THE TRIUMPH OF THE NUT
AND OTHER PARODIES
BY
CHRISTOPHER WARD
[Illustration: [Logo]]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1923
Copyright, 1923,
By
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_First Printing, September, 1923_
_Second Printing, November, 1923_
_Printed in the United States of America_
TO
SHERWOOD ANDERSON,
MARGARET DELAND,
GERTRUDE ATHERTON,
EDITH WHARTON,
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART,
SINCLAIR LEWIS,
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER,
REBECCA WEST,
JEFFREY FARNOL,
WILLA CATHER,
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,
WILLIAM J. LOCKE,
RAFAEL SABATINI,
A. S. M. HUTCHINSON,
KATHLEEN NORRIS,
ZANE GREY,
T. S. ELIOT
Without whose assistance
it could never have been written,
This Book is
Timidly Dedicated.
Acknowledgment is gratefully made to _The Literary Review_ of _The New
York Evening Post_ for permission to reprint several of these parodies,
which appeared in its columns, often under different titles and
sometimes in briefer versions.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. THE TRIUMPH OF THE NUT 1
or Too Many Marriages.
2. THE FLAME THAT FAILED 10
Réchaufféd from “The Vehement Flame.”
3. BLACKER OXEN 20
by Gertrude Otherton.
4. GLIMPSING THE MOON 35
With an obeisance to Edith Wharton.
5. THE VANISHING POINT 47
With apologies to “The Breaking Point.”
6. BABBITT 59
On Sinclair Lewis.
7. JOSEPH AND THE BRIGHT SHAWL 70
8. THE JUDGE 79
or Turning the Tea Tables.
Illustrating the influence of Henry James upon an
otherwise perfectly good novelist, Rebecca West.
9. THE PERILS OF PEREGRINE 84
à la Jeffrey Farnol.
10. ONE OF HERS 94
Long after Willa Cather.
11. PARADISE BE DAMNED! 105
by F. Scott Fitzjazzer.
12. THE TRIALS OF TRIONA 119
In Locke Step.
13. CAPTAIN BLOODLESS 128
an Episode—
Far from Sabatini.
14. SOME FREEDOM! 135
“With a great price ($2.00) obtained I This Freedom!”
15. CERTAIN PEOPLE OF NO IMPORTANCE 147
Not by Kathleen Norris.
16. THE BLUNDERER OF THE WASTELAND 157
by Jane Grey.
17. THE DRY LAND 170
Another kind of “Waste Land” inspired by T. S. Eliot.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NUT
_or_
TOO MANY MARRIAGES
I
There was a man named Webster, who lived in a town in the State of
Wisconsin and he made patent washing machines. He had a wife named Mary
and a daughter named Jane and a stenographer named Natalie. And he used
to have dreams, which was no great matter until he began to practise
what he dreamed.
And so there was this Webster, and then this thing happened to him. He
began to feel strange feelings and movements within his head, as though
it were a newly wound watch.
He found it hard to sit still in one spot and impossible to sit still in
two spots. So he walked rapidly to and fro, in and out of office and
factory, and he thought: “Perhaps I am becoming a little insane. But I
like myself better this way.” Which, considering what kind of man he had
been, was not strange.
He stopped in front of Natalie and looked hard at her. She looked hard,
too, though not at him. She just naturally looked hard because she was a
pretty hard case, in her own way.
Suddenly it was clear to John Webster that Natalie was not a woman. She
was a house. When she raised her eyes she raised the windows of the
house and when she raised her voice she raised the roof. She was short
and broad—a bungalow, then, with no upper story at all, nothing above
the eaves.
So then Natalie was a house, a new thought. Probably other people were
houses too; his own wife, perhaps. He must look to see what kind of a
house she was. Was she an eligible family residence, suitable for
permanent occupancy, or merely a boarding house, to be left at short
notice—if one preferred, let us say, a nice little bungalow?
And so there he was on his way home for lunch and an inspection of his
wife.
II
Yes, both of them, wife and daughter, were houses. Then he himself must
be a house. Houses should not wear clothes. He went up to his room and
took off all his clothes. He stood before a mirror admiring his own
naked façade.
What kind of house was he? A large winged insect flew against the
window screen and crawled slowly toward the top. It spoke with a
little voice: “Let me in. I belong to your house. Let me in.” That was
the answer to his question. “Bughouse! Positive, bug—comparative,
parasite—superlative, paresis,” he murmured, and he smiled softly—so
softly.
III
When he returned to the office he saw that Natalie was changed. An
amazing and lovely thing had happened. Tears came into his eyes and his
knees felt as weak as his brain. He crawled across the room on all fours
and laid his head in her lap.
“Natalie, an amazing and lovely thing has happened to you. You have had
a bath,” he said.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Why, you look so pale, and, besides, I saw the high water mark on the
back of your neck,” he said. “Where did you do this amazing and lovely
thing?”
“In a common washtub in mother’s shed.”
How lovely it was that she had used a common washtub instead of one of
the patent washing machines. They were so commercial, so practical. But
a common washtub, you see, is nearly related to the old oaken bucket and
reminds one of all the creeping, crawling, swimming, jumping things that
live in and around wells.
He could see them now, thousands of the little creatures, going swiftly
up and down stairs, opening windows, laughing, crying, fighting, and,
especially, making love, without any hampering rules, regulations, or
restrictions. It was too lovely.
“Natalie,” he said, “I do not love my wife. She is so fat. I will take a
thousand dollars and go away with you. Let who will make patent washing
machines. Henceforth, I will only make love.”
Now this Natalie, you see, was a notable dumbbell and so she said
nothing. All she thought was that a thousand dollars would take a lot of
spending and she might as well go along.
IV
As you will remember, John Webster had begun to dislike his clothes.
They were, you see, ready-made clothes. Hence one should not be
surprised at the strange nightly ceremony begun in his room.
He set up a picture of the Virgin between two yellow candles. Then he
undressed and walked naked up and down the room for hours at a time,
thinking great thoughts.
“I used to be a dull clod. Now I am a shining nut. I am cracked and my
shell is off. I am a lovely study in psychopathy.
“Why should I work, making uninteresting washing machines? I will become
a writer. Among them I shall not be strange, for there are many nuts
among the writers. They write books like this and get away with it. Many
people will think this is a deep, philosophical book, that it throws a
new and fierce light upon the problems of civilization. Whereas it is
simply a medical document, a study of a certain common form of insanity.
“I will write books like this book, but they shall throw a fiercer light
on the problems of civilization, for I will make my hero run naked in
the streets. All nuts of this particular variety do that when they are
fully ripe. My book will be a devastating book and it will have Sherwood
Anderson and Krafft-Ebing faded.”
There he was, you see, John Webster, night after night, walking naked up
and down his room, thinking great thoughts.
V
One night his wife could no longer restrain her vain and morbid
curiosity as to what he was doing, walking so up and down in his room.
He saw the door to her room open an inch. At the same time his
daughter’s door similarly opened. In a moment he had disposed himself
for the great scene.
“Come in,” he called. There was a commanding ring in his voice. “Come
in, both of you, and sit there on the bed.”
Pale, frightened, cowed, those wretched women, who had never had great
thoughts, came in. There was John Webster, naked, seated on the top of a
dresser, crosslegged, like an obscene Buddha, a lighted candle in each
hand. They made for the bed and fell prostrate, burying their faces in
the bed-clothes.
“Jane,” he began, addressing his daughter, “I do not love that woman
there, your mother and my wife. When our marriage transpired——”
A muffled groan from Jane stopped him. “Occurred, father,” she moaned.
“Occurred, not transpired. Don’t you know the difference in the meaning
of the words?”
He ignored the interruption. “She was lovely, tall, straight, and slim.
Her hair was golden yellow. Now she is homely, fat, and generally
unattractive. Her hair is rather colorless. No free, unrestrained animal
would continue to love such a mate. I intend to be like other animals.
So I am going to leave this house and live with Natalie.
“In a short time, doubtless, I shall leave her in turn and find another,
and so on until I am overtaken by death or the police.
