Blinker was displeased. A man of less culture and poise and wealth
would have sworn. But Blinker always remembered that he was a
gentleman—a thing that no gentleman should do. So he merely looked
bored and sardonic while he rode in a hansom to the center of
disturbance, which was the Broadway office of Lawyer Oldport, who was
agent for the Blinker estate.
“I don’t see,” said Blinker, “why I should be always signing confounded
papers. I am packed, and was to have left for the North Woods this
morning. Now I must wait until to-morrow morning. I hate night trains.
My best razors are, of course, at the bottom of some unidentifiable
trunk. It is a plot to drive me to bay rum and a monologueing,
thumb-handed barber. Give me a pen that doesn’t scratch. I hate pens
that scratch.”
“Sit down,” said double-chinned, gray Lawyer Oldport. “The worst has
not been told you. Oh, the hardships of the rich! The papers are not
yet ready to sign. They will be laid before you to-morrow at eleven.
You will miss another day. Twice shall the barber tweak the helpless
nose of a Blinker. Be thankful that your sorrows do not embrace a
haircut.”
“If,” said Blinker, rising, “the act did not involve more signing of
papers I would take my business out of your hands at once. Give me a
cigar, please.”
“If,” said Lawyer Oldport, “I had cared to see an old friend’s son
gulped down at one mouthful by sharks I would have ordered you to take
it away long ago. Now, let’s quit fooling, Alexander. Besides the
grinding task of signing your name some thirty times to-morrow, I must
impose upon you the consideration of a matter of business—of business,
and I may say humanity or right. I spoke to you about this five years
ago, but you would not listen—you were in a hurry for a coaching trip,
I think. The subject has come up again. The property—”
“Oh, property!” interrupted Blinker. “Dear Mr. Oldport, I think you
mentioned to-morrow. Let’s have it all at one dose to-morrow—signatures
and property and snappy rubber bands and that smelly sealing-wax and
all. Have luncheon with me? Well, I’ll try to remember to drop in at
eleven to-morrow. Morning.”
The Blinker wealth was in lands, tenements and hereditaments, as the
legal phrase goes. Lawyer Oldport had once taken Alexander in his
little pulmonary gasoline runabout to see the many buildings and rows
of buildings that he owned in the city. For Alexander was sole heir.
They had amused Blinker very much. The houses looked so incapable of
producing the big sums of money that Lawyer Oldport kept piling up in
banks for him to spend.
In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine.
Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him
with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt. Everybody
was out of town. But here he was kept in like a schoolboy to write his
name over and over on pieces of paper. His wounds were deep.
Blinker turned his back on the fogies, and said to the club steward who
had come forward with some nonsense about cold fresh salmon roe:
“Symons, I’m going to Coney Island.” He said it as one might say:
“All’s off; I’m going to jump into the river.”
The joke pleased Symons. He laughed within a sixteenth of a note of the
audibility permitted by the laws governing employees.
“Certainly, sir,” he tittered. “Of course, sir, I think I can see you
at Coney, Mr. Blinker.”
Blinker got a paper and looked up the movements of Sunday steamboats.
Then he found a cab at the first corner and drove to a North River
pier. He stood in line, as democratic as you or I, and bought a ticket,
and was trampled upon and shoved forward until, at last, he found
himself on the upper deck of the boat staring brazenly at a girl who
sat alone upon a camp stool. But Blinker did not intend to be brazen;
the girl was so wonderfully good looking that he forgot for one minute
that he was the prince incog, and behaved just as he did in society.
She was looking at him, too, and not severely. A puff of wind
threatened Blinker’s straw hat. He caught it warily and settled it
again. The movement gave the effect of a bow. The girl nodded and
smiled, and in another instant he was seated at her side. She was
dressed all in white, she was paler than Blinker imagined milkmaids and
girls of humble stations to be, but she was as tidy as a cherry
blossom, and her steady, supremely frank gray eyes looked out from the
intrepid depths of an unshadowed and untroubled soul.
“How dare you raise your hat to me?” she asked, with a smile-redeemed
severity.
“I didn’t,” Blinker said, but he quickly covered the mistake by
extending it to “I didn’t know how to keep from it after I saw you.”
“I do not allow gentlemen to sit by me to whom I have not been
introduced,” she said, with a sudden haughtiness that deceived him. He
rose reluctantly, but her clear, teasing laugh brought him down to his
chair again.
“I guess you weren’t going far,” she declared, with beauty’s
magnificent self-confidence.
“Are you going to Coney Island?” asked Blinker.
“Me?” She turned upon him wide-open eyes full of bantering surprise.
“Why, what a question! Can’t you see that I’m riding a bicycle in the
park?” Her drollery took the form of impertinence.
