as well as a few other things, hit the Bowery early in the season, and
opened up with a roar that could be heard many blocks. It was the same
old thing only a little more so, and the line-up was composed of a
bunch of husky dames who ought to have been carrying the hod instead of
giving an exhibition of beef on the hoof. The roster is a very familiar
one, with the beef-eaters sometimes in the background like scenery,
and then again in the foreground to give the boys a good look at the
tights, two or three ginger girls, who had a small amount of talent
with a great amount of nerve, who did stunts in the olio, and the usual
collection of Irish and Hebrew comedians, of which the least said
the better. The names on the roster would look like a collection of
heroines from the Waverly novels, with Pearl, Pansy and Myrtle in the
lead by a couple of good lengths. It was put together according to the
recipe of a well-known manager, which was this:
[Illustration: They had a hot time in Minneapolis when the show hit
town]
“The people who pay their money for these kind of shows, my boy,
don’t want beauty, or brains or talent. They’d go to sleep with Sarah
Bernhardt doing the death scene in ‘Camille,’ and they’d call Booth in
‘Richard the Third’ a frost. What they want is legs--good, big husky
legs that can take all the wrinkles out of the biggest size of pink
tights on the market. They want quantity, not quality. Give them that
and you’ll get their ten, twenty and thirty every time.”
He wore big diamonds, had a bank roll the size of a Hamburger steak,
and so he must have been in right. Besides he always had a bottle of
wine with his meals, and he didn’t care what kind of wine it was, so
long as the label was attractive; which goes to show that his money was
coming in so fast that his palate couldn’t keep up with it.
On the night the Fair Maids of Gotham opened, the Willie Boy, very fly
up to a certain point, but with a soft sucker part about as big as
a Derby hat, planted himself in one of the front seats. He had been
mixing up with sports all of his life, and as a result the corners
on him were as hard as flint. His roll was divided in four parts and
stowed away in four separate places for safety’s sake, and when it came
to a hurry touch he was prepared to dig down into his change pocket
and produce a few pennies with verdigris on them as the extent of his
capital. He had a block and a counter for every proposition that came
his way and when anything came off he always managed to land his
percentage and ride, even though everybody else walked.
The orchestra had crushed through its preliminary canter, the lights
went down, the buzz of talk let up for a moment, and as he settled
himself back in his seat with a big cigar in his mouth the curtain slid
up for the opening chorus. The grenadiers in front swung their legs
coquettishly, and pranced about like two-legged pachyderms as they
delivered the goods in the shape of a song, which stated in very wobbly
and uncertain rhyme that they were very jolly, very entertaining, and
that they were out for a lark and were willing to take chances. It was
all very affecting, and it might have been going on yet if the star of
the show, known professionally as the principal boy, hadn’t butted in
like a football player when the cue, “Here comes the Prince,” was given
by a perfect lady with a forty-six-inch bust. She was so thoroughly
upholstered with rhinestones that she looked like some new kind of an
electric light proposition on legs. Willie sized her up with the eye of
a connoisseur, and he fell to wondering whether or not among all that
paving of cut glass there might not be a true gem.
Suddenly, as the line in front swayed, then broke and shifted, he
caught sight of a tall blonde who had been fastened to it like the tail
on a kite. She wasn’t quite as wide as the rest of the bunch, but there
was something about her that attracted his immediate attention.
And here you see again the delicate tracery of the Italian hand of
fate--that invisible, indefinite thing which stands always at our backs
ready to move us here and there, like chessmen on a board, whether
we like it or not. The male human pats himself on his shoulder and
congratulates himself that he has a will and a mind of his own, but
ever near him is that wraith which directs his movements, making him do
this or that and go here and there. There is no force, no threat and no
cajoling; it is simpler than a twist of the wrist, and the end of that
winding, twisting, intersected road, with its hundreds of sharp turns
here and there and its joys and sorrows, is the grave.
So look at the boy with good red blood in his veins, with a gentle,
high-bred mother, a beautiful sister, and a home in which there was
nothing but refining influences, sitting bolt upright now in that cheap
theatre seat and gazing like one bewitched at this girl with the yellow
hair, bleached to almost a frazzle, and the pale, watery blue eyes,
with no figure at all and absolutely no talent, produced and spit forth
from a tenement to grow up in the city’s streets like a weed to finally
reach the most ordinary position in a most ordinary theatrical company,
where, standing on the lowest possible level, she was satisfied. Paint,
powder and rouge made her a ghastly sight, but in his eyes she was
framed in an aureole and was as beautiful as a Madonna.
