To Carson Chalmers, in his apartment near the square, Phillips brought
the evening mail. Beside the routine correspondence there were two
items bearing the same foreign postmark.
One of the incoming parcels contained a photograph of a woman. The
other contained an interminable letter, over which Chalmers hung,
absorbed, for a long time. The letter was from another woman; and it
contained poisoned barbs, sweetly dipped in honey, and feathered with
innuendoes concerning the photographed woman.
Chalmers tore this letter into a thousand bits and began to wear out
his expensive rug by striding back and forth upon it. Thus an animal
from the jungle acts when it is caged, and thus a caged man acts when
he is housed in a jungle of doubt.
By and by the restless mood was overcome. The rug was not an enchanted
one. For sixteen feet he could travel along it; three thousand miles
was beyond its power to aid.
Phillips appeared. He never entered; he invariably appeared, like a
well-oiled genie.
“Will you dine here, sir, or out?” he asked.
“Here,” said Chalmers, “and in half an hour.” He listened glumly to the
January blasts making an Aeolian trombone of the empty street.
“Wait,” he said to the disappearing genie. “As I came home across the
end of the square I saw many men standing there in rows. There was one
mounted upon something, talking. Why do those men stand in rows, and
why are they there?”
“They are homeless men, sir,” said Phillips. “The man standing on the
box tries to get lodging for them for the night. People come around to
listen and give him money. Then he sends as many as the money will pay
for to some lodging-house. That is why they stand in rows; they get
sent to bed in order as they come.”
“By the time dinner is served,” said Chalmers, “have one of those men
here. He will dine with me.”
“W-w-which—,” began Phillips, stammering for the first time during his
service.
“Choose one at random,” said Chalmers. “You might see that he is
reasonably sober—and a certain amount of cleanliness will not be held
against him. That is all.”
It was an unusual thing for Carson Chalmers to play the Caliph. But on
that night he felt the inefficacy of conventional antidotes to
melancholy. Something wanton and egregious, something high-flavored and
Arabian, he must have to lighten his mood.
On the half hour Phillips had finished his duties as slave of the lamp.
The waiters from the restaurant below had whisked aloft the delectable
dinner. The dining table, laid for two, glowed cheerily in the glow of
the pink-shaded candles.
And now Phillips, as though he ushered a cardinal—or held in charge a
burglar—wafted in the shivering guest who had been haled from the line
of mendicant lodgers.
It is a common thing to call such men wrecks; if the comparison be used
here it is the specific one of a derelict come to grief through fire.
Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting hulk. His
face and hands had been recently washed—a rite insisted upon by
Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In the
candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the
apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes with
a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter’s coat. Phillips’s comb had
failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and conformed to the
contour of a constantly worn hat. His eyes were full of a hopeless,
tricky defiance like that seen in a cur’s that is cornered by his
tormentors. His shabby coat was buttoned high, but a quarter inch of
redeeming collar showed above it. His manner was singularly free from
embarrassment when Chalmers rose from his chair across the round dining
table.
“If you will oblige me,” said the host, “I will be glad to have your
company at dinner.”
“My name is Plumer,” said the highway guest, in harsh and aggressive
tones. “If you’re like me, you like to know the name of the party
you’re dining with.”
“I was going on to say,” continued Chalmers somewhat hastily, “that
mine is Chalmers. Will you sit opposite?”
Plumer, of the ruffled plumes, bent his knee for Phillips to slide the
chair beneath him. He had an air of having sat at attended boards
before. Phillips set out the anchovies and olives.
“Good!” barked Plumer; “going to be in courses, is it? All right, my
jovial ruler of Bagdad. I’m your Scheherezade all the way to the
toothpicks. You’re the first Caliph with a genuine Oriental flavor I’ve
struck since frost. What luck! And I was forty-third in line. I
finished counting, just as your welcome emissary arrived to bid me to
the feast. I had about as much chance of getting a bed to-night as I
have of being the next President. How will you have the sad story of my
life, Mr. Al Raschid—a chapter with each course or the whole edition
with the cigars and coffee?”
“The situation does not seem a novel one to you,” said Chalmers with a
smile.
“By the chin whiskers of the prophet—no!” answered the guest. “New
York’s as full of cheap Haroun al Raschids as Bagdad is of fleas. I’ve
been held up for my story with a loaded meal pointed at my head twenty
times. Catch anybody in New York giving you something for nothing! They
spell curiosity and charity with the same set of building blocks. Lots
of ’em will stake you to a dime and chop-suey; and a few of ’em will
play Caliph to the tune of a top sirloin; but every one of ’em will
stand over you till they screw your autobiography out of you with foot
notes, appendix and unpublished fragments. Oh, I know what to do when I
see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I
strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel
yarns for my supper. I claim descent from the late Tommy Tucker, who
was forced to hand out vocal harmony for his pre-digested wheaterina
and spoopju.”
“I do not ask your story,” said Chalmers. “I tell you frankly that it
was a sudden whim that prompted me to send for some stranger to dine
with me. I assure you you will not suffer through any curiosity of
mine.”
“Oh, fudge!” exclaimed the guest, enthusiastically tackling his soup;
“I don’t mind it a bit. I’m a regular Oriental magazine with a red
cover and the leaves cut when the Caliph walks abroad. In fact, we
fellows in the bed line have a sort of union rate for things of this
sort. Somebody’s always stopping and wanting to know what brought us
down so low in the world. For a sandwich and a glass of beer I tell ’em
that drink did it. For corned beef and cabbage and a cup of coffee I
give ’em the hard-hearted-landlord—six-months-in-the-hospital-lost-job
story. A sirloin steak and a quarter for a bed gets the Wall Street
tragedy of the swept-away fortune and the gradual descent. This is the
first spread of this kind I’ve stumbled against. I haven’t got a story
to fit it. I’ll tell you what, Mr. Chalmers, I’m going to tell you the
truth for this, if you’ll listen to it. It’ll be harder for you to
believe than the made-up ones.”