“And I am laying brick on a tall factory chimney,” said Blinker.
“Mayn’t we see Coney together? I’m all alone and I’ve never been there
before.”
“It depends,” said the girl, “on how nicely you behave. I’ll consider
your application until we get there.”
Blinker took pains to provide against the rejection of his application.
He strove to please. To adopt the metaphor of his nonsensical phrase,
he laid brick upon brick on the tall chimney of his devoirs until, at
length, the structure was stable and complete. The manners of the best
society come around finally to simplicity; and as the girl’s way was
that naturally, they were on a mutual plane of communication from the
beginning.
He learned that she was twenty, and her name was Florence; that she
trimmed hats in a millinery shop; that she lived in a furnished room
with her best chum Ella, who was cashier in a shoe store; and that a
glass of milk from the bottle on the window-sill and an egg that boils
itself while you twist up your hair makes a breakfast good enough for
any one. Florence laughed when she heard “Blinker.”
“Well,” she said. “It certainly shows that you have imagination. It
gives the ‘Smiths’ a chance for a little rest, anyhow.”
They landed at Coney, and were dashed on the crest of a great human
wave of mad pleasure-seekers into the walks and avenues of Fairyland
gone into vaudeville.
With a curious eye, a critical mind and a fairly withheld judgment
Blinker considered the temples, pagodas and kiosks of popularized
delights. Hoi polloi trampled, hustled and crowded him. Basket parties
bumped him; sticky children tumbled, howling, under his feet, candying
his clothes. Insolent youths strolling among the booths with hard-won
canes under one arm and easily won girls on the other, blew defiant
smoke from cheap cigars into his face. The publicity gentlemen with
megaphones, each before his own stupendous attraction, roared like
Niagara in his ears. Music of all kinds that could be tortured from
brass, reed, hide or string, fought in the air to gain space for its
vibrations against its competitors. But what held Blinker in awful
fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking,
struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy,
with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery
and tinsel pleasures. The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all
the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste,
repelled him strongly.
In the midst of his disgust he turned and looked down at Florence by
his side. She was ready with her quick smile and upturned, happy eyes,
as bright and clear as the water in trout pools. The eyes were saying
that they had the right to be shining and happy, for was their owner
not with her (for the present) Man, her Gentleman Friend and holder of
the keys to the enchanted city of fun?
Blinker did not read her look accurately, but by some miracle he
suddenly saw Coney aright.
He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys. He now looked
clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists. Their offenses were
wiped out. Counterfeit and false though the garish joys of these
spangled temples were, he perceived that deep under the gilt surface
they offered saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the restless
human heart. Here, at least, was the husk of Romance, the empty but
shining casque of Chivalry, the breath-catching though safe-guarded dip
and flight of Adventure, the magic carpet that transports you to the
realms of fairyland, though its journey be through but a few poor yards
of space. He no longer saw a rabble, but his brothers seeking the
ideal. There was no magic of poesy here or of art; but the glamour of
their imagination turned yellow calico into cloth of gold and the
megaphones into the silver trumpets of joy’s heralds.
Almost humbled, Blinker rolled up the shirt sleeves of his mind and
joined the idealists.
“You are the lady doctor,” he said to Florence. “How shall we go about
doing this jolly conglomeration of fairy tales, incorporated?”
“We will begin there,” said the Princess, pointing to a fun pagoda on
the edge of the sea, “and we will take them all in, one by one.”
They caught the eight o’clock returning boat and sat, filled with
pleasant fatigue, against the rail in the bow, listening to the
Italians’ fiddle and harp. Blinker had thrown off all care. The North
Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness. What a fuss he had
made over signing his name—pooh! he could sign it a hundred times. And
her name was as pretty as she was—“Florence,” he said it to himself a
great many times.
As the boat was nearing its pier in the North River a two-funnelled,
drab, foreign-looking sea-going steamer was dropping down toward the
bay. The boat turned its nose in toward its slip. The steamer veered as
if to seek midstream, and then yawed, seemed to increase its speed and
struck the Coney boat on the side near the stern, cutting into it with
a terrifying shock and crash.
While the six hundred passengers on the boat were mostly tumbling about
the decks in a shrieking panic the captain was shouting at the steamer
that it should not back off and leave the rent exposed for the water to
enter. But the steamer tore its way out like a savage sawfish and
cleaved its heartless way, full speed ahead.
The boat began to sink at its stern, but moved slowly toward the slip.
The passengers were a frantic mob, unpleasant to behold.
Blinker held Florence tightly until the boat had righted itself. She
made no sound or sign of fear. He stood on a camp stool, ripped off the
slats above his head and pulled down a number of the life preservers.