It was one of the things that no human being will ever be able to
account for satisfactorily. Personal magnetism undoubtedly plays a
part in it, as it does in many other things, but you wouldn’t think a
young fellow like this would go so far out of his class unless he had a
throwback strain of degeneracy imbedded somewhere in his system.
The tribe trooped off to make a change of costume and the comedians
settled down to work. Then the ginger girls whooped things up a
bit, and an acrobat went through the routine of stunts, while a few
spasmodic outbursts of applause showed there were some people in the
house who appreciated his work. But the pair of eyes owned by the young
fellow in the aisle seat, third row, were looking for that blonde and
nothing else.
Knowing everybody as he did, it wasn’t a difficult matter for him to
get someone who knew her to wait after the show and bring them together
in a rather formal way, although, in her case, that wouldn’t have been
at all necessary. She had as little use for formalities as she had for
conventionalities, which is not at all to be wondered at.
“Meet my friend Willie; now let’s all go out and get a drink,” was all
there was to it, and ten minutes later four--two of each sex--were
planted around a table in a cafe not more than a block or so from the
theatre.
“Like the show?” asked the Genial Giantess, who was keen enough to
smell a little love affair in the air.
“Great,” answered Willie; “it ought to get the money this season. What
are you going to drink?”
“I never take anything but beer after the matinee--it hurts my voice.”
Strangely enough no one laughed, but with another girl and at another
time Willie would have laughed himself almost into convulsions, for he
has a keen sense of humor.
The four ate and drank at that table until it was time for the night
show and then they separated, by which time Willie was so far gone
that he sat throughout the evening performance while she smiled
encouragingly at him from the other side of the footlights.
That is how the courtship really began.
For the rest of the week they were together all the time, and she began
to realize that she had at last reached the apex of her ambition and
found a man who looked like a wedding ring and a board bill proposition.
A fellow like this can have a dozen affairs and no one will question
them, but when it comes to marrying there is a different story. To the
outsiders it bore all the earmarks of a week’s stand at first, and as
he never showed his hand no one was any the wiser, not even his most
intimate friends.
A man’s declaration of love for a woman is a very beautiful thing so
long as he is honest about it and keeps within his own class. The slang
of the slums can be made as sincere as the most polished English.
But in a case of infatuation like this--it might be called temporary
insanity--it doesn’t hardly seem right there should be any ceremony.
The halo of romance existed only in the mind of the boy--for the woman
it was a business transaction with the obligations all on one side,
so it was with a flippant air that she promised to “love, honor and
obey,” and then after the briefest of brief honeymoons she went on the
road with the show, while the young husband at once set about preparing
a home for her when she should get ready to settle down to a life of
domesticity.
At first he figured on taking her to his mother’s home, but when he
told of the hurry-up wedding and showed a picture of the woman to whom
he had given his name, the scene that followed forever settled the
question, and he knew that his soubrette wife and his mother would
never live under the same roof together.
The morals of the members of a burlesque show on the road have come to
be a joke. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are very rare,
though I personally know of some good women who have gone on tour
through force of circumstances and have come through the ordeal morally
and physically clean. I regret to be compelled to record that the
Genial Giantess doesn’t belong in this class, and when the aggregation
had torn thirty weeks off the calendar they came back looking like
refugees from the San Francisco earthquake.
“I ain’t got a cent,” remarked the blonde on the ferryboat coming from
Jersey City, “and I don’t have to have because Willie will stake me as
soon as I get to New York, and besides he’s got a flat fixed up for me.”
That was the truth. He had a nice apartment for the homecoming, and
while he wasn’t as much in love with her as he was when they were first
married, he still felt that he had obligations and he ought to make
good.
You know what I said in the beginning about fate? Well, listen.
