hundred nights here at least!"
They paused at the corner to wait for a cable-car, and Sherrington
joined them.
This gave Carpenter a chance to lead the daughter away from the mother
half a dozen steps.
"I'm so glad mother thinks the play will go," the girl began. "And
mother is a very good judge, too. You ought to make a lot out of it."
The young dramatist felt that he had his chance at last.
"I've wanted to make money mainly for one reason," he returned; "I
wanted to ask you to take half of it."
"Half of it?" she echoed, as though she did not understand.
"Oh, well--all of it," he responded, swiftly; "and me with it."
"Mr. Carpenter!" she cried, and her blushes made her look even lovelier
than before.
"Won't you marry me?" he asked, ardently.
"Oh, I suppose I've got to say yes," she answered, "or else you'll go
down on your knees here in the street!"
(1895.)
A CANDLE IN THE PLATE
Little Miss Peters had given a last look to the dinner-table with its
effective decoration of autumn leaves, and she had made sure that the
cards were in their proper places. She had glanced at herself in the
mirror of the music-room as she passed through, and she had smiled to
see the little spot of color burning in her cheek. She had taken her
place modestly behind her employer, the portly hostess, and she had seen
the guests arrive one by one. She had remarked the cheerful eagerness of
the young Irishman for whose sake the company had gathered, and she had
frankly admired his good looks. Now she was sitting silently in her seat
at the table, and she was wondering what the stranger would think of
them all.
It would not be quite fair to the worthy widow to say that Mrs. Canton's
dinners were always ponderous; but it might be admitted that, although
the cooking was ever excellent and the guests were selected from the
innermost circle of Society, the bill of fare was monotonous and the
conversation often lacked variety. That evening, however, there were
several present who had not before been honored with invitations to dine
in that exclusive mansion. Few people of fashion were back in town so
early in October, and it had not been easy for Mrs. Canton to make up
her complement of guests when she found that she had suddenly to honor a
letter of introduction Lord Mannington had given to the Honorable
Gilbert Barry, brother of Lord Punchestown. She had heard that the
handsome Irishman had been a great success at Lenox, and that all the
girls were wild about him. In Mannington's letter she was informed that
the young man went in for slumming and all that sort of thing, and that
he had been living in Toynbee Hall; she was besought, therefore, to make
him acquainted with the people in New York most interested in the
elevation of the lower classes.
This sentence of Lord Mannington's letter it was that had caused Mrs.
Canton to invite Rupert de Ruyter, the novelist, for she happened to
have read one of his stories about the wretched creatures living down in
the Italian quarter, and she was sure he would be able to tell Mr. Barry
all that the young Irishman might want to know about the slums of New
York. She had been fortunate enough to get the Jimmy Suydams, too; and
she knew that Mrs. Jimmy took such an interest in the poor, acting as
patroness so often, and all that. Then when little Miss Peters had come
in to write the invitations and to balance the check-book and to answer
the accumulated notes, Mrs. Canton, having gone over the list, looked
at the pretty young secretary for a minute without speaking, and then
said, "It won't be easy to get just the people one wants. Why shouldn't
you come, Miss Peters? You belong to one of those things, you know, what
do you call them--Working Girls' Clubs--don't you?"
"I'm a working girl myself, am I not?" Miss Peters answered. "And I
reckon I'm very glad I've gotten the work to do."
"Then you can tell him anything Mr. de Ruyter doesn't know about these
sort of people. How absurd for the younger brother of a peer to bother
himself about such things over here, isn't it?" Mrs. Canton had
returned. "Then that's settled."
Although the Southern girl had not relished the way the invitation had
been proffered, she had not declined it, glad to get a glimpse again of
the life of luxury to which she had been a stranger since she had been
earning her own living; and thus it was that she was sitting silently in
her seat at the dinner-table that evening in October, with Gilbert Barry
and Rupert de Ruyter opposite to her. She did not seem to notice how the
young Irishman glanced across the table at her more than once with
obvious admiration, or how he tried to lure her into the conversation.
