in the savings bank, to be added to, from time to time, as a provision
for the future and our Precious Ones. This seemed a good idea at the
time, and it seems so yet, for that matter. I have never been able to
discover that there is anything wrong with having money in a good
savings bank.
I _put_ the Sum in a good savings bank, and we were briefly satisfied
with our prudence. It gave us a sort of safe feeling to know that it was
there, to be had almost instantly, in case of need.
It was this latter knowledge that destroyed us. When the novelty of
feeling safe had worn off we began to need the Sum. Casually at first,
coming as a mere suggestion, in fact, from one or the other of us, of
what we could buy with it. It is wonderful how many things we were
constantly seeing that the Sum would pay for.
Our furniture, for instance, had grown old without becoming antique, and
was costly only when you reckon what we had paid for moving it. We had
gradually acquired a taste (or it may have been only the need of a
taste) for the real thing. Whatever it was it seemed expensive--too
expensive to be gratified heretofore, but now that we had the Sum----
The shops along Fourth Avenue were literally bulging with things that we
coveted and that the Sum would pay for. I looked at them wistfully in
passing, still passing strong in my resolution to let the Sum lie
untouched. Then I began to linger and go in, and to imagine that I knew
a good piece and a bargain when I saw it. This last may be set down as a
fatal symptom. It led me into vile second-hand stores in the hope of
finding some hitherto undiscovered treasure. In these I hauled over the
wretched jetsam of a thousand cheap apartments and came out dusty and
contaminated but not discouraged.
I suggested to the Little Woman one day that it would be in the nature
of an investment to buy now, in something old and good, the desk I had
needed so long. I assured her that antiques were becoming scarcer each
year, and that pieces bought to-day were quite as good as money in the
savings bank, besides having the use of them. The Little Woman agreed
readily. For a long time she had wanted me to have a desk, and my
argument in favor of an antique piece seemed sound.
I did not immediately find a desk that suited me. There were a great
many of them, and most of them seemed sufficiently antique, but being
still somewhat modern in my ideas I did not altogether agree with their
internal arrangements, while such as did appeal would have made too
large an incursion into the Sum. What I did find at length was a
table--a mahogany veneered table which the dealer said was of a period
before the war. I could readily believe it. If he had said that it had
been _through_ the war I could have believed that, too. It looked it.
But I saw in it possibilities, and reflected that it would give me an
opportunity to develop a certain mechanical turn which had lain dormant
hitherto. The Little Woman had been generous in the matter of the desk.
I would buy the table for the Little Woman.
She was pleased, of course, but seemed to me she regarded it a trifle
doubtfully when it came in. Still, the price had not been great, and it
was astonishing to see how much better it looked when I was through with
it, and it was in a dim corner, with its more unfortunate portions next
the wall. Indeed, it had about it quite an air of genuine
respectability, and made the rest of our things seem poor and trifling.
It was the beginning of the end.
Some Colonial chairs came next.
The Little Woman and I discovered their battered skeletons one day as
we were hurrying to catch a car. They were piled in front of a place
that under ordinary conditions we would have shunned as a pest-house.
Still the chairs were really beautiful and it was a genuine "find"! I
did not restore these myself--they needed too much. I had them delivered
to a cabinet-maker who in turn delivered them to us in a condition that
made the rest of our belongings look even shabbier, and at a cost that
made another incursion into the Sum.
I renovated and upholstered the next lot of chairs myself, and was proud
of the result, though the work was attended by certain unpleasant
features, and required time. On the whole, I concluded to let the
cabinet-maker undertake the heavy lounge that came next, and was in
pieces, as if a cyclone had struck it somewhere back in the forties and
it had been lying in a heap, ever since. It was wonderful what he did
with it. It came to us a thing of beauty and an everlasting joy, and his
bill made a definite perforation in the Sum.
We did not mind so much now. It was merely altering the form of our
investment, we said, and we had determined to become respectable at any
cost. The fact that we had been offered more for the restored lounge
than it cost us reassured us in our position. Most of our old traps we
huddled together one day, and disposed of them to a second-hand man for
almost enough to pay for one decent piece--a chiffonier this time--and
voted a good riddance to bad rubbish.
