Hastings Beauchamp Morley sauntered across Union Square with a pitying
look at the hundreds that lolled upon the park benches. They were a
motley lot, he thought; the men with stolid, animal, unshaven faces;
the women wriggling and self-conscious, twining and untwining their
feet that hung four inches above the gravelled walks.
Were I Mr. Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller I would put a few millions in my
inside pocket and make an appointment with all the Park Commissioners
(around the corner, if necessary), and arrange for benches in all the
parks of the world low enough for women to sit upon, and rest their
feet upon the ground. After that I might furnish libraries to towns
that would pay for ’em, or build sanitariums for crank professors, and
call ’em colleges, if I wanted to.
Women’s rights societies have been laboring for many years after
equality with man. With what result? When they sit on a bench they must
twist their ankles together and uncomfortably swing their highest
French heels clear of earthly support. Begin at the bottom, ladies. Get
your feet on the ground, and then rise to theories of mental equality.
Hastings Beauchamp Morley was carefully and neatly dressed. That was
the result of an instinct due to his birth and breeding. It is denied
us to look further into a man’s bosom than the starch on his shirt
front; so it is left to us only to recount his walks and conversation.
Morley had not a cent in his pockets; but he smiled pityingly at a
hundred grimy, unfortunate ones who had no more, and who would have no
more when the sun’s first rays yellowed the tall paper-cutter building
on the west side of the square. But Morley would have enough by then.
Sundown had seen his pockets empty before; but sunrise had always seen
them lined.
First he went to the house of a clergyman off Madison avenue and
presented a forged letter of introduction that holily purported to
issue from a pastorate in Indiana. This netted him $5 when backed up by
a realistic romance of a delayed remittance.
On the sidewalk, twenty steps from the clergyman’s door, a pale-faced,
fat man huskily enveloped him with a raised, red fist and the voice of
a bell buoy, demanding payment of an old score.
“Why, Bergman, man,” sang Morley, dulcetly, “is this you? I was just on
my way up to your place to settle up. That remittance from my aunt
arrived only this morning. Wrong address was the trouble. Come up to
the corner and I’ll square up. Glad to see you. Saves me a walk.”
Four drinks placated the emotional Bergman. There was an air about
Morley when he was backed by money in hand that would have stayed off a
call loan at Rothschilds’. When he was penniless his bluff was pitched
half a tone lower, but few are competent to detect the difference in
the notes.
“You gum to mine blace and bay me to-morrow, Mr. Morley,” said Bergman.
“Oxcuse me dat I dun you on der street. But I haf not seen you in dree
mont’. Pros’t!”
Morley walked away with a crooked smile on his pale, smooth face. The
credulous, drink-softened German amused him. He would have to avoid
Twenty-ninth street in the future. He had not been aware that Bergman
ever went home by that route.
At the door of a darkened house two squares to the north Morley knocked
with a peculiar sequence of raps. The door opened to the length of a
six-inch chain, and the pompous, important black face of an African
guardian imposed itself in the opening. Morley was admitted.
In a third-story room, in an atmosphere opaque with smoke, he hung for
ten minutes above a roulette wheel. Then downstairs he crept, and was
out-sped by the important negro, jingling in his pocket the 40 cents in
silver that remained to him of his five-dollar capital. At the corner
he lingered, undecided.
Across the street was a drug store, well lighted, sending forth gleams
from the German silver and crystal of its soda fountain and glasses.
Along came a youngster of five, headed for the dispensary, stepping
high with the consequence of a big errand, possibly one to which his
advancing age had earned him promotion. In his hand he clutched
something tightly, publicly, proudly, conspicuously.
Morley stopped him with his winning smile and soft speech.
“Me?” said the youngster. “I’m doin’ to the drug ’tore for mamma. She
dave me a dollar to buy a bottle of med’cin.”
“Now, now, now!” said Morley. “Such a big man you are to be doing
errands for mamma. I must go along with my little man to see that the
cars don’t run over him. And on the way we’ll have some chocolates. Or
would he rather have lemon drops?”
Morley entered the drug store leading the child by the hand. He
presented the prescription that had been wrapped around the money.
On his face was a smile, predatory, parental, politic, profound.
“Aqua pura, one pint,” said he to the druggist. “Sodium chloride, ten
grains. Fiat solution. And don’t try to skin me, because I know all
about the number of gallons of H2O in the Croton reservoir, and I
always use the other ingredient on my potatoes.”
“Fifteen cents,” said the druggist, with a wink after he had compounded
the order. “I see you understand pharmacy. A dollar is the regular
price.”
“To gulls,” said Morley, smilingly.
He settled the wrapped bottle carefully in the child’s arms and
escorted him to the corner. In his own pocket he dropped the 85 cents
accruing to him by virtue of his chemical knowledge.
“Look out for the cars, sonny,” he said, cheerfully, to his small
victim.
Two street cars suddenly swooped in opposite directions upon the
youngster. Morley dashed between them and pinned the infantile
messenger by the neck, holding him in safety. Then from the corner of
his street he sent him on his way, swindled, happy, and sticky with
vile, cheap candy from the Italian’s fruit stand.
Morley went to a restaurant and ordered a sirloin and a pint of
inexpensive Chateau Breuille. He laughed noiselessly, but so genuinely
that the waiter ventured to premise that good news had come his way.
“Why, no,” said Morley, who seldom held conversation with any one. “It
is not that. It is something else that amuses me. Do you know what
three divisions of people are easiest to over-reach in transactions of
all kinds?”
“Sure,” said the waiter, calculating the size of the tip promised by
the careful knot of Morley’s tie; “there’s the buyers from the dry
goods stores in the South during August, and honeymooners from Staten
Island, and”—
“Wrong!” said Morley, chuckling happily. “The answer is just—men, women
and children. The world—well, say New York and as far as summer
boarders can swim out from Long Island—is full of greenhorns. Two
minutes longer on the broiler would have made this steak fit to be
eaten by a gentleman, Francois.”