While the performers were on the ferryboat, and when Blondie was making
her celebrated remark, her Willie was up against a bar on Broadway with
a couple of men he had met some time before. They were talking about
women, and one, a commercial traveler, remarked:
“I’ll put you up against a warm bunch if you want to get on the job
this week. We didn’t do a thing to them in Minneapolis when I was there
on my last trip. I had a big blonde on my staff, and the first night I
met her I loaded her up so that she had to be carried upstairs to her
room by three waiters. Here’s a letter I got from her last week, and
while she’s no ten thousand dollar beauty yet she’s a good fellow and a
thoroughbred sport. Read it, Willie. When she hits this burg I’ll put
you next and bet 20 to 1 that she’ll drink you to a standstill, for
she’s the biggest tank I ever ran across.”
And when Willie read the letter which bore his wife’s signature and
which put him wise to a few things he had never before dreamed of, he
did what many another man would do under the same circumstances--that
is, many another wise man. He ordered a round of drinks, and then he
kept on ordering and saying nothing, letting the other fellows tell all
they knew, and the first chance he got he blew out and went home, not
to the place he had fixed up for Mrs. Willie, but to the home presided
over by his mother. He simply abandoned the flat and all of his day
dreams. They vanished like mist in the morning’s sun.
A few days later he got a letter from his wife and in it she reproached
him for not meeting her, and furthermore she inquired what had become
of the flat he had fixed up for her.
“I am broke, you know,” she wrote, “and I think the least you could do
is to help me out.”
She signed it “Your loving (_sic_) and affectionate wife,” and it
almost gagged him to read it.
He took a sheet of paper and wrote the answer. It contained but one
line, but it told a whole chapter. In due course of time it was
delivered to her. She opened the envelope and read the enclosure. What
she said was unfit for publication, for what she saw was only two words
and they were:
“Forget it.”
[Illustration]
TOLD BY THE MANICURE GIRL
“How long have you been here?” asked the man with the black mustache;
“I never noticed you before.”
“Just a week to-day,” said the manicure, as she soused one of his fat,
pudgy paws in the scented water. She didn’t even take the trouble to
look up at him as she talked, but applied herself at once to the almost
impossible task of making his nails even presentable. It’s a hard job,
you know, trying to improve on one of nature’s bum pieces of work.
The man leaned back in his chair contentedly, and with that air of
assurance which money begets, and he looked her over as he would have
looked over a new style of shirt in a haberdasher’s window. He noted
that her hair was dark chestnut in color and luxuriant, also that it
was undoubtedly all her own. The contour of her face was such as would
have attracted any man with red blood in his veins and a heart to pump
it. She had, besides, nice hands that were well kept, and a dainty
manner that was rather charming.
“Don’t you ever get tired of doing this kind of work?” he asked, when
he had finished his inspection and had sized her up to his apparent
satisfaction.
“I am always tired of it,” she answered, briefly.
“How would you like to travel?” was his next question.
[Illustration: “I wasn’t arrested, but I was put out as if I were a
common swindler”]
Then she paused a moment and glanced up. She was smiling, and the two
dimples that came in her cheeks rather enhanced her beauty.
Then he saw that she also had teeth that were white and regular, that
her lips were red and her eyelashes long.
You know a bargaining man takes in all these things, just the same as a
buyer of beef on the hoof feels and prods the cattle in the search for
blemishes.
“There is nothing in the world I would like better than to travel.”
She looked him squarely in the eyes, and her smile was accentuated.
Then she resumed her work. As for him he leaned still farther back in
the comfortable chair and sucked complacently on his big Havana.
“I knew you was a nice little girl as soon as I saw you.”
“Did you?”
The rapid, supple fingers never paused for a moment in their work,
and were trimming, rubbing and polishing those awful nails into some
kind of decent shape. The thick, heavy, hairy hand, with its spatulate
extremities, showed physical strength and nothing else. It was made
for work, and it had worked, too, in its day. It had been used to the
most ordinary and menial kind of labor, as the hands of its ancestors
had. It had lifted beams and handled picks and shovels. It had pulled
at ropes and tugged at heavy burdens. It had had little to do with
the gentler side of life, and even the big diamond ring on the fourth
finger could not hide its early career.
