, what's the use?
His mother called him "Toddy-One-Boy," in memory of a book she had read
long years ago. He was six years old, and I never think of him without
that jingle coming to mind:
"Little Willie choked his sister,
She was dead before they missed her.
Willie's always up to tricks.
Ain't he cute, he's only six!"
He had the face of a Bouguereau cherub, and mild blue eyes such as we
are told inhabit the countenances of angels. He was the most
innocent-looking chap you ever set eyes on. His mother called him an
angel; I should hate to tell you what the neighbors called him. He
lacked none of that subtile humor so familiar in child-life. Heavens!
the deeds I could (if I dared) enumerate. They turned him loose among
the comic supplements one Sunday, and after that it was all over.
Hadn't he emptied his grandma's medicine capsules and substituted
cotton? And hadn't dear old grandma come down stairs three days later,
saying that she felt much improved? Hadn't he beaten out the brains of
his toy bank and bought up the peanut man on the corner? Yes, indeed!
And hadn't he taken my few letters from his sister's desk and played
postman up and down the street? His papa thought it all a huge joke till
one of the neighbors brought back a dunning dressmaker's bill that had
lain on the said neighbor's porch. It was altogether a different matter
then. Toddy-One-Boy crawled under the bed that night, and only his
mother's tears saved him from a hiding.
All these things I thought over as I sat at my table. She knew that I
would have gone had it been possible. Women and logic are only cousins
german. Six months ago I hadn't been in love with any one but myself,
and now the Virgil of love's dream was leading me like a new Dante
through _his_ Inferno, and was pointing out the foster-brother of
Sisyphus (if he had a foster-brother), pushing the stone of my lady's
favor up the steeps of Forlorn Hope. Well, I would go up to the club,
and if I didn't get home till mor-r-ning, who was there to care?
The Frenchman had gone, and the benevolent old gentleman. The crowd was
thinning out. The young man at my left rose, and I rose also. We both
stared thoughtfully at the hat-rack. There hung two hats: an opera-hat
and a dilapidated old stovepipe. The young fellow reached up and, quite
naturally, selected the opera-hat. He glanced into it, and immediately a
wrinkle of annoyance darkened his brow. He held the hat toward me.
"Is this yours?" he asked.