Reflecting upon this now, it seems to me we were a bit hasty and
unkind. Poor though they were, the old things had served us well and
gone with us through the ups and downs of many apartments. In some of
them we had rocked the Precious Ones, and on most of them the precious
Ones had tried the strength and resistance of their toys. They were
racked and battered, it is true and not always to be trusted as to
stability, but we knew them and their shortcomings, and they knew us and
ours. We knew just how to get them up winding stairs and through narrow
doors. They knew about the length of time between each migration, and
just about what to expect with each stage of our Progress. They must
have long foreseen the end. Let us hope they will one day become
"antiques" and fall into fonder and more faithful hands.
But again I am digressing--it is my usual fault. We invested presently
in a Chippendale sideboard, and a tall clock which gave me no peace
night or day until I heard its mellow tick and strike in our own dim
little hall. The aperture in the Sum was now plainly visible, and by the
time we had added the desk, which I had felt unable to afford at the
start, and a chair to match, it had become an orifice that widened to a
gap, with the still further addition of a small but not inexpensive
Chippendale cabinet and something to put within it.
The Little Woman called a halt now. She said she thought we had enough
invested in this particular direction, that it was not wise to put all
one's eggs into one basket. Besides, we had all the things our place
would hold comfortably: rather more, in fact, except in the matter of
rugs. The floors of the Sunshine apartment were hard finished and
shellacked. Such rugs as we had were rare only as to numbers, and we
were no longer proud of them. I quite agreed with the Little Woman on
the question of furniture, but I said that now we had such good things
in that line, I would invest in one really good rug.
I did. I drifted one day into an Armenian place on Broadway into which
the looms of the Orient had poured a lavish store. Small black-haired
men issued from among the heaped-up wares like mice in a granary. I was
surrounded--I was beseeched and entreated--I was made to sit down while
piece after piece of antiquity and art were unrolled at my feet. At each
unrolling the tallest of the black men would spread his hands and look
at me.
"A painting, a painting, a masterpiece. I never have such fine piece
since I begin business;" and each of the other small black men would
spread their hands and look at me and murmur low, reverent exclamations.
I did not buy the first time. You must know that even when one has
become inured to the tariff on antique furniture, and has still the
remains of a Sum to draw upon, there is something about the prices of
oriental rugs that is discouraging when one has ever given the matter
much previous thought.
But the memory of those unrolled masterpieces haunted me. There was
something fascinating and Eastern and fine about sitting in state as it
were, and having the treasures of the Orient spread before you by those
little dark men.
So I went again, and this time I made the first downward step. It was a
Cashmere--a thick, mellow antique piece with a purple bloom pervading
it, and a narrow faded strip at one end that betokened exposure and age.
The Little Woman gasped when she saw it, and the Precious Ones approved
it in chorus. It took me more than a week to confess the full price. It
had to be done by stages; for of course the Little Woman had not sat as
I had sat and had the "paintings of the East" unrolled at her feet and
thus grown accustomed to magnificence. To tell her all at once that our
one new possession had cost about five times as much as all the rest of
our rugs put together would have been an unnecessary rashness on my
part. As it was, she came to it by degrees, and by degrees also she
realized that our other floor coverings were poor, base, and spurious.
Still I was prudent in my next selections. I bought two smaller pieces,
a Kazak strip, and a Beloochistan mat. This was really all we needed,
but a few days later a small piece of antique Bokhara overpowered me,
and I fell. I said it would be nice on the wall, and the Little Woman
confessed that it was, but again insisted that we would better stop now.
She little realized my condition. The small dark men in their dim-lit
Broadway cave had woven a spell about me that made the seductions of
antique furniture as a forgotten tale.
I bought a book on rug collecting, and I could not pass their
treasure-house without turning in. They had learned to know me from
afar, and the sound of my step was the signal for a horde of them to
come tumbling out from among the rugs.