An hour later the Arabian guest lay back with a sigh of satisfaction
while Phillips brought the coffee and cigars and cleared the table.
“Did you ever hear of Sherrard Plumer?” he asked, with a strange smile.
“I remember the name,” said Chalmers. “He was a painter, I think, of a
good deal of prominence a few years ago.”
“Five years,” said the guest. “Then I went down like a chunk of lead.
I’m Sherrard Plumer! I sold the last portrait I painted for $2,000.
After that I couldn’t have found a sitter for a gratis picture.”
“What was the trouble?” Chalmers could not resist asking.
“Funny thing,” answered Plumer, grimly. “Never quite understood it
myself. For a while I swam like a cork. I broke into the swell crowd
and got commissions right and left. The newspapers called me a
fashionable painter. Then the funny things began to happen. Whenever I
finished a picture people would come to see it, and whisper and look
queerly at one another.”
“I soon found out what the trouble was. I had a knack of bringing out
in the face of a portrait the hidden character of the original. I don’t
know how I did it—I painted what I saw—but I know it did me. Some of my
sitters were fearfully enraged and refused their pictures. I painted
the portrait of a very beautiful and popular society dame. When it was
finished her husband looked at it with a peculiar expression on his
face, and the next week he sued for divorce.”
“I remember one case of a prominent banker who sat to me. While I had
his portrait on exhibition in my studio an acquaintance of his came in
to look at it. ‘Bless me,’ says he, ‘does he really look like that?” I
told him it was considered a faithful likeness. ‘I never noticed that
expression about his eyes before,’ said he; ‘I think I’ll drop downtown
and change my bank account.’ He did drop down, but the bank account was
gone and so was Mr. Banker.
“It wasn’t long till they put me out of business. People don’t want
their secret meannesses shown up in a picture. They can smile and twist
their own faces and deceive you, but the picture can’t. I couldn’t get
an order for another picture, and I had to give up. I worked as a
newspaper artist for a while, and then for a lithographer, but my work
with them got me into the same trouble. If I drew from a photograph my
drawing showed up characteristics and expressions that you couldn’t
find in the photo, but I guess they were in the original, all right.
The customers raised lively rows, especially the women, and I never
could hold a job long. So I began to rest my weary head upon the breast
of Old Booze for comfort. And pretty soon I was in the free-bed line
and doing oral fiction for hand-outs among the food bazaars. Does the
truthful statement weary thee, O Caliph? I can turn on the Wall Street
disaster stop if you prefer, but that requires a tear, and I’m afraid I
can’t hustle one up after that good dinner.”
“No, no,” said Chalmers, earnestly, “you interest me very much. Did all
of your portraits reveal some unpleasant trait, or were there some that
did not suffer from the ordeal of your peculiar brush?”
“Some? Yes,” said Plumer. “Children generally, a good many women and a
sufficient number of men. All people aren’t bad, you know. When they
were all right the pictures were all right. As I said, I don’t explain
it, but I’m telling you facts.”
On Chalmers’s writing-table lay the photograph that he had received
that day in the foreign mail. Ten minutes later he had Plumer at work
making a sketch from it in pastels. At the end of an hour the artist
rose and stretched wearily.
“It’s done,” he yawned. “You’ll excuse me for being so long. I got
interested in the job. Lordy! but I’m tired. No bed last night, you
know. Guess it’ll have to be good night now, O Commander of the
Faithful!”
Chalmers went as far as the door with him and slipped some bills into
his hand.
“Oh! I’ll take ’em,” said Plumer. “All that’s included in the fall.
Thanks. And for the very good dinner. I shall sleep on feathers
to-night and dream of Bagdad. I hope it won’t turn out to be a dream in
the morning. Farewell, most excellent Caliph!”
Again Chalmers paced restlessly upon his rug. But his beat lay as far
from the table whereon lay the pastel sketch as the room would permit.
Twice, thrice, he tried to approach it, but failed. He could see the
dun and gold and brown of the colors, but there was a wall about it
built by his fears that kept him at a distance. He sat down and tried
to calm himself. He sprang up and rang for Phillips.
“There is a young artist in this building,” he said. “—a Mr.
Reineman—do you know which is his apartment?”
“Top floor, front, sir,” said Phillips.
“Go up and ask him to favor me with his presence here for a few
minutes.”
Reineman came at once. Chalmers introduced himself.
“Mr. Reineman,” said he, “there is a little pastel sketch on yonder
table. I would be glad if you will give me your opinion of it as to its
artistic merits and as a picture.”
The young artist advanced to the table and took up the sketch. Chalmers
half turned away, leaning upon the back of a chair.
“How—do—you find it?” he asked, slowly.
“As a drawing,” said the artist, “I can’t praise it enough. It’s the
work of a master—bold and fine and true. It puzzles me a little; I
haven’t seen any pastel work near as good in years.”
“The face, man—the subject—the original—what would you say of that?”
“The face,” said Reineman, “is the face of one of God’s own angels. May
I ask who—”
“My wife!” shouted Chalmers, wheeling and pouncing upon the astonished
artist, gripping his hand and pounding his back. “She is traveling in
Europe. Take that sketch, boy, and paint the picture of your life from
it and leave the price to me.”