“I want you to know about this plan of mine. There are too many
marriages. There should be many matings, free and frequent. But of
marriages, few or none. This is the key to unlock the fetters of
civilization. It is Sherwood Anderson’s answer to the riddle of
existence, else this book, in which we live, has no meaning.”
For hours he talked, describing to his daughter all the ugly aspects of
her mother’s body and mind, all the sordid incidents of their married
life that his memory could recall or his imagination furnish. It was a
quite lovely experience for both women.
When he dressed, packed his bag, and left the house, his wife took a few
ounces of laudanum and ceased to exist.
VI
Through the silent, deserted streets toward the railroad station John
Webster walked with his new woman, Natalie, the Beautiful Washing
Machine Girl. He walked with one foot on the curb and one in the gutter.
Up and down he went, as with alternate step he now rose toward heaven on
the higher foot, now sank toward earth on the lower. It pleased him to
walk thus. It seemed to typify the conflict of life, the struggle
between the higher and lower natures. Natalie, carrying both bags, wept
unceasingly, but inaudibly.
“That is fine,” thought John Webster. “She weeps with dignity. But she
walks with both feet on the sidewalk.”
“Come, woman,” he said. “Walk as I do, with one foot in the gutter. That
will do for a starter. Both of them and all the rest of you will be in
the gutter, when I am through with you. Better get used to it
gradually.”
Natalie, still weeping, audibly now, obeyed. And so there in the
darkness of the night, John Webster and his _pro tempore_ soul mate,
Natalie, the congenital dumbbell, went on their way, up and down, up and
down, one foot in the gutter, one on the curb.
VII
They came to where narrow strips of grass bordered the sidewalk. These
gave John Webster a new and glorious thought.
“See the grass strips!” he cried; “the beautiful grass strips! All flesh
is grass; therefore, let us strip also.”
He began, unsystematically but vigorously, enthusiastically, to remove
his clothing. Natalie’s weeping now lost all its dignity. She bellowed
enormously. She woke the echoes and a policeman.
And, so you see, there is John Webster in a great house maintained by
the State of Wisconsin for all who think such great thoughts. He is free
from the worries of women, wives and washing machines; carefree in all
respects save one—his straitjacket is obviously a ready-made garment.
THE FLAME THAT FAILED
_Réchaufféd from_
“THE VEHEMENT FLAME”
I
“We have been married exactly fifty-four minutes,” said Maurice, “and I
still love you.”
“I can’t believe it!” answered Eleanor.
As she was thirty-nine and he nineteen, her incredulity was not strange,
but, after all, fifty-four minutes lacks a full six minutes of being an
hour.
They were islanded in rippling tides of windblown grass, with the warm
fragrance of dropping locust blossoms enfolding them and in their ears
the endless murmur of the river.
“We must spend our golden wedding here, under this tree,” he said.
She made a mental calculation. She was twice his age. At their golden
wedding he would be sixty-nine and she twice that—one hundred and
thirty-eight! It seemed hopeless. Would it last forever? Such a little
thing might—_throw the switches_.
Six minutes had elapsed. “I wish,” said Maurice very low in his mind, “I
wish I could die, right now!” _Tempus, edax amoris!_
II
She had said “No!” six times. Consider her age! Consider that she was a
music-teacher and suffered from indigestion! Consider, moreover, that
the author of her being had failed to give her any last name and here
was her opportunity to fill the gap! This, then, was certainly an heroic
defense of an untenable position. At the seventh time of asking, she
capitulated—more to be pitied than blamed.
She sang with a voice of serene sweetness. Otherwise she was a creature
of alluring silences. They fascinated Maurice. He was sure that behind
her white forehead beautiful, mysterious thoughts were evolving. Perhaps
that was so. Evolution is a notoriously slow process. On the other hand,
behind that white forehead there may have been merely one full portion
of the great cosmic void. Judging her by what she verbally disclosed,
her rating under the Binet test was D−.
She was not a well woman. Besides indigestion, she was suffering from
another chronic illness, _detropitis_. She did not know it yet. She had
not met Maurice’s other half. She was his better half, but Edith was his
other half—a very different thing.
Edith and Maurice were fashioned for each other. They had been so
carefully forged and shaped that they fitted each other like a pair of
scissors. Anything that came between them was—_de trop_ and likely to
get hurt.
Moreover, she was, unknowingly, now exposing herself to her final, her
fatal malady. The place of their fifty-four minute honeymoon had been
rashly, inconsiderately chosen. This riverside paradise was unlucky for
her. Death was already shaking the bones for the final throw—though its
double-sixes did not fall for ten years. All in all, she was not a well
woman.
III
Maurice’s Uncle Henry and Aunt Mary took them in until Maurice could get
a job. Uncle Henry’s wife counted every cigar he smoked, yet he
maintained his cheerfulness. He reminded one somewhat of Mark Tapley,
somewhat of Moses, but mostly of William James—the Pragmatic Sanction
justified everything to him.
Aunt Mary was of distinguished lineage, descendant of the late Lydia
Pinkham and of the late Ralph Waldo Emerson. She inherited the Pinkham
physique, the Emerson mentality.
Edith, their daughter, was eleven. She and Maurice had a wonderful time
playing tag and pussy-in-a-corner, while Eleanor sat on the porch with
the other old folks and had a wonderful time being jealous of Edith.
“Maurice! don’t get overheated, darling! Look out! you’ll tear your
panties and mamma will have to spank. Maurice! come sit by mamma and
she’ll show you how to play cat’s-cradle. Maurice, dear! You mustn’t
play with that rough, rude tom-boy. Come, let mamma tell you Bible
stories.”
It worried Maurice. Seeking distraction, he developed an interest in
poultry. He shingled the chicken-coop and then crawled in and sat among
the chickens debating whether Eleanor was an old hen. After observing
them for some time, he found that hens never nagged the cockerels. She
was not an old hen!
Apparently slight causes have such momentous effects! He had developed
an interest in chickens. He little knew whither it was to lead him.
IV
Maurice got a job in a real-estate office and at once became a real
force in the business. He devised a new method of making sales. It
consisted in pointing out to prospective purchasers the defects in the
houses he was trying to sell.
If a house had a broken-down heater, an antiquated plumbing system and a
leaky roof, Maurice would take the client into his confidence and tell
him frankly that there was a broken window-pane in the attic, a creaky
board in the dining-room floor and several scratches in the paint of the
guest-room door. Such frankness was most beguiling. The client was
beguiled into examining, under Maurice’s guidance, the attic window and
the guest-room door, and forgot to look at the heater and the roof.
Houses which had been the despair of the office were sold, one after
another. They gave him three cheers and the nickname of “G. R. Q.
Wallingford.”
V
Their attempt at housekeeping failed. Although Eleanor had hired a very
deaf old scrubwoman to do the cooking, somehow the food wasn’t properly
prepared. After Maurice had broken a tooth on one of her soft-boiled
eggs, they gave it up and went to boarding.
They had a nice third-story room, with a black-marble mantelpiece, an
antique carpet and steel engravings of Lincoln’s Cabinet and Daniel
Webster. It was a dear little lovenest. Every evening Maurice played
solitaire on a marble-topped table. She put on an old wrapper, let down
her hair, made it all nice and stringy with cologne, lay down on the bed
and moaned. They were three years married now. He was twenty-two, she
was going on for about sixty-six.
“Star, why do you moan?” he asked gently.
“You’re tired of me, Maurice. You don’t love me,” she moaned. “I’m
jealous.”
“Of whom,” he inquired.
“Of Edith, of your Aunt Mary, of your stenographer, of our landlady, of
the schoolteacher downstairs, of our late cook, of everybody.”
Moan—moan—moan. “Jealousy isn’t a vice. It’s my favorite indoor sport. I
love you—I love you so.” Moan—moan—moan. “Tell me you love me, Maurice.”
“I do—yes, of course, naturally, I love you—devotedly, madly.”
“You don’t love me! You don’t love me!”
He threw the table at her. She screamed.