It irritated Miss Peters to have Rupert de Ruyter monopolize the talk.
His rather rasping voice sawed her nerves, and she detested the way he
thrust forward his square chin. She listened while he chattered along,
not boasting exactly, yet managing to convey the impression that he knew
more than any one else. Now and again he did bring forth a picturesque
fact, for which he had the kodak eye of a reporter. He had the
happy-go-lucky facility of the newspaper man, and he rattled away with
more than one absurd misapprehension of the reality, until he reminded
her of a singer with a fine voice but unable to avoid false notes.
"I don't pretend to know New York inside-out and upsidedown," he was
saying; "but it is a most fascinating study, this polyglot city of ours,
and the more you push your investigations the more likely you are to
make surprising discoveries. You know we have an Italian quarter here?"
This was addressed, perhaps, to the British guest, but it was Mrs. Jimmy
Suydam who answered it.
"Of course we do," she said; "haven't we all read that thrilling story
you wrote about it?--the story with the startling title--_A Vision of
Black Despair_."
The author flushed with pride that so handsome a woman and so exclusive
a leader of Society should thus praise one of his writings.
Mr. Jimmy Suydam leaned over to Mrs. Canton, at whose left he was
sitting, and said, "I don't see how my wife does it, do you? She keeps
up with everything, you know--reads all the books--and all that."
"I didn't mean to remind you of that little thing of mine," continued De
Ruyter, with a self-satisfied air that made little Miss Peters feel as
though she would like to stick a pin in him. "That's neither here nor
there, though I spent two days down in the Italian quarter getting up
the local color for it. But what you didn't know, any of you, I am
certain, is that part of the soil of this city was imported from Italy."
"Really, now," commented the British guest, "that is very interesting,
indeed. It would be from a religious motive, I suppose--just as some of
the mediaeval cemeteries had earth brought from the Holy Land?"
"That would be a more romantic reason, no doubt," the story-teller
explained. "But the real one is very prosaic, I fear. The Italian soil
here in New York was brought over as ballast by the ships that were
going to take back our bread-stuffs. There is lot after lot upon the
Harlem that has been filled in with this ballast--stones mostly, but
some of it is earth."
"Genoa the superb providing a foundation for imperial New York," said
the young Irishman, with a little flourish--and Miss Peters guessed that
De Ruyter made a mental note of the figure for future elaboration. "And
has New York a volcano under the city like Naples, now?--like every
great town in Europe for the matter of that. Have you a seething mass of
want and misery and discontent, such as boiled over in Paris under the
Commune? That's what I'm wanting to find out."
"We have a devil's cauldron of our own, if that's what you mean,"
responded De Ruyter; "and we have people from every corner of the globe
here now helping to keep the pot a-boiling. We have Russian Jews by the
thousand, living just as they did in the Pale. We have Chinese enough to
support a Chinese theatre. We have so many Syrians now that they are
pre-empting certain blocks for themselves. We have Irish peasants so
timid and suspicious that they won't go to the hospital when they are
almost dying, because they believe the doctors keep a Black Bottle to be
administered to troublesome patients."
"I should think they would be ever so much more comfortable in a roomy
hospital than in their stuffy little tenement-house rooms," said Mrs.
Jimmy; "and they can't get decent nursing in their own homes, can they?"
"The poor are a most unreasonable lot--and ungrateful, too," added Mr.
Suydam; "that's what I think."
"They are not so badly off in their tenement-houses as you might think,"
explained De Ruyter. "They help each other with the children when
there's sickness."
"The universal freemasonry of motherhood," commented Gilbert Barry; and
again Miss Peters suspected the story-teller of making a mental record
of the phrase.
"They are impossible to understand," De Ruyter declared.
"Why?" asked Miss Peters, suddenly, across the table, to the surprise of
everybody. The young Irishman smiled encouragingly, as though he had
been regretting that this pretty girl refused to talk.