It was the old story of Eastern magic. The spell of the Orient was upon
me, and in the language of my friends I went plunging down the _rug_ged
path to ruin. I added an Anatolian to my collections--a small one that I
could slip into the house without the Little Woman seeing it until it
was placed and in position to help me in my defense. It was the same
with a Bergama and a Coula, but by this time the Precious Ones would
come tearing out into the hall when I came home and then rush back,
calling as they ran: "Oh, mamma, he's got one and he's holding it behind
him! He's got another rug, mamma!"
So when I got the big Khiva I felt that some new tactics must be
adopted. In the first place, it would take two strong men to carry it,
and in the next place it would cover the parlor floor completely, and
meant the transferring to the walls of several former purchases.
Further than this, its addition would make the hole in the Sum big
enough to drive a wagon through--a band-wagon at that with a whole
circus procession behind it. Indeed, the remains of the Sum would be
merely fragmentary, so to speak, and only the glad Christmas season
could make it possible for me to confess and justify to the Little Woman
the fulness of the situation.
Luckily, Christmas was not far distant. The dark men agreed to hold the
big Khiva until the day before, and then deliver it to the janitor.
With the janitor's help I could get it up and into the apartment after
the Little Woman had gone to bed. I could spread it down at my leisure
and decorate the walls with some of those now on the floor. When on the
glad Christmas morning this would burst upon the Little Woman in sudden
splendor, I felt that she would not be too severe in her judgment.
It was a good plan, and it worked as well as most plans do. There were
some hitches, of course. The Little Woman, for instance, was not yet in
bed when the janitor was ready to help me, and I was in mortal terror
lest she should hear us getting the big roll into the hallway, or coming
out later should stumble over it in the dark. But she did not seem to
hear, and she did not venture out into the hall. Neither did she seem
to notice anything unusual when by and by I stumbled over it myself and
plunged through a large pasteboard box in which there was something else
for the Little Woman--something likely to make her still more lenient in
the matter of the rug. I made enough noise to arouse the people in the
next flat, but the Little Woman can be very discreet on Christmas eve.
She slept well the next morning, too,--a morning I shall long remember.
If you have never attempted to lay a ten-by-twelve Khiva rug in a small
flat-parlor, under couches and tables and things, and with an extra
supply of steam going, you do not understand what one can undergo for
the sake of art. It's a fairly interesting job for three people--two to
lift the furniture and one to spread the rug, and even then it isn't
easy to find a place to stand on. It was about four o clock I think when
I began, and the memory of the next three hours is weird, and lacking in
Christmas spirit. I know now just how every piece of furniture we
possess looks from the under side. I suppose this isn't a bad sort of
knowledge to have, but I would rather not acquire it while I am pulling
the wrinkles out of a two-hundred-pound rug. But when the Little Woman
looked at the result and at me she was even more kind than I had
expected. She did not denounce me. She couldn't. Looking me over
carefully she realized dimly what the effort had cost, and pitied me. It
was a happy Christmas, altogether, and in the afternoon, looking at our
possessions, the Little Woman remarked that we needed a house now to
display them properly. It was a chance remark but it bore fruit.
XII.
_Gilded Affluence._
Yet not immediately. We had still to make the final step of our Progress
in apartment life, and to acquire other valuable experience. It happened
in this wise.
Of the Sum there still remained a fragment--unimportant and fragile, it
would seem--but quite sufficient, as it proved, to make our lives
reasonably exciting for several months.
A friend on the Stock Exchange whispered to me one morning that there
was to be a big jump in Calfskin Common--something phenomenal, he said,
and that a hundred shares would pay a profit directly that would
resemble money picked up in the highway.
I had never dealt in stocks, or discovered any currency in the public
thoroughfares, but my recent inheritance of the Sum and its benefits had
developed a taste in the right direction. Calfskin Common was low then,
almost as low as it has been since, and an option on a hundred shares
could be secured with a ridiculously small amount--even the fragment of
the Sum would be sufficient.