“Excuse me, dearest, for an hour or two. I forgot something.” He took
his hat and went out. All the lights went out....
_The switches were thrown...._
VI
Lily Dale was a little thing, with exquisite features, a pretty,
laughing face and amber eyes. She was a lover of flowers, a neat
housekeeper, a good cook. She was honest, cheerful, self-reliant,
humorous. In fact, she was a great deal better than she should be,
considering what she was. In the entire category of virtues she lacked
only two, grammar and—the title rôle.
In her little flat she cooked a steak for Maurice better than any he’d
had since he was married—and made a cup of coffee to match it. She put
him in a big chair before an open fire, with a hyacinth on the table
beside him. She sat on a hassock by him, smoked cigarettes and told him
funny stories ... and Maurice discovered why men leave home....
Maurice had a wonderful idea. He and Eleanor would again go to
housekeeping and install Lily in the kitchen. Lily would be saved and
they’d have a good cook. Then Eleanor could lie on the bed upstairs and
moan all the evening, while he and Lily made fudge in the kitchen.
“My wife’s very broad-minded,” he said, “and we need a cook awful bad.”
“Ain’t you the funny little feller!” said Lily. “Here, you run along
home to mother. The old lady’ll think you got stole or something....”
Eleanor awaited him in their room. “Maurice, dear! Where’ve you been?”
“To see a chicken. You know my interest in poultry. (Thank God! that’s
no lie)....”
But whenever he wanted a good cup of coffee, he had to go back to the
little flat....
VII
Little Jacky Dale was six years old when Eleanor first learned of his
existence. She happened not to be lying on the bed at the time, so she
fainted first—then went to bed.
There were dumb days when she went about like an automaton. Days when
she sat at the window and looked at the bare branches of the trees, the
dead stalks of the lilies—the river! Sometimes she was almost able to
think. Then a return to normality—blank listlessness. Sometimes she
seemed to hear a whisper in her mind—but it was only an echo in the
void.
So the days passed and each day she dredged the silences of her cranium
for thoughts—none! But at last, after two years of listening to echoes
and dredging silences—an idea came to her! It was the first she’d ever
had! The shock of it took her breath away, stunned her! But there it
was, her first-born idea! A little idiotic, perhaps, but her own!
She went to the house on Maple Street, where Lily lived.
“Sell me Jacky! I’ll give you six hundred dollars.”
“Sell Jacky for six hundred dollars! I ain’t no cheap trader!”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Then you needn’t come around. If that’s all you’ve got, you’d better
get.”
She got.
VIII
A failure! Her little first-born idea had flivvered! Would she ever have
another? Yes! She had another almost immediately—of the same kind. She
must keep Maurice from marrying Edith and to do that it was
necessary—not for her to live. No, that would be good for only twenty or
twenty-five years or maybe thirty—if she lived to be eighty. Maurice
would be only sixty then and Edith fifty and they might still marry.
She must do better than that. He must marry Lily! Lily would live at
least fifty years more. By that time Maurice would surely be dead and
Edith foiled, forever. She, herself, must die at once so Maurice might
marry Lily....
It was the place of their honeymoon. But the river looked wet! Suppose
it was? Her skirts would get wet! To keep her coat dry she left it on
the bank. Her hat? She’d wear that to keep her hair dry.
Feet in the water, ankle deep! It _was_ wet! Oh, bother! Above her knees
now! Still wet—such a nuisance! She fell full length! Wet all over!!!
She couldn’t stand that! That was too much of a wetness! No, no, she’d
better go home and try something new.
So she tried pneumonia.
IX
“Of course, now that poor Eleanor is gone,” said Maurice, “I’ll have to
look out for Jacky and Lily. I think I’ll marry Lily.”
“Of course not,” said Aunt Mary, and Uncle Henry agreed.
“Well, then, I don’t think I’ll marry any one. Although Lily is an
excellent cook.”
“You’re all so stupid,” broke in Edith. “You marry me, Maurice.”
“But,” interposed Uncle Henry, “what about Maurice’s relations with——”
“Bother Maurice’s relations,” Edith interrupted. “I’m not marrying them.
We’ll adopt Jacky and put Lily in the kitchen.”
BLACKER OXEN
_By_
GERTRUDE OTHERTON
I
Lee Clavering’s weary eyes—steel-blue, half closed—roved over the
darkened auditorium.
Twelve years ago he had migrated from pre-civil-war Louisiana to
Manhattan, the Brains of America—from the ante-bellum to the cerebellum.
In that time he had attained the highest position in the gift of the
nation. Poets, playwrights, players, painters, pugilists, politicians,
prophets, priests, popes, presidents, princes and pullman-car porters
cringed before him.
He was L. C., the premier columnist of America, the King Kleagle of the
Kolyumist Klan.
His long dark face suggested the cynical, the mysterious, the morose.
But his steel-blue eyes were now, as always, searching, with the
evergreen hope of finding _the_ consummate woman, which proves him
really romantic. That he found her in a New York first-night audience
proves him a character in fiction.
II
She sat two seats ahead of him. After the first act, she rose to her
feet, turned toward him and, with her opera glasses, swept the house.
“European,” Clavering clicked. “All of them are—these sweepers and
scrubwomen.”
The columnist spoke. The man took a second look—and saw that Venus
rising from the sea had nothing on her (emphasis on _her_, please!)—the
most exquisitely beautiful woman he had ever seen—the only authentic
consummate woman, indubitably.
Clavering’s nerves rippled, but the man next to him—old Dinwiddie,
swell, suave and sixty—had an apoplectic fit. His eyes bulged. His lips
gibbered.
“It’s a ghost—Mary Ogden—belle of New York forty-five years ago, when I
was a kid—married Count Zattiany—Hungarian—never been back since——”
“Her daughter, of course,” suggested Clavering.
“Never had any—to speak of—but that’s it—must be—one of the
unmentionables—she was a gay one—little liaison now and then—relished by
the best of men——”
III
Three weeks passed—six more “first-nights”—and “Mary Ogden” was at every
one of them, also Lee Clavering. She was “the talk of the town.”
The newspapers were full of the mystery. Who was this enthralling
person? Crowds followed her everywhere. She bought a pair of gloves—and
seven floor-walkers were hurried to Bellevue in seven separate deliria.
She went into the Public Library—and the infatuated populace carried off
all the books as souvenirs. She walked around the reservoir—and they
drew off the water and sold it for a dollar a bottle.
At the theater they turned the footlights around and threw the
spotlights on her. Nobody looked at the stage. The actors forgot their
parts, switched from the first act of “The Demi-Vierge” to the second
act of “Pollyanna” and no one noticed it, but the author.
On the second Sunday, forty per cent of all the clergymen preached on
“Mary has chosen the better part.”
Never had there been such excitement in Manhattan since Peter Stuyvesant
broke his wooden leg.
IV
After the sixth “first-night,” Lee Clavering followed her home. He found
her alone in the great city, on her own doorstep.
“May I?—Am I?—Are you?—Were they?—Was it?—Whoosis?—” he stammered, his
temperature rising dangerously.
“Oh,” she said with a faint smile, “I’m locked out——”
“Watch me!” he said.
He tore out the area railing and threw it at a passing taxicab, smashed
the area windows, and burst in the door. Entering, he ran rapidly
through the house, switched on all the lights, turned on the hot and
cold water in every bathroom, upset the furniture and slid down the
banisters from the fourth story to the first. Landing in a heap at the
bottom, he leaped to his feet and opened the front door.
“Thank you,” she said simply. “Have a drink, Mr. Clavering?”
“You know whom I am, then?” he cyrilled in amazement.
“Certainly. Don’t you?” she answered.
“I—yes—no—” he murmured, his eyes fixed on her, as he poured a drink.
“That’s the catsup bottle—and do you always drink from a finger bowl?”
she asked sweetly.
“Oh, invariably never,” he gasped. “I mean—inevitably always——”
“Won’t you sit down?”
“You make me sit up—and take notice,” he columned feebly, seating
himself on the overturned victrola.