"Why are they impossible to understand?" repeated the American
story-teller. "I don't know, I'm sure. They are conundrums, all of them,
and I am ready to give them up."
"Isn't it because you persist in approaching them as though they were
strange, wild beasts?" the young woman went on. "You speak of them just
as if they were different from us. But they are not, are they? They have
their feelings just like we have; they fall in love and they get married
and they quarrel and they die, just like we do. There is not more crime
in the tenement-houses than there is in the rest of the city--not if you
remember how many more people live in the tenement-houses. There isn't
less joy there, or less sorrow either. There is quite as much happiness,
I reckon, and a good deal more fun. They are not the lower animals; and
it just makes me mad all over when I hear them spoken of in that way.
They are human beings, after all--and if you can't understand them it's
because you're not ready to go to them as your equals."
"That's what I say," the Irishman agreed; "we must approach them on the
plane of human sympathy--that's the only way to get them to open their
hearts."
"Why should we expect them to open their hearts to us?" Miss Peters
continued. "We don't open ours to strangers, do we?"
"That's quite true," admitted Barry. "Sometimes I wonder if it isn't
impertinent we are when we thrust ourselves into a poor man's room. I
doubt we should like him to thrust himself into ours."
"I think that is a most amusing suggestion of yours," Mrs. Jimmy
declared. "I shall look forward with delight to the day when the Five
Points send missionaries up to Fifth Avenue."
"What an absurd idea!" cried Mrs. Canton, in disgust.
"Come now," the Irishman returned, "I deny that the suggestion is mine;
but it is not so absurd--really, it isn't. There's lots of things they
can teach us. I don't know but what we have more to learn from them than
they have from us--really I don't. Christianity, now--practical
Christianity--'inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these,' and
all that sort of thing--well, there's more of that among the poor than
there is among the rich, I'm thinking."
"If you want to pick up picturesque bits of low life in New York," broke
in De Ruyter, "you must get a chance to see a candle in the plate."
"A candle in the plate?" echoed Barry. "I've never heard of it."
"It sounds like the title of a tale of superstition transplanted from
Europe and surviving here in America," said Mrs. Jimmy.
"It's not a superstition, it's only a custom," De Ruyter explained; "and
whether it's a transplanted survival or not I can't say. You see I've
never seen the thing myself, but I've been told about it. I hear that
down in the tenement-house region, when a family can't pay the rent and
the landlord puts their scant furniture out on the sidewalk, and they
don't know where to lay their heads that night, then one of the
neighbors takes a candle and lights it and sticks it up on a plate, and
takes his stand on the sidewalk; and this is a sign to everybody that
there is a family in sore distress, and so the passers-by drop in a
penny or two until there is enough to pay the arrears of rent and let
the poor mother and children go back."
Mrs. Jimmy Suydam laughed a little bitterly. "That sort of thing may be
possible on Cherry Hill," she said, "but it would never do on Murray
Hill, would it? Just imagine how absurd a broken millionaire would look
standing at a street corner with a little electric light on a silver
salver, expecting the multi-millionaires going by to drop in a check or
two to pay his rent for him!"
"I thought I had a quaint little silhouette of metropolitan life for
you," De Ruyter responded, smiling back; "but you spoil the picture if
you guy it like that."
"Very curious it is," said Barry--"very curious, indeed. 'How far a
little candle throws its beams.' I don't think that the custom was
exported from Ireland or from England--at least, I do not recall
anything analogous."
"I've heard an old Irishwoman complain that the law was harder here on
the tenant than it was in the old country," Miss Peters asserted; and
then she appended an imitation of the old Irishwoman's speech: "'Sure,
they'd boycott the landlord there, that's what they'd do, or they'd
shoot the agent, maybe; but here ye can't--there's the police, bad cess
to 'em!'"
"Have you ever seen the candle in the plate?" Barry asked her, across
the table.
"Never," she answered.