He began to buckle one around Florence. The rotten canvas split and the
fraudulent granulated cork came pouring out in a stream. Florence
caught a handful of it and laughed gleefully.
“It looks like breakfast food,” she said. “Take it off. They’re no
good.”
She unbuckled it and threw it on the deck. She made Blinker sit down
and sat by his side and put her hand in his. “What’ll you bet we don’t
reach the pier all right?” she said and began to hum a song.
And now the captain moved among the passengers and compelled order. The
boat would undoubtedly make her slip, he said, and ordered the women
and children to the bow, where they could land first. The boat, very
low in the water at the stern, tried gallantly to make his promise
good.
“Florence,” said Blinker, as she held him close by an arm and hand, “I
love you.”
“That’s what they all say,” she replied, lightly.
“I am not one of ‘they all,’” he persisted. “I never knew any one I
could love before. I could pass my life with you and be happy every
day. I am rich. I can make things all right for you.”
“That’s what they all say,” said the girl again, weaving the words into
her little, reckless song.
“Don’t say that again,” said Blinker in a tone that made her look at
him in frank surprise.
“Why shouldn’t I say it?” she asked calmly. “They all do.”
“Who are ‘they’?” he asked, jealous for the first time in his
existence.
“Why, the fellows I know.”
“Do you know so many?”
“Oh, well, I’m not a wall flower,” she answered with modest
complacency.
“Where do you see these—these men? At your home?”
“Of course not. I meet them just as I did you. Sometimes on the boat,
sometimes in the park, sometimes on the street. I’m a pretty good judge
of a man. I can tell in a minute if a fellow is one who is likely to
get fresh.”
“What do you mean by ‘fresh?’”
“Why, try to kiss you—me, I mean.”
“Do any of them try that?” asked Blinker, clenching his teeth.
“Sure. All men do. You know that.”
“Do you allow them?”
“Some. Not many. They won’t take you out anywhere unless you do.”
She turned her head and looked searchingly at Blinker. Her eyes were as
innocent as a child’s. There was a puzzled look in them, as though she
did not understand him.
“What’s wrong about my meeting fellows?” she asked, wonderingly.
“Everything,” he answered, almost savagely. “Why don’t you entertain
your company in the house where you live? Is it necessary to pick up
Tom, Dick and Harry on the streets?”
She kept her absolutely ingenuous eyes upon his. “If you could see the
place where I live you wouldn’t ask that. I live in Brickdust Row. They
call it that because there’s red dust from the bricks crumbling over
everything. I’ve lived there for more than four years. There’s no place
to receive company. You can’t have anybody come to your room. What else
is there to do? A girl has got to meet the men, hasn’t she?”
“Yes,” he said, hoarsely. “A girl has got to meet a—has got to meet the
men.”
“The first time one spoke to me on the street,” she continued, “I ran
home and cried all night. But you get used to it. I meet a good many
nice fellows at church. I go on rainy days and stand in the vestibule
until one comes up with an umbrella. I wish there was a parlor, so I
could ask you to call, Mr. Blinker—are you really sure it isn’t
‘Smith,’ now?”
The boat landed safely. Blinker had a confused impression of walking
with the girl through quiet crosstown streets until she stopped at a
corner and held out her hand.
“I live just one more block over,” she said. “Thank you for a very
pleasant afternoon.”
Blinker muttered something and plunged northward till he found a cab. A
big, gray church loomed slowly at his right. Blinker shook his fist at
it through the window.
“I gave you a thousand dollars last week,” he cried under his breath,
“and she meets them in your very doors. There is something wrong; there
is something wrong.”
At eleven the next day Blinker signed his name thirty times with a new
pen provided by Lawyer Oldport.
“Now let me go to the woods,” he said surlily.
“You are not looking well,” said Lawyer Oldport. “The trip will do you
good. But listen, if you will, to that little matter of business of
which I spoke to you yesterday, and also five years ago. There are some
buildings, fifteen in number, of which there are new five-year leases
to be signed. Your father contemplated a change in the lease
provisions, but never made it. He intended that the parlors of these
houses should not be sub-let, but that the tenants should be allowed to
use them for reception rooms. These houses are in the shopping
district, and are mainly tenanted by young working girls. As it is they
are forced to seek companionship outside. This row of red brick—”
Blinker interrupted him with a loud, discordant laugh.
“Brickdust Row for an even hundred,” he cried. “And I own it. Have I
guessed right?”
“The tenants have some such name for it,” said Lawyer Oldport.
Blinker arose and jammed his hat down to his eyes.
“Do what you please with it,” he said harshly. “Remodel it, burn it,
raze it to the ground. But, man, it’s too late I tell you. It’s too
late. It’s too late. It’s too late.”