“You will pardon my confusion,” he babbled on. “To who—I mean, to wit
have I the honor of speaking? How old are you? Have you ever been
married? If so, mark a cross within the circle, but not within the
triangle—if not, was your husband present when the body was found? If
you have any children not in jail, how do you account for it? Who _are_
you, and if not, what _is_ your beautiful name? Answer yes or no.”
“Marie Zattiany,” she answered, with a smile.
“Legitimate or ill—” he paused in midflight, dipped his forefinger into
the catsup and dreamily drew a red cross on his shirt-front.
“Pardon me,” he continued, “I was about to ask a personal question. To
speak quite impersonally—will you marry me?—if you’re of marriageable
age.”
“How old do you think I am? Don’t answer. You’d certainly either flatter
me nauseatingly or insult me grossly. Come back in three weeks and I
will tell you my story.”
She raised her hand for him to kiss, but he ducked and she missed him by
an inch.
Outside the house, he remembered the shattered basement-windows. His
southern chivalry would not let him leave her unprotected. He lay down
on the doorstep and slept soundly until dawn.
V
A column a day keeps the sheriff away and when you’ve got the habit, you
keep right on, no matter what your feelings are—or your readers’. It
helped L. C. to bear incertitude with fortitude.
The make-up seldom varied. It must open with a poem, preferably an
authentic L. C. Horatian ode. His odometer registered three a week. It
was his line—“master of the Horatian line,” he had been called. As thus:
THE MAN OF UPRIGHT LIFE
Horace: Book I; Ode 22
_Integer vitæ, scelerisque purus_—
De gink dat never croaked a guy
Nor crowned a cop
Nor even bumped a buddy on the beezer
Nor kicked his frail an’ blacked her eye
(It does ’em good an’ dat’s no lie)
Nor stuck a knife in any scrappy geezer—
A chink or wop,
Nor peddled dope or hop or hooch, nor panned a yid
Nor blew a safe, nor shoved de queer, nor napped a kid
Dat never copped a come-on’s kale
Nor frisked a hayseed’s leather
Ain’t got no fear of judge or jail
Nor de cops all put together
Dey’ll never pinch him. Hully gee!
Dat ain’t no loss!
Dey’ll never mug him for de Gallery.
He’ll never git no third degree
(Like what de bulls once giv’ to me.
I’ll say dey earn’t their salary.
_I come across!!_)
Nor do a bit nor stretch a rope, nor pad de hoof
And pound his ear beneat’ de sky, widout no roof
He needn’t pack no wicked gat.
Policemen’ll protect him.
If he forgets where home is at,
Kind Central’ll connect him.
L’Envoi
Dat pious pie-faced son of a gun,
He’s sittin’ pretty, maybe.
But ain’t he missed a lot of fun?
_I’ll tell de world! Oh, baby!_
Then the contribs must have a chance. Just now they were busy with Tens.
For example, one proposed, as the Ten Most Lovable Old Women in History,
a list beginning with (1) Mother Goose and (2) Old Mother Hubbard, and
ending with (9) Josephine Daniels and (10) Wilhelmina Jenny Bryan.
Another wrote——
“Sir: If I had to go to a Desert Island and take
Ten Women with me, I’d take
(1) Cyanide of Potassium
And that would be about all.
“G. P. B.”
Then the Diary:
“Wednesday, October 9.
“Up betimes, at ten of the clock and to my office, there half an hour
pasting contribs’ contribs to make a full column and amazed to find how
short my stint, but with no lack of pleasure or content. Having nothing
now in my mind of trouble in the world, did sit and think on many
things. So to lunch with H. Broun, my fellow scrivener and a very
pleasant fellow withal, though me thought me had heard before some of
the bright sayings of his little son, wherewith he regaled me. Thence to
the game or play of base-ball, as well played as ever I saw in my life.
Thence to tea with Mistress Myssa McMynn, with much merriment and wit.
Thence to dinner with F. Adams, the satyrickal writer, H. Canby, the
excellent critick, C. Morley, the literary philosopher, D. Marquis, the
poet, and other wits, and much good talk of this and that. Thence to the
playhouse where was enacted a masque entitled “The Follies,” to my great
content. Thence to supper with W. Rogers, the antick player, and found
him very intelligent, whereat I wondered greatly. And so to bed, very
low spirited and lay a long time marvelling at my capacity for work and
how, poor wretch, I must earn my bread by the sweat of my paste pot.”
VI
Three weeks passed.
“To-night’s the night,” he cried, rushed from his apartment, plunged
recklessly between automobiles going in four different directions at
once—obviously Fords—sprang upon the roof of a passing taxicab and told
the man to drive like hell for Park Avenue.
He charged up the steps, assaulted the door with his fists, leap-frogged
over the impassive butler. He found her in the library and forced the
fighting from the start.
It seemed to her that her entire body was encircled by flexible hot bars
of iron and that her face, her mouth, were being flagellated.
“Break away!” she managed to gurgle. “No biting in the clinches!”
“Who are you?” he cried. “I don’t want to know! Will you marry me? Don’t
answer!”
Again she was submerged. When she was coming up for the third time, he
pushed her head under once more. A left hook to the jaw and he collapsed
under a table.
When he came to, his voice was weak.
“A typewriter, please!” he gasped. “It’s stuff for the column.” His news
sense rarely failed him.
“Tuesday, October 29th—I to M. Zattiany’s, the toast of the town, and a
mighty mystery, whether she be in truth Zattiany or a mischievous
impostor, and did kiss and clip her mightily, but the baggage handed me
a slapp on the mapp, as a trunk had fallen on me. So I to the mat.”
“What next?” he added feebly.
“Have a drink,” she said.
He took three.
“Who are you, woman? Is your real name Zattiany or Firpo?”
“I am Mary Ogden Zattiany,” she answered quietly; “I married Zattiany
forty-five years ago. I was twenty-five at the time. Do your own
arithmetic.”
“Five from thirty is twenty and carry two—twice two is five divided by
forty—double it and subtract the cube root—think of a number, add a dash
of bitters—shake well before using”—his voice trailed to silence and his
jaw dropped.
“I hated Zattiany but his position appealed to my love of power and
intrigue—especially the latter. I was besieged by men—and surrendered at
discretion.”
He got suddenly to his feet. “Think I’ll take few more drinks.” He did
so and then sat down on the floor, a full glass in either hand.
“I had many lovers—many—many—many—” she went on.
“Bow-wow-wow!” he barked a short laugh.
He gazed at her with relaxing features. His steel-blue eyes goggled
sardonically.
“Of all my lovers, I loved but one, Prince Haffanauer, the last. But he
married and left me flat.”
“Lef’ your flat? Thought you lived in palazzo.”
“That’s so,” she echoed. “I did until the war came.”
“’Scuse me pers’nal queshion, Mis’ Zattiany, but have you sat in any
these genelmen’s laps lately?”
“Not since Haffanauer,” she answered pleadingly.
“Tha’s long time—thirty minutes,” he ruminated. “That’s all ri’.
Proceed!”
“I was sixty-five when Haffanauer—elapsed, so to speak.”
“But you’re young woman now. Please ’splain that—simple queshion—how do
you did it?”
“Coué!”
“No, I won’ go ’way—not tell you till me—till you tell me.”
“Coué! Coué! Emile Coué!”
“Are you singin’ song or jes’ making funny noises?”
“Oh, you know! Every day in every way—younger and younger.”
“Sure, I know! Every day Coee, Cooay, he chortled in his joy! Alice
Swunderland. S’Lewis Carroll—great columnist—my cousin—same ’nitials.”
“I was sixty-eight when I took the cure. Every day I’ve been getting
younger and younger—_in every way_.”
“Better stop, lady!” he said solemnly. “Some kid now, but—much
younger—police in’erfere.”
“Well—that is my story. Do you—do you love me still?” she faltered.
“’Scuse me, ’nother pers’nal queshion. _D’you make zis hooch?_”
“I did.”
“’En I _do_ love your still. Old as you are, your still’s mos’ beautiful
thing in N’York. _In hooch signo vinces._ With all thy faults, I love
thy still—now an’ forever—one insepar’ble—death us do part!”