“If yez t’inks it’s on de bum,” said the waiter, “Oi’ll”—
Morley lifted his hand in protest—slightly martyred protest.
“It will do,” he said, magnanimously. “And now, green Chartreuse,
frappe and a demi-tasse.”
Morley went out leisurely and stood on a corner where two tradeful
arteries of the city cross. With a solitary dime in his pocket, he
stood on the curb watching with confident, cynical, smiling eyes the
tides of people that flowed past him. Into that stream he must cast his
net and draw fish for his further sustenance and need. Good Izaak
Walton had not the half of his self-reliance and bait-lore.
A joyful party of four—two women and two men—fell upon him with cries
of delight. There was a dinner party on—where had he been for a
fortnight past?—what luck to thus run upon him! They surrounded and
engulfed him—he must join them—tra la la—and the rest.
One with a white hat plume curving to the shoulder touched his sleeve,
and cast at the others a triumphant look that said: “See what I can do
with him?” and added her queen’s command to the invitations.
“I leave you to imagine,” said Morley, pathetically, “how it desolates
me to forego the pleasure. But my friend Carruthers, of the New York
Yacht Club, is to pick me up here in his motor car at 8.”
The white plume tossed, and the quartet danced like midges around an
arc light down the frolicsome way.
Morley stood, turning over and over the dime in his pocket and laughing
gleefully to himself. “‘Front,’” he chanted under his breath; “‘front’
does it. It is trumps in the game. How they take it in! Men, women and
children—forgeries, water-and-salt lies—how they all take it in!”
An old man with an ill-fitting suit, a straggling gray beard and a
corpulent umbrella hopped from the conglomeration of cabs and street
cars to the sidewalk at Morley’s side.
“Stranger,” said he, “excuse me for troubling you, but do you know
anybody in this here town named Solomon Smothers? He’s my son, and I’ve
come down from Ellenville to visit him. Be darned if I know what I done
with his street and number.”
“I do not, sir,” said Morley, half closing his eyes to veil the joy in
them. “You had better apply to the police.”
“The police!” said the old man. “I ain’t done nothin’ to call in the
police about. I just come down to see Ben. He lives in a five-story
house, he writes me. If you know anybody by that name and could”—
“I told you I did not,” said Morley, coldly. “I know no one by the name
of Smithers, and I advise you to”—
“Smothers not Smithers,” interrupted the old man hopefully. “A
heavy-set man, sandy complected, about twenty-nine, two front teeth
out, about five foot”—
“Oh, ‘Smothers!’” exclaimed Morley. “Sol Smothers? Why, he lives in the
next house to me. I thought you said ‘Smithers.’”
Morley looked at his watch. You must have a watch. You can do it for a
dollar. Better go hungry than forego a gunmetal or the
ninety-eight-cent one that the railroads—according to these
watchmakers—are run by.
“The Bishop of Long Island,” said Morley, “was to meet me here at 8 to
dine with me at the Kingfishers’ Club. But I can’t leave the father of
my friend Sol Smothers alone on the street. By St. Swithin, Mr.
Smothers, we Wall street men have to work! Tired is no name for it! I
was about to step across to the other corner and have a glass of ginger
ale with a dash of sherry when you approached me. You must let me take
you to Sol’s house, Mr. Smothers. But, before we take the car I hope
you will join me in”—
An hour later Morley seated himself on the end of a quiet bench in
Madison Square, with a twenty-five-cent cigar between his lips and $140
in deeply creased bills in his inside pocket. Content, light-hearted,
ironical, keenly philosophic, he watched the moon drifting in and out
amidst a maze of flying clouds. An old, ragged man with a low-bowed
head sat at the other end of the bench.
Presently the old man stirred and looked at his bench companion. In
Morley’s appearance he seemed to recognize something superior to the
usual nightly occupants of the benches.
“Kind sir,” he whined, “if you could spare a dime or even a few pennies
to one who”—
Morley cut short his stereotyped appeal by throwing him a dollar.
“God bless you!” said the old man. “I’ve been trying to find work for”—
“Work!” echoed Morley with his ringing laugh. “You are a fool, my
friend. The world is a rock to you, no doubt; but you must be an Aaron
and smite it with your rod. Then things better than water will gush out
of it for you. That is what the world is for. It gives to me whatever I
want from it.”
“God has blessed you,” said the old man. “It is only work that I have
known. And now I can get no more.”
“I must go home,” said Morley, rising and buttoning his coat. “I
stopped here only for a smoke. I hope you may find work.”
“May your kindness be rewarded this night,” said the old man.
“Oh,” said Morley, “you have your wish already. I am satisfied. I think
good luck follows me like a dog. I am for yonder bright hotel across
the square for the night. And what a moon that is lighting up the city
to-night. I think no one enjoys the moonlight and such little things as
I do. Well, a good-night to you.”
Morley walked to the corner where he would cross to his hotel. He blew
slow streams of smoke from his cigar heavenward. A policeman passing
saluted to his benign nod. What a fine moon it was.
The clock struck nine as a girl just entering womanhood stopped on the
corner waiting for the approaching car. She was hurrying as if homeward
from employment or delay. Her eyes were clear and pure, she was dressed
in simple white, she looked eagerly for the car and neither to the
right nor the left.
Morley knew her. Eight years before he had sat on the same bench with
her at school. There had been no sentiment between them—nothing but the
friendship of innocent days.
But he turned down the side street to a quiet spot and laid his
suddenly burning face against the cool iron of a lamp-post, and said
dully:
“God! I wish I could die.”