I mentioned the matter that night to the Little Woman. We agreed almost
instantly that there was no reason why we should not make something on
Calfskin Common, though I could see that the Little Woman did not know
what Calfskin Common was. I have hinted before that she was not then
conversant with the life and lingo of the Stock Exchange, and on the
whole my advantage in this direction was less than it seemed at the
time. I think we both imagined that Calfskin Common had something to do
with a low grade of hides, and the Little Woman said she supposed there
must be a prospective demand from some foreign country that would
advance the price of cheap shoes. Of course it would be nice to have our
investments profitable, but on the whole perhaps I'd better lay in an
extra pair or so of everyday footwear for the Precious Ones.
I acquired some information along with my option on the stock next day,
so that both the Little Woman and myself could converse quite
technically by bed-time. We knew that we had "put up a ten per cent.
margin" and had an "option" at twelve dollars a share on a hundred
shares of the common stock in leather corporation--said stock being
certain to go to fifty and perhaps a hundred dollars a share within the
next sixty days. The fragment of the Sum and a trifle more had been
exchanged for the Stock, and we were "in on a deal." Then too we had a
"stop-loss" on the Stock so that we were safe, whatever happened.
The Little Woman didn't understand the "stop-loss" at first, and when I
explained to her that it worked automatically, as it were, she became
even more mystified. I gathered from her remarks that she thought it
meant something like an automatic water shut-off such as we had in the
bath-room to prevent waste. Of course, that was altogether wrong, and I
knew it at the time, but it did not seem worth while to explain in
detail. I merely said that it was something we could keep setting higher
as the stock advanced, so that in event of a downward turn we would save
our original sum, with the accrued profits.
Then we talked about what we would do with the money. We said that now
we had such a lot of good things and were going to make money out of the
Stock we ought to try one really high-class apartment--something with an
elevator, and an air of refinement and gentility. It would cost a good
deal, of course, but the surroundings would be so much more congenial,
so much better for the Precious Ones, and now that I was really doing
fairly well, and that we had the Stock--still we would be prudent and
not move hastily.
We allowed the Stock to advance five points before we really began to
look for a place. Five points advance meant five hundred dollars' profit
on our investment, and my friend on the exchange laughed and
congratulated me and said it was only the beginning. So we put up the
stop-loss, almost as far as it would go, and began to look about for a
place that was quite suitable for people with refined taste, some very
good things in the way of rugs and furniture, and a Stock.
We were not proud as yet. We merely felt prosperous and were willing to
let fortune smile on us amid the proper surroundings. We said it was
easy enough to make money, now that we knew how, and that it was no
wonder there were so many rich people in the metropolis. We had fought
the hard fight, and were willing now to take it somewhat easier. We
selected an apartment with these things in view.
It was some difficulty to find a place that suited both us and the
Precious Ones. Not that they were hard to please--they welcomed anything
in the nature of change--but at most of the fine places children were
rigorously barred, a rule, it seemed to us, that might result in rather
trying complications between landlord and tenant in the course of time
and nature, though we did not pursue investigations in this line. We
found lodgment and welcome at length in the Apollo, a newly constructed
apartment of the latest pattern and in what seemed a most desirable
neighborhood.
The Apollo was really a very imposing and towering affair, with onyx and
gilded halls. The elevator that fairly shot us skyward when we ascended
to our eerie nest ten stories above the street, and was a boundless joy
to the Precious Ones, who would gladly have made their playhouse in the
gaudy little car with the brown boy in blue and brass. Our fine
belongings looked grand in the new suite, and our rugs on the inlaid and
polished floor were luxurious and elegant. Compared with this, much of
our past seemed squalid and a period to be forgotten. Ann, who was still
with us, put on a white cap and apron at meal-times, and to answer the
bell, though the cap had a habit of getting over one ear, while the
apron remained white with difficulty.
The janitor of the Apollo was quite as imposing as the house itself,--a
fallen nobleman, in fact, though by no means fallen so far as most of
those whose possibilities of decline had been immeasurably less. He was
stately and uplifting in his demeanor. So much so that I found myself
unconsciously imitating his high-born manner and mode of speech. I had a
feeling that he was altogether more at home in the place than we were,
but I hoped this would pass. Whatever the cost, we were determined to
live up to the Apollo and its titled _Chargé d'Affaires_.