But an accident happened--a money-making accident which some might call
opportunity--and the hands had been withdrawn from their labors, and
the callous spots had a chance to disappear--gradually, but none the
less surely. The movement of the slim white fingers caused him to look
down, and he was conscious of the fact that his heart was beating a bit
faster than usual. The blue smoke from his cigar curled up through his
mustache, it crept into his eyes and made them sting. Through the haze
he noticed that the girl had a bow of black ribbon fastened to her hair.
“I’ll bet you’d be a good sport if you had the chance.”
“That depends upon what you mean by the chance,” she said.
He couldn’t quite analyze that, and so he blurted out:
“Go down the line with me and I’ll show you.”
She paid no attention to that.
“How about it?” he persisted.
“How about what?”
“I’d just like to take you out to a little lunch for two. What time do
you break away from here? What time do you knock off?”
“To-night, do you mean?”
“Sure, yes, to-night.”
“Just time enough to go home, and I never go out at night.”
“Tush, tush, now. Be a good fellow, and if I like you I’ll take you on
a long trip. You know you said you liked to travel, didn’t you? Well,
I’m going to give you a chance, if you behave yourself and stick to me.
I’ve been looking for a girl like you for a long while, and you just
hit me right, so you’re on the job. I can make good, all right, you
needn’t be afraid of that, for I’ve got all kinds of money, and when I
meet anybody I like I spend it like a drunken sailor, see?”
“Yes, I see; I knew you had money all the time.”
“You did, did you; well, how?”
“Because it is only men with plenty of money who would talk to a girl
the way you have been talking to me. It is only the men with money
who think they can buy everything in sight, especially if that which
they think they fancy happens to be the wearer of a skirt, and it’s
the men with money who think their money is better than anybody else’s
money, and their dollars are of more value than the dollars owned or
controlled by some one who has less than they have. Are you married?”
“No,” he answered. He would have said more if he had known what to say.
“Then why don’t you go and pick out some woman whom you like and who
likes you, and marry her and have it over with. Your time for being a
gay sport has passed; leave that to the young fellows.”
Daintily she reddened his nails with rouge, doing them as carefully as
if they were works of art, and tapping each one gently in order to get
just the right amount of color.
“I don’t think,” she went on, “that you quite know what you’ve been
up against. You may have heard the old saying, ‘a burnt child dreads
the fire;’ well, I’m the child in this case, although I’m no child in
years. As I told you before, I’ve been here a week, and it’s a great
relief to me to be working, for I’ve been on one of those little trips
you were just talking about, and there is nothing to it. You see,”
then she glanced up quickly, “perhaps you don’t want to hear this.”
“That’s all right; go ahead, you can’t hurt my feelings.”
“I was told that I was a good fellow and a nice girl, and I was led to
believe that I could have anything in the world that I wanted, and I
want to tell you right here that it is a beautiful thing to believe and
have faith in anyone. Some of the stories that men tell to women would
make great reading if it was only written right, but they would be all
fiction, because I don’t believe a man ever told a woman the truth in
his life. I’m talking from personal experience, of course. This one
man, who was really old enough to be my father, talked to me about my
future, and said, among other things, he would always look after me,
and I was serious enough about it to believe that he would, too. Then
one day he asked me if I wanted to take a little trip, and his words
were so much like yours when you spoke that you startled me. Isn’t it
strange that the nails of your left hand take on so much higher polish
than those of the right hand? I wonder why it is? There, _I’m_ through
now. Fifty cents, please.”
“But how about the finish of that story? Did you take the trip?”
“Of course I took it.”
“Make the job a dollar and tell me the rest.”
“I never would have believed that I would be sitting here telling that
story to a man whom I had only met once. You’re not offended at the way
I criticised you, are you?”
“Not at all,” he answered, “go ahead and criticise me all you like. I
rather like it, it’s so seldom that I am criticised.”
“You mean nowadays?” she asked, noting his hands.
“Yes, since I got money. Go on with the story.”
“The trip was to be to Europe--first London, then Paris, and after that
Berlin. He was a banker and so prominent that you would know his name
at once if I were to mention it, but there is where I draw the line.
I’ll save him that much, anyhow. When we left he had a large bag in
which he seemed to take an especial interest, for he would allow no one
to touch it but himself, and it wasn’t until we were half way across
that I found out that it was all full of money.”
“Money?” queried the man with the black mustache, sitting bolt upright
in his chair.