And then he slept as quietly as a child.
VII
Three weeks passed—three weeks of constant companionship with Lee
Clavering—almost exhausting her capacity for surprise and her cellar.
Then, a wireless telegram—“Wife dead must see you immediately on arrival
Berengaria Haffanauer.”
The Prince arrived—straight, thin, erect, broke—in his eyes the glance
of the Austrian double-eagle, now selling at 99⁴⁴⁄₁₀₀ off for cash.
“Frau Gräfin.” He lifted her hand to his lips with princely courtesy.
“Younger than when I first saw you. Couéing, they tell me—and billing,
as well—is it not so?”
“Why are you here, Excellenz?”
“Because Austria needs you—I need you. We need you every hour and—every
dollar. Will you marry me?”
“But I am engaged to L. C.”
“What of that? Let me state my case. I am about to rehabilitate Austria.
My plans are simple but comprehensible by the meanest intelligence—only.
I shall annex Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Moldavia, Bolivia,
Rumania, Pneumonia, the Jugo and Czecho brothers and all the Balking
States. I shall create a Barnum, Bailey and Ringling Brothers
Austria—bigger and better than ever.
“And you?” he went on, “you shall be—what you will—queen, empress, my
m—er—morganatic wife. The Oesterreich shall shed its plumes for your
adornment—if only you’ll buy a little preferred with a large bonus of
very common.”
“Old stuff!” she exclaimed disdainfully. “I have the same plan. I shall
do it myself—with the aid of my husband’s column—I, Marie, Countess
Zattiany!”
“But, no,” he answered. “Return to Austria as Mrs. Lee Clavering and
you’ll be cut by every true-born Austrich. We recognize no one without
sixteen quarterings—and a few hangings and drawings.”
“What?” she stared aghast. “Mrs. Lee—? Shall I have to take my husband’s
name? Isn’t the Lucy Stone League too powerful——”
“Not in Austria,” he said blandly. “No League whether of Nations or
denominations is recognized.”
“I love him so!” she moaned. “But this changes everything. I will never
give up the gräfinship. Moritz! I am yours!”
“Sign on the dotted line,” he said quietly.
VIII
She wrote Lee these stanzas:
When lovely woman takes to Coué-ing
And finds what bills she has to pay
For this—though sweet—untitled wooing.
The next boat takes her down the bay.
You should then be up and doing.
_Follow me on Saturday_,
Still your happiness pursuing.
_Love like ours will find a way._
But he printed it in the column on Saturday and on Monday married the
daughter of an eminent bootlegger.
GLIMPSING THE MOON
_With an Obeisance to_
EDITH WHARTON
I
“I opine,” began Susy——
“You what?” interrupted Nick.
“Opine,” answered Susy.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Nick.
“Why not?” she asked, amazed.
“Why it isn’t done, my dear. Really it isn’t.”
“It’s a perfectly good word,” pouted Susy. “Prior used it.”
“Prior, yes, but not since,” said he. “It has had priority but not
permanency. Obsolete, my dear—archaic. Begin again.”
“All right. How’s this?——”
I
“The moon—their tutelary orb——”
“Tutelary orb! Oh, dear!” groaned Nick. “Why don’t you say ‘chaste
goddess of the night!’ ‘sweet regent of the heavens!’ ‘queen and
huntress, chaste and fair!’ or something new like that? This is modern
English prose, my dear Susy. Here, let me have the typewriter. I’ll show
you how.”
I
Nick Lansing lived in a three-pair-back bed sitting-room. An industrious
young man, he worked day and night. In the daytime he worked, writing
part of a popular encyclopedia—V to X, a most depressing section of the
alphabet. At night he worked his rich friends for dinners, the opera,
drinks and cigars, a more agreeable job.
Susy Branch was also a prominent member of the I. W. W. She worked
everybody, day and night, all the time, for everything—clothes, shoes,
hats, board, lodging and laundry.
In spite of their industry, both were poor. Nick was poor as he could
be—which, considering Nick’s capacity for poverty—is saying something.
Susy was poorer than she could be—and be satisfied—which, considering
her tastes and appetites, isn’t saying so much. Still, the fact is she
hadn’t a red—outside of her vanity-case.
And so they were married. By the Interposition of Authorship they were
brought together at the almost equally poor Fulmers’ tiny cottage in the
wilds of New Hampshire, where Nat Fulmer painted the Italian cook on the
veranda, Grace Fulmer played the fiddle in the dining-room and the five
Fulmer kids raised hell simultaneously all over the place. The romance
of married love in a cottage swept Susy off her feet.
It was Susy’s idea. Nick would never have thought of it.
“Why not us get married?” she asked quite simply.
Nick was frightened, shied, might have run away, but Susy was on the job
with a plan—blue-prints, specifications and working-drawings all
complete—especially the last. Susy was a fast worker.
In six words, the gist of it was “checks, nothing but checks, for
wedding-presents.” The word “checks”—in the plural—rooted Nicky to the
spot. “Lead me to them!” cried every fibre in his body.
The whole thing was simple enough. Susy would guarantee the checks. It
should be understood of all that it would be bad form to give Nick and
Susy anything but checks, drafts or orders for the payment of money—this
their spending-money. For the rest, everyone would lend them their spare
houses, palazzos, cottages, villas, apartments, servants, food, wine,
cigars and cigarettes—board and lodging free for a year at least. Susy
would guarantee _that_.
And that’s all they had to look out for—one year. After that, why,
either of them might make a better match—both of them probably. One
little hand-made divorce would do for both....
“I should like just for once to have something of my very own, Nicky
dear—something that nobody had lent me, like my fancy-dresses, motors,
opera cloaks—or given me, like everything else. And the divorce would be
my own, wouldn’t it, Nicky? Mine and yours, just our owny own little
divorce.”
“Checks!” murmured Nicky, still in a trance. “Checks!”...
II
It rose for them—the moon—their tutelary orb, if you prefer to put it
that way, as indeed you may, goodness knows, some do—over Como,
Streffy’s villa, marble balustrades, stephanotis, gardenias,
nightingales, and Streffy’s cigars....
But now their month was ended. They were packing for the next on their
string, Vanderlyn’s palazzo in Venice, equally well found.
“The new tenant’s motor has come,” said Susy gaily, “and I’ve bribed the
chauffeur to drive us to Milan. It’s so much cheaper than railway
fares.”
“Clever of you!” Nicky laughed.
“And I’ve packed all the rest of Streffy’s cigars.”
“Streffy’s cigars?” Lansing stared, aghast. “_Streffy’s cigars!_ Oh, my
God! Give me the key, woman!”...
He worked half an hour over the refractory lock, perspired, broke his
finger-nails, disinterred them at last. Then he jumped into the motor
and they were whirling through the nightingale-thickets to the gates.
“Why did you leave the cigars, dear?” she asked.
“Of course, you don’t understand, darling,” he answered gently. “No
woman knows anything about cigars. Streffy never bought those cigars,
dear. _They were given to him._ Thank God! Vanderlyn buys his own
cigars....”
III
At the palazzo, a letter from Ellie Vanderlyn awaited Susy, containing
four other letters addressed to “Nelson Vanderlyn, Esqre., New York
City.” Susy read:
“One good turn deserves another ... you and Nick can stay all summer ...
no expense—servants have orders ... just post these letters, one a
week ... be good to my child....”
It was too plain!... vile!... infamous!... a child left behind ...
abominable!... for her to take care of ... outrageous!... She would
never do it ... they must leave this place at once....
But she awoke next morning to the sun shining through curtains of old
brocade, making a network of golden scales upon the vaulted ceiling—to a
luxurious breakfast in bed and a single tea-rose in an old Murano
glass—and thought of—the child! How could she leave a lonely child
exposed to all the evils of such a pampered infancy? Distasteful as it
was to dwell in the palazzo of the ungodly—it was her duty ... and she
did. The letters went in due course to N. Vanderlyn, Esqre.