And now came exciting days. The Stock continued to advance, as our
friend had prophesied. Some days it went up one point, some days two.
Every point meant a hundred dollars' clear profit. One day it advanced
five full points. We only counted full points. Fractional advances we
threw into the next day's good measure, and set the stop-loss higher,
and yet ever higher.
We acquired credit with ourselves. We began to think that perhaps after
all we hadn't taken quite so good an apartment as we deserved. What was
a matter of a thousand dollars more or less on a year's rent when the
Stock was yielding a profit of a hundred or two dollars a day. We
repeated that it was easy enough now to understand how New Yorkers got
rich, and could afford the luxuries heretofore regarded by us with a
wonderment that was akin to awe. I began to have a vague notion of
abandoning other pursuits and going into stocks, altogether. We even
talked of owning our own home on Fifth Avenue. Still we were quite
prudent, as was our custom. I did not go definitely into stocks, and we
remained with the fallen nobleman in the Apollo. Neither did we
actually negotiate for Fifth Avenue property.
The Little Woman bought many papers during the day. In some of them
early stock quotations were printed in red, so it might be truly said
that these were red-letter days for the Little Woman. When she heard
"_Extra!_" being shouted in the street far below she could not
dispossess herself of the idea that it had been issued to announce a
sensational advance of the Stock. Even as late as ten o'clock one night
she insisted on my going down for one, though I explained that the Stock
Exchange had closed some seven hours before. The Precious Ones fairly
kept the elevator busy during the afternoon, going for extras, and when
the final Wall Street edition was secured they would come shouting in,
"Here it is. Look at the Stock, quick, Mamma, and see how much we've
made to-day!"
Truly this was a gilded age; though I confess that it did not seem quite
real, and looking back now the memory of it seems less pleasant than
that of some of the very hard epochs that had gone before. Still, it
occupies a place all its own and is not without value in life's
completed scheme.
The Stock did not go to fifty. It limped before it got to forty, and we
began to be harassed by paltry fractional advances, with even an
occasional fractional decline. We did not approve of this. It was
annoying to look in the Wall Street edition and find that we had made
only twelve dollars and a half, instead of a hundred or two, as had been
the case in the beginning. We even thought of selling Calfskin Common
and buying a stock that would not act that way; but my friend of the
exchange advised against it. He said this was merely a temporary thing,
and that fifty and a hundred would come along in good time. He adjusted
the stop-loss for us so that there was no danger of the Stock being sold
on a temporary decline, and we sat down to wait and watch the papers
while the Stock gathered strength for a new upward rush that was sure to
come, and would place us in a position to gratify a good many of the
ambitions lately formed.
A feverish and nerve-destroying ten days followed. The Stock had become
to us as a personal Presence that we watched as it stumbled and
struggled and panted, and dug its common Calfskin toes into things in a
frantic effort to scale the market. I know now that the men who had
organized the deal were boasting and shouting, and beating the air in
their wild encouragement, while those who opposed it were hammering, and
throttling and flinging mud, in as wild an effort to check and
demoralize and destroy. At the time, however, we caught only the echo of
these things, and believed as did our friend on the exchange, that a
great capitalist was in control of Calfskin Common and would send it to
par.
Only we wished he would send it faster. We did not like to fool along
this way, an eighth up and an eighth, or a quarter down, and all
uncertainty and tension. Besides, we needed our accruing profits to meet
our heavily increased expenses which were by no means easy to dispose of
with our normal income, improved though it was with time and tireless
effort.
Indeed, most of the eighths and quarters presently seemed to be in the
wrong direction. It was no fun to lose even twelve dollars and a half a
day and keep it up. The Presence in the household was in delicate
health. It needed to be coddled and pampered, and the strain of it told
on us. The Little Woman developed an anxious look, and grew nervous and
feverish at the clamor of an "extra." Sometimes I heard her talking
"plus" and "minus" and "points" in her sleep and knew that she had taken
the Stock to bed with her.