"But you have heard of it?" De Ruyter inquired.
"Never before to-night," was her reply.
"You don't mean to say you don't believe that there is any such custom?"
Mrs. Jimmy asked. "Thus all our illusions are shattered one by one."
"Of course, I don't know," the girl responded; "I haven't been working
down there very long--only since last February. But it sounds like it
was a fake, as we used to say in the newspaper office when I was a
reporter."
Mrs. Jimmy Suydam had never met Miss Peters before, and now she examined
the girl curiously, wondering what sort of being a woman was who had
been a reporter and was now living among the poor, and who happened also
to be dining at Mrs. Canton's.
The hostess was just then explaining to Mr. Suydam in a whisper that
Miss Peters was a Southern girl of excellent family, who used to write
those "Polly Perkins" articles for the _Dial_ on Sunday, but who had
given it up last winter, and now acted as her secretary.
"A fake?" repeated the Irishman, gleefully; "that's one of your
Americanisms, isn't it? I must remember that. A fake--what does it mean
exactly?"
"It means the thing that is not," De Ruyter explained, with a trace of
acerbity in his voice. "Miss Peters disbelieves in the existence of the
candle in the plate, and she was too polite to call my story a lie, so
she said it was a fake."
"Oh, Mr. De Ruyter," was her retort, "and you used to be a newspaper man
yourself once!"
"Your newspapers, now," Barry broke in, "I confess they puzzle me. They
are so clever, you know, and so up-to-date, and all that; but you never
know what to believe in them, do you? And then they do such dreadful
things."
"I fear you will find few Americans prepared to defend our newspapers,"
said the story-teller, always a little ashamed that he had once been a
reporter. "But what sort of a dreadful thing have you in mind just now?"
"Things quite inconceivable, you know," the Irishman explained; "a thing
like this, for example. A year or two ago a man gave me a copy of one of
your New York papers--the _Dial_, I think it was. I read it with great
interest, as one would the writing of some strange tribe of savages,
don't you know? It was so very extraordinary."
As the guest made this plain statement, little Miss Peters happened to
catch the eye of the handsome Mrs. Jimmy Suydam, and they exchanged an
imperceptible smile.
"What shocked me the most," Barry continued, "was a long article from
some special commissioner, with headings in huge letters--"
"Scare-heads they call them," explained De Ruyter.
"Scare-heads?" repeated the Irishman. "That's the very name for them.
Scare-heads--delicious! This article, then, had scare-heads galore, and
it described how a suicide had been identified. It seems some poor girl
of the working-class had got into trouble, and sooner than bring
disgrace on her family she had jumped into the river here--Hudson's
River, isn't it? She had carefully arranged so that there was no clew
by which she could be traced. But she had not counted on the devilish
ingenuity of the special commissioner, a woman, too--at least I suppose
it was a woman, since the thing was signed 'Polly Perkins.'"
Mrs. Jimmy saw the blood rise in the cheeks of Miss Peters, until the
little Southern girl was as red as any of the maple-leaves that decked
the cloth between the two women. She noticed that Rupert De Ruyter was
staring into his plate with ill-concealed embarrassment, and that Mrs.
Canton seemed a little uneasy.
"It seems that the poor creature's body was sent to the Morgue," Barry
continued, "and no one claimed it, so it was buried at the cost of the
county. And there's where the diabolical cunning of this reporter was
exercised. She guessed that the girl's family would want to see the body
laid away in holy ground, and so she went to the burying. And she hit
it, for there were two women there in deep black, the mother of the poor
wretch and the sister, not afraid to show their bitter grief when they
thought they were unknown and unwatched. The spy tracked them to their
house and she found out their names, and she put the whole story in the
paper! I suppose it broke the mother's heart, and the sister's, to see
the dead girl's shame brought home to her and to them when they thought
it was buried in the grave with her body. I don't deny that the female
detective showed a deal of skill; but what a pitiful thing! To risk
breaking two loving hearts--and for what purpose?"