Charlie Strefford arrived wearing a mouldy Panama hat, reminiscent of
the Stilton cheese of old England—an eccentricity pardonable in the
next-but-two to the Earldom of Altringham—only the present incumbent and
his son intervening.
“Good old Streffy!”
“Where’s old Nick?”
“He’s writing, you know. Works all day on a philosophic romance—like
_Marius_, you know.”
“Oh, I say!—good one!” laughed Streffy. “Nick’s _Marius_—_you_ marry
_me_—see? Capital!—Eh, what? Rath-er! Countess of Altringham—what?
Altringham and son sure to die soon‘—’bout middle of the book—accident
in hunting field or yacht capsizes in the Solent—sure to—always
happens—one or other—absolutely. Think it over, old thing....”
IV
Ellie Vanderlyn came back ... but only to be off again to St. Moritz,
leaving Nick and Susy undisturbed.
“Good-by, you dear thing,” to Nicky. “I must thank you for helping me to
be so happy elsewhere—you and Susy were such bricks about the letters.”
She left him a morocco case, in it a pearl scarf pin. He sought Susy.
She hurried to him. She pressed the button of the lamp. Her husband’s
face started out of the twilight ... fortunately stopped before it had
entirely left him ... then hardened. On her outstretched wrist was a
bracelet of emeralds and brilliants.
“Look, dearest—wasn’t it darling of Ellie,” she cried.
“Yes, she gave me this.” He opened the morocco case. “But yours cost
more. Will you tell me why she values your services higher than mine?
Don’t you know that men demand and receive higher wages than women? My
position as head of the family ... it’s humiliating ... it’s.... I don’t
know what to say.... I’m all het up.... I’ll have to go for a tramp....”
And he left her ... just like that.
V
None was to be found in all Venice, nor in Milan, nor in Genoa, whither
his hopeless quest had led him. Lazzaroni a-plenty ... but in all Italy,
it seemed, there was not one real, honest-to-God, good old-fashioned
American tramp....
... But he did find Coral Hicks....
There, in the harbor, was the huge outline of the Hickses’ yacht, the
_Ibis_ ... within the outline was the _Ibis_ itself. Nick knew it well.
He had bummed his board and lodging on it for five months once in the
good old days before Susy and the checks had mesmerized him.
There was something so restful about the Hickses, so substantial, so
solvent. Good old Papa and Mamma Hicks, solid three-dimensional
people.... Papa, especially, had a wonderful figure—one large digit,
backed by six ciphers and a decimal point.
He could see them now, with their entourage—two secretaries, a doctor, a
maiden lady known as Eldorada Tooker—though why so called, unless to
supply Comic Relief, no one could say—and Coral, sole daughter of their
house and heart, that still unmarried child of opulence.
One large digit, backed by six ciphers and a decimal point, contrasted
with a small bank balance, backed by Susy’s grandmother’s pearl
necklace ... what about that? He knew they would have to cast the pearls
before the wolf, if they were to hang together much longer.... Susy
would have to choose between her Nicholas and her necklace.... Was it
right?... Was it fair to Susy to burden her longer?... The year was
almost up.... Why not resign now—while the _Ibis_ was at hand?...
_tutissimus Ibis_!
He picked up the _Daily Mail_, ran his eye casually down its columns and
read:
“Tragic Yachting Accident in the Solent. The Earl of Altringham and his
son, Viscount d’Amblay, drowned.”
VI
Coral Hicks was a young lady of compact if not graceful outline, with a
downright manner, also a little black down right on her upper lip. She
shanghaied unresisting Nick and the _Ibis_ sailed away....
Sitting beside him on deck, she suddenly said:
“Your wife hasn’t written you for weeks.”
“No, thank the Lord!” he laughed.
“And you haven’t written her.”
“No.”
“Then you’re free. Will you take a new job? Will you be my—secretary?”
“My dear Coral,” he replied, “this is so sudden. No, I cannot. I do not
love you in that way, dearest. It’s too much like work. But I will be a
husband to you.”
From the next port he wired his wife:
“Hereby tender resignation my position your husband stop pearls
beautiful but Coral more durable stop recommend Streff my successor go
to it kid—don’t stop.”
VII
Susy wired Streffy:
“Congratulations old bean nice name Altringham been thinking it over
Nick has quit.”
She received an answer:
“Meet me at the fountain Versailles Friday”....
“So Nicky did a bunk, eh?” Streffy chuckled. “I say, that’s top-hole,
what? How about little old me? Countess, you know ... places, no end....
Altringham and the others.... If you don’t like the others, we’ll see
about altering ’em.... I say, how’s that? Pretty good, eh? ... better
take me on, old thing? What?...”
Casually running their eyes down the columns of the _Daily Mail_, as was
their wont, Nick, Streffy, Susy and Coral read:
“A divorce has been arranged and will shortly take place between Mr. and
Mrs. Nicholas Lansing.”
VIII
They were at tea on the terrace of the Castle, the Earle and Countess of
Altringham (_née_ Branch) and their week-end guests, Mr. and Mrs.
Nicholas Lansing (_née_ Hicks), all merry and bright.
“Nicky, dear, did you read the funny story they’ve written about us?”
asked Susy gaily. “Of course not. I’d forgotten you’ve given up books
entirely. Well, it’s simply killing. You see, I’m supposed to turn
Streffy down and then, of all things, get a job as child’s nurse
for—you’d never guess—_the five Fulmer kids_—remember that awful
bunch?—can you imagine me?
“Then you do the same to Coral—isn’t that the limit?—you turning down
Coral! Imagination? Well, I guess yes. And you come bumbling round and
it’s all on again—no divorce at all. Think of it!—and we go off with all
the Fulmer kids, for a second honeymoon at—this is the top-notch!—at
Fontainebleau—cheap hotel—awful restaurants. And, then, I suppose, we
live happily ever after—though the Lord knows what we’re supposed to
live on. They didn’t know us, did they, old one? I’ll say they didn’t.”
Everybody roared with laughter.
“Oh, well,” said Nicky, “you know, they’re the thing nowadays—unhappy
endings—they all do it—call it Realism.”
THE VANISHING POINT
_With Apologies to_
“THE BREAKING POINT”
I
“Give Elizabeth a kiss for me!” Uncle David called after him, as he left
the house.
“David,” said Aunt Lucy, “he’ll never marry Elizabeth until the mystery
is cleared up.”
“Nonsense!” said Doctor David. “Donaldson’s dead. Maggie will keep quiet
for her own sake. She’s as criminally liable as I am. Beverly Carlysle
hasn’t been heard of for years. The Thorwald woman will never tell. The
whole thing’s dead and buried”....
At dinner, Dick was as cheerful as usual.
“I’ve asked Elizabeth Wheeler to go to the theatre on Wednesday to see
Beverly Carlysle in ‘The Valley.’”
Aunt Lucy, fork in air, stared at him. Uncle David stared at his plate.
II
“Walter, who is Dick Livingston?” Mrs. Wheeler asked her husband.
“Son of Henry, Doctor David’s brother.”
“Walter, Dick’s been living in this town for ten years and everybody
knows him and likes him, but suddenly everybody in town has remembered
that Henry Livingston wasn’t married. It is most embarrassing for
Elizabeth. I think you ought to do something about it.”
“Very well, dear. I’ll go to Wyoming and look into it.”
But he never reached Wyoming alive.
(To be continued.)
III
Because he never started. He was too busy.
Who was Dick Livingston? Dick did not know. He could remember that
little cabin in the Wyoming mountains, the snow-storm, himself
recovering from an illness, in the care of Doctor David—nothing back of
that. The rest was walled off.
If he could only have a severe shock—a breaking point—get run over by a
train or something—_and awake surrounded by familiar things_ to stir his
dormant memory—perhaps——?
Beverly Carlysle’s brother, Fred Gregory, saw him in the theatre. Louis
Bassett, reporter on the _Times-American_, saw Gregory see him. What did
it mean?
He hurried back to the office, got out the files of the paper for ten
years back, read them through, advertisements and all, then read them
through again. It was four o’clock in the morning when his eye fell on
this advertisement:
“Wanted—Cook. Protestant preferred, anything taken. Apply L-22 this
office.”
He clipped it, put it in his note book, packed his bag and took the
midnight train for Wyoming.
Gregory hastened to Beverly Carlysle’s dressing-room.
“Counted the house?” she asked.
“Fourteen hundred and one,” he answered.
“Why so particular about the one?”
“He’s worth more than all the rest put together.”
“Who is he?”
(To be continued.)
IV
“Jud Clark, rightful heir to the millions of old Elihu Clark,” said
Gregory.
“And, incidentally, the murderer of my husband,” said Beverly Carlysle.
“So they say,” said he.
“Isn’t it true?”
“You ought to know.”
“So ought you for that matter. Better than I.”
“Why talk in riddles?”
“It’s so much more mysterious.”
“Are you sure it was Jud Clark?”
“No, not at all, but who else could it be?”
“You’re going dotty. You’d better see a doctor.”
“Which doctor?” he asked.
“No, certainly not. A brain specialist.”
V
Gregory rang the doctor’s bell. Minnie came to the door.
“Is the doctor in?”
“Which doctor?”
“No, certainly not—I mean—either of them.”
He saw Doctor David.
“Have a chair?” said the doctor.
“Have you a photograph of your nephew?” asked Gregory.
“Here is one taken in Chicago.”
“Was he there at the time?”
“Where did you think he was? Overseas?”
“Well, it looks kind of half-seas-over.”
“Why did you want to see it?”
“Oh, I thought maybe it would add to the confusion.”
Dr. David’s right hand was fumbling in the desk-drawer beside him. He
found what he sought. Stealthily he drew it forth. Gregory caught the
glitter of reflected light——
(To be continued.)
VI
From the gilded band of the cigar which was offered him.
“Have a chair?” said the doctor.
“You asked me that before.”
“So I did, but that was a week ago, in the last number. Have another for
this week.”
“Are you trying to bribe me?”
“Sir, leave this house!” thundered Doctor David. “Leave it at once—right
where it is. I like this location.”
“Speaking of that—I’m going to-night.”
“Where?”
“To the next location—Wyoming.”
“Have a chair! I mean—have a care! Have a care!”
“Come along with me.”
VII
“I’m going to Wyoming, dearest Elizabeth.”
“Gone long, Dick?”
“Probably not until the last chapter, dearest. There are bound to be
complications. You see, I’m going to find out who I am, if any. I must
unravel the mystery of my adolescence. It is very annoying not to know
whether or not you are whom. As it is now, I may be or I may not be.”
“Who? Whom? Whichever it is.”
“Jud Clark, the murderer of Beverly Carlysle’s husband,” said he.
“How interesting!” she murmured.
The midnight train to Wyoming carried all the principals—all
except—those who remained at home.
VIII
Louis Bassett met Dick in the Norada Hotel. Bassett gave him a drink of
good new post-war whisky and David immediately passed out.
They were nearly arrested by the prohibition agent, who had the
exclusive boot-legging privilege for Norada and surrounding territory.
But Louis carried the unconscious man down the fire-escape, stole two
horses and took him through a blinding blizzard to the well-known
mountain-cabin, one of the most frequented points of interest in the
State—rubber-neck wagons every two hours.
IX
To the seclusion of this mountain fastness, Bassett brought the
unconscious Richard, laid him in a bunk (bunk! how appropriate!)
surrounded him with a Gillette razor, an Ingersoll watch, an Arrow
collar, a can of Campbell’s soup, and a Ford car. He watched narrowly.
The sleeping man awoke.
_His eyes fell upon the old familiar things._
He started—“I remember”—stopped.
Bassett cranked him again.
“What do you remember?”
“I remember, I remember the house where I was born, the little window
where the sun came peeping in at morn.”
“What is your name?” said Louis quietly.
“My name is——”
(To be continued.)
X
“My name is Norval. On the Grampian Hills——”
He relapsed into coma.
“Some hooch!” exclaimed Bassett.
Two days later he again awoke. “Are you normal now? Or still Norval?”
asked Bassett.
“I am Jud Clark,” he answered. “I shot Beverly Carlysle’s husband in
the”—he stopped.
“In what?” asked Bassett, regarding him steadily.
“In the billiard room. He tore the cloth with his cue. It was
justifiable homicide. There were no witnesses. I could not possibly be
convicted. We must flee at once.”
“Do you remember anything else?”
“Yes. I am Dick Livingston. I can remember Papa and Mamma, Uncle David,
Aunt Lucy, the cook, Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler, the postman and the spot on
the parlor rug—everything—everyone, except—one. I cannot remember
Elizabeth. I remember how she looked, her voice, her eyes, her hair—but
not her name—Elizabeth—I cannot remember that.”
Bassett took Dick on his back and carried him for days and days, miles
and miles, up and down the mountains, through the blinding blizzard,
without food, drink or sleep.
When he deposited his burden on the station platform at Norada, his
hands and feet were worn to ribbons.
He looked cautiously around. A man approached—blue uniform, brass
buttons. They must not be taken alive!
He shouldered the conscious man again, drew his revolver, set his back
against a door. It yielded. They fell headlong backwards——
(To be continued.)
XI
Into the waiting room. Bassett shoved the still conscious man under a
bench and met the blue-coated officer nonchalantly.
“Looking for any one?”
“Why, yes.”
“Who—whom?”
“Oh, only Jud Clark. They say there’s a reward on his head.”
Just then the still conscious man rolled out from under the bench. The
officer sprang forward and snatched the hat from his head.
“Nope!” he said, “not him—nothing there but hair.”
“Who are you?”
“The sheriff of this county.”
“Gosh! I am relieved! I thought you were the prohibition officer.”
Again he lifted the still conscious man on his shoulder.
“Where are we going now?” asked Dick.
“New York,” said Bassett.
XII
Three days later they reached New York—by train.
“We must find Fred Gregory,” said Bassett.
“I thought he told Uncle David he was going to Wyoming.”
“A bluff. He’ll be right out in front of the Martinique.”
But he was not. They found him in Beverly Carlysle’s house. They entered
with drawn revolvers.
“Hands up!”
(To be continued.)
XIII
Up they went, Beverly’s and Gregory’s.
“You look natural, Jud,” said Beverly, “all dressed up with a gun.”
“Silence, woman!” said Bassett sternly. “I have brought a confession for
you two to sign.”
“All right,” said Gregory. “Got a fountain pen?”
This was the confession:
“We, being of sound mind and in fear of death, do voluntarily make,
sign, seal, publish and declare this our last confession:
Dick Livingston is not Jud Clark. He is Fred Gregory. Howard Lucas,
Beverly Carlysle’s husband, was not killed by Jud Clark. She was not
married to the man Jud Clark killed. It was Fred Gregory.
Howard Lucas did not gouge Jud Clark’s billiard table. It was a pool
table. Fred Gregory gouged it, practicing putting.
Jud Clark was not killed by Howard Lucas. It was Fred Gregory. He was
shot by Howard Lucas—or else Howard Clark was shot by Fred Lucas—one or
the other.
Beverly Carlysle saw the man shot in the billiard room. She was in her
own room when the trigger was pulled and hurried down in time to see the
fatal bullet hit Fred Clark or Howard Gregory—whichever it was.
Fred Gregory’s real name is Fred Gregory. He was the son of Henry
Livingston on his mother’s side. The children were twins. So was Howard
Lucas.
There is something wrong somewhere. The whole thing was a mistake.
We do further confess that Dick Livingston is not the son of Elihu Clark
but of Fred Gregory—unless he decides to claim the Clark millions—in
which case, he is.
We do further confess that Fred Gregory gave the drink to Dick
Livingston in Norada. It was not Louis Bassett, who violated the
Volstead Act.
God have mercy on our souls!”
(Signed) Beverly Gregory
Fred Carlysle
XIV
Dick was back in Haverly. Aunt Lucy met him at the door.
“Elizabeth is engaged to Wallie Sayre,” she said.
“Who’s Elizabeth?” asked Dick.
Aunt Lucy remained unconscious for three days, but finally recovered.
It was weeks later when the door-bell rang and Minnie admitted Elizabeth
to the doctor’s office.
“Name, please,” said Dick.
“Elizabeth Wheeler,” she replied.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Marry me,” said Elizabeth.
“There now,” he said. “I knew I’d forgotten something. Please excuse me.
I’ve been so busy.”
Louis Bassett, in the _Times Republican_ office, stared at the notice in
the paper.
“Married—on the 17th at St. Barnabas’s Church, Elizabeth, daughter of
Mr. and Mrs. Walter Wheeler, to Dr. Richard Livingston.”
“Gosh!” he said. “I wonder who she married.”
BABBITT
_on_
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It was night in Zenith, the night of the grand testimonial banquet
tendered to George F. Babbitt, by the Boosters Club, in honor of the
publication of the well-known novel entitled “Babbitt.” Mr. Babbitt
spoke on “American Literature,” in part as follows:
“Fellow Boosters: In rising to address you on this auspicious occasion,
I want to say first and foremost that I am glad and proud that when it
came to the turn of the City of Zenith and yours truly to of had their
old, old story told, so to speak, it was by an up-to-date modern
successful writer, who, I am told on good authority, sells his books by
their thousands and their tens of thousands, amounting in all, I am led
to believe, to somewhere in the neighborhood of upward of approximately
about 400,000 volumes of a single book, an output, my friends, which
compares favorably with the production of cans of condensed milk and
pasteboard cartons produced in our great city, and puts literature
firmly upon the basis of quantity production of a standardized output.
“I am glad and proud, I may say, that it was him, this modern,
up-to-date literary writer, full of pep and punch, who sees things as
they are and not as others see us, that it has fallen to his lot to
depict this book.
“Now, my friends, let us come with me and cast a glance backward upon
American literature in the old days of yore, as the poet says, and see
how different it used to be, and I will not detain you long. Let us see
how different was the lot of such writers as James J. Whittier and Edwin
A. Poe and William Wordsworth Longfellow, when they were in their prime.
Did they sell their books by their thousands and their tens of thousands
and have a snug bank-account and a nice little bungalow, maybe, and a
good little bus standing ready in his own garage, so he could climb in,
step on the gas and shoot out into God’s good out-o’-doors for a little
airing and exercise after the day’s work? No, sir, my friends, I say it
without fear of contradiction; they did not.
“Literature in those bygone days of yore was something else again, as
one of our greatest writers puts it in his well-known tales of Potash
and Perlmutter, depicting the better side of our Hebrew friends, with
all their love of home and family. They were lucky if they sold one of
their poems or fiction-writings for a mere song to some publisher, who
maybe paid them enough to eke out a miserable pittance in some garret or
some place like that.
“And, why, my friends, was this the case? Simply and solely because, my
friends, they didn’t write about the things that Zenith City wants to
read. What do we want to read, if I may put the question? Why, we want
to read about the things we know about and understand—about the things
of home and business—about business, first and foremost.
“The kind of romance we want is not the romance of two knights in tin
armor trying to punch holes in each other’s stomachs, if you will excuse
the word, with spears or something or maybe making illicit love—I speak
plainly for we must not blink these evils—to some countess, who was
maybe already the wife of some lord or duke, as in the bygone days of
chivalry, when knighthood was in flower, as the poet says.
“That’s not the kind of romance we want. Believe me or not, my friends,
when two keen-witted American realtors, maybe, of my own profession, sit
down to make a deal, maybe about a piece of real estate, matching our
keen wits against each other in the struggles and triumphs of modern
business—there, my friends, is the romance of to-day.
“Us real he-American men and our wives and kiddies want to read about
our city, Zenith, God bless it! and our homes properly equipped with a
bathroom with sanitary plumbing, which I say without disrespect and I
challenge any man to deny it, is the hall mark of civilization in this
twentieth century of ours, and not like the filthy habits and customs of
the effete nations of Europe to whom the use of soap—God save the
mark!—is practically unknown. We like to read about our autos, our
hot-water heating and kitchen cabinets and vacuum-cleaners and those
sort of things.
“It is facts we want and not imagination, and I am glad to say that the
successful literary writers of to-day, with their ears to the ground,
their eyes to the keyhole and their nose to the grindstone, are hearing
the stern voice of the people—yea! and heeding it. Imagination has had
its day, my friends. It was all very well in those bygone days of yore
for an author to depend on his imagination, but it’s different now.
“Let us contrast for a moment and I will not detain you long, two
well-known writers. Take Washington Irwin, for instance, what did he
write about? Why it is well known of all men that he wrote about many
things that never had actually happened in this broad land of ours nor
anywhere else. Take Rip Van Winkle, for instance, all about a
disgraceful old bum, who soused himself into such a state that he beat
his wife—a thing, I am sure, with all due respect, no man here in this
audience would be guilty of in public. Then he got chased by a headless
horseman—a headless horseman, mind you, my friends, an utter
impossibility—and then to crown the climax he slept for twenty or thirty
years, a perfect absurdity and one which, I am sure, no citizen of
Zenith would place in the hands of a growing boy as an example to
imitate.
“Now take another writer of the same name—zippy, peppy, up-to-date—a man
who can sell his stuff to the _Saturday Evening Post_, than which there
is no higher standard in our day and generation. Why, gentlemen, if
Washington Irwin should turn over in his grave, I say without fear of
contradiction, he would be absolutely and teetotally unable to recognize
his own son, Will.
“And, gentlemen, consider for a moment, where this here imagination
leads. If you depend on it for your raw material, you can’t go in and
out among the people, notebook in hand and jot down what you actually
see with your own eyes. No, sir, you got to work your old imagination
for what you write about, and what does this lead to? Why, gentlemen,
you all know that Edwin A. Poe, for instance, when he wanted to write
about some raven or a skeleton in armor or something had to drink
himself into a state of insensibility or worse before he could put pen
to paper. That’s what they had to do.
“Think of those debased minds like James J. Whittier or William
Wordsworth Longfellow or George Cullen Bryant, maybe, hiding in their
wretched garrets or some place, taking shot after shot of hop, smoking
opium, maybe, or worse, to keep their imaginations going to supply even
the feeble demand for their hand-made output.
“That was bad enough, my friends, but things got going from bad to worse
before they got better, and who made them better? Why, you, my friends,
and me, the American business man. It was this way. The wide-awake
business man of America began to employ the best writers, to write his
ads. These writers dealt with facts, gentleman, facts, in their own
inimical style, if I may say so, and the advertising sections of our
great American magazines shortly rivaled in interest the stories and
other fictional matter, so that it was the common custom of our business
men to tear out the advertising section and keep that to read and throw
the rest away.
“The editors and publishers of our great magazines found themselves
paying good money for stories and for good white paper to print them on
and it being torn out and thrown away, which wasn’t good business. This,
gentlemen, was the lowest depths to which literature at last got, the
apothesis of our literature, if you will pardon the use of a high-brow
term.
“Then a smart, keen-witted American business man who happened to be
editor of one of the magazines saved the situation, so to speak. He saw
that literature had got anæmic. It was short on red blood corpuscles. It
needed a transfusion of blood.
“So he put the patient face to face and shoulder to shoulder with the
real force in American life, the advertisements—made a page ad face a
page of so-called literature—cut the stories into strips and put a
column ad next to a column of fictional writing.
“The name of this literary genius, I am creditably informed, was Cyrus
H. K. Bok, and, believe me, the greatest surgeon of modern times, who
saved American literature from taking the count in a fight to a finish
was this same old Doc Bok.
“The result was not only that you couldn’t tear out the stories and
throw them away without simultaneously and at the same time destroying
the thing you wanted to read, and after you had read all the ads two or
three times you simply had to give the stories the once over.
“And, moreover and likewise, the fictitious writers couldn’t keep on
writing their imaginative bunk and get away with it. They couldn’t stack
up some guff about a raven or a skeleton in armor against the real
thing, like the Ginko