“Yes, money. That’s what I said, wasn’t it?” she asked, petulantly.
“Brand new greenbacks, pound notes, hundred and thousand-franc notes.
Oh, they were beautiful to look at, and I counted over the packages
because they were so pretty. You see, he said he was going over to put
through a big banking deal, and he cautioned me to say nothing about
all the money he had with him, for fear he would be robbed. When we
arrived in London we went direct to the Cecil, where he registered
under an assumed name, but I was down on the book as his wife, just
the same, and he told me to go out and get some clothes and anything
I wanted. He said he wanted to have some of the big bills changed and
that was the easiest way in the world to have it done, but he asked me
to bring all the change to him, and to pay for every separate article
with one of the new bills. I thought it was rather queer at the time,
but I did as he told me and I never in my life had such a good time
buying things. I brought back to the hotel a dreadful amount of change,
so much that it was a nuisance.
“Every day it was the same thing over again until I honestly grew tired
of spending money. Think of that--tired spending. Before we left for
Paris he put over $15,000 of the change in a safe deposit vault that
only he and I knew about, because something had happened and he had to
get to Paris quickly. When we got there we went to the Grand Hotel,
where he registered under still another name. Again I went shopping,
and the only hard part of it was that I had a new bill to change every
time I bought anything, think of that, even if it was a little lunch in
a cafe, and many a time I have had to wait while they sent out for the
change of a thousand-franc note. We were there just four days when one
afternoon two men came to our rooms with the proprietor or manager of
the hotel, and the first thing I knew he was arrested on the charge of
making or having counterfeit money or something like that. Before they
got him out of the room he whispered to me that he had put $15,000 more
in a safe deposit vault in Paris, and he told me the name of the place.
He said it was in my name, too.
“I wasn’t arrested, but I was put out of the hotel as if I had been a
swindler. I had enough money to get home, and so I came. I don’t want
any more excitement in mine, and I’m content to get along the best way
I can, without any fireworks or trips of any kind, unless, of course,
_I’m_ sure that everything is absolutely correct and all right. Suppose
I had been broke, what would I have done alone in Paris?”
“What happened to the man?” he asked, ignoring her question.
“He was tried and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, and if he
had only married me, and I had my marriage certificate, I could go over
there and get $30,000 as easy as nothing. I don’t care so very much for
it, but still it would come in very handy and I wouldn’t mind dividing
it up with anyone who could help me out.”
The man fidgeted in his chair, glanced out of the window, and then took
a long pull at his cigar.
“Bored you, didn’t it?” asked the girl. “I knew it would, but you
insisted on my telling it, and you’re the only one that knows it. I’m
really getting garrulous.”
“Do you think $5,000 would be enough to get the papers fixed up?”
“Oh, yes, that would be quite enough, for I inquired about it. It would
take me there and back again and pay all expenses.”
“And you’d give me half?”
“Why, of course I would. Who wouldn’t?”
You know the old saying about a sucker being born every minute. I could
go on and make the usual hot finish to this story, but what’s the use
when two lines will suffice. She got the money, of course, and he got
what is known in the language of The Line as the lemon. Very sour it
was for this hard, wise fellow, and they say that now every time he
passes a manicure parlor he turns his head the other way and says
things which wouldn’t look well in print.
[Illustration: There were times when she did things that were
unconventional]
INVESTING IN A HUSBAND
Money makes the mare go.
Sure.
That is, sometimes, if it’s the right kind of a mare and there is
enough money.
Take out all the “ifs” and “buts” and it will be all right.
The world began with a man, Adam, and the woman came later, but the
finish will be different, for there will be a woman in the last ditch
giving or ready to give the avenging angel the stiffest kind of an
argument.
This story differs from the Creation in that it begins with a woman,
as all stories of to-day should. And why not? for take the lady out of
the case and there’s no story and never will be. The slim finger of a
woman, you know, is in every pie. Sometimes it improves the flavor and
sometimes it spoils it--that’s a matter of luck--and there are men who
have tried pies or many fingers, whichever simile you prefer, and the
result in their cases is always the same.
The girl in this story had birth, and blood, and breeding behind her.
She also had good looks and a little money, and that is about all
that anyone wants. Add to that a fairly nice disposition and you have
reached the limit.