There was a moment's silence when the Irishman asked this unanswerable
question. Then Miss Peters raised her head and looked him in the eye.
"That was what is called a 'beat.' No other paper had the news," she
said; "and the reporter who wrote that story got a raise of five dollars
a week."
"Faith, she deserved it," Barry returned. "It was blood-money she was
taking, I'm thinking."
"That's what I think now," Miss Peters replied. "I wish I had thought so
then. I wrote that article, and that is one reason why I am living down
there among the poor, to try and make it up to them. Of course, I can't
undo the wrong I did; but I mean to do my best."
Then there was another silence, broken by Mrs. Jimmy, who turned to Mrs.
Canton and asked if she was going to take a box at the horse-show.
When the ladies left the dining-room Barry took the chair by the side of
Suydam.
"What's the name of that pretty little girl?" he asked. "Peters, isn't
it? I say, it was awfully plucky of her to tell us that she was 'Polly
Perkins,' wasn't it, now? I like her; she's a trump! And that fair hair
of hers is very fetching, isn't it?"
(1897.)
MEN AND WOMEN AND HORSES
Merrymount Morton walked briskly down Madison Avenue that warm November
evening, when there was never a foretaste of winter in the intermittent
breezes that blew gently across the city from river to river; and as he
crossed the side streets one after another he saw the full moon in the
east, low and large and mellow. On the brow of Murray Hill he checked
his pace for a moment in frank enjoyment of the vista before him,
differing in so many ways from the scenes which met his vision in the
little college town of New England where he earned his living, and where
he had spent the most of his life. The glow of the great town filled the
air, and the roar of the city arose all about him. It seemed to him
almost as though he could feel the heart of the metropolis throbbing
before him. He caught himself wondering again whether he had not erred
in accepting the professorship he had been so glad to get when he came
back from Germany, and whether his life would not have been fuller and
far richer had he come to New York, as once he thought of doing, and had
he resolutely struck out for himself in the welter and chaos of the
commercial capital of the country.
Down at the foot of the slope a cluster of electric lights spelled out
the name of a trivial extravaganza then nearing its hundredth
performance in the lovely Garden Theatre, and the avenue hereabouts had
a strange, unnatural brilliance. High up in the pure dark blue the
beautiful tower rose in air, its grace made visible by many lights of
its own. The avenue was clogged with carriages, and the arcade before
the theatre and under the tower was thick with men who carried under
their arms folded card-board plans of the great amphitheatre, and who
vociferously proffered tickets for the horse-show. So far remote from
the current of fashion was Merrymount Morton that he had not been aware
that the horse-show week was about to come to a glorious end. But he was
familiar enough with New York to know that the horse-show was also an
exhibition of men and women, and that the human entries were quite as
important as the equine, and rather more interesting. He had never
happened to be in the city at this season of the year; and although he
had intended to spend the evening at the College Club, he seized the
occasion to see a metropolitan spectacle which chanced to be novel to
him.
From one of the shouting and insistent venders he bought a ticket, and
he walked through the broad entrance-hall, the floor of which slanted
upwards. He passed the door of a restaurant on his right, and he
glanced down a staircase which led to the semi-subterranean stalls where
the horses were tethered. A pungent, acrid, stable odor filled his
nostrils. Then he found himself inside the immense amphitheatre, under
the skeleton ribs of its roof picked out with long lines of tiny
electric bulbs. Morton had a first impression of glittering hugeness,
and a second of restless bustle. From a gallery behind him there came
the blare and crash of a brass band playing an Oriental march; but even
this did not drown the buzz and murmur of many thousand voices. The vast
building seemed to Morton to be filled with men and women, all of them
talking and many of them in motion. He found himself swept along slowly
in the dense crowd that circled steadily around the high fence which
guarded the arena wherein the horses were exhibited. This crowd was too
compact for him to approach the railing, and he could not discover for
himself whether or not anything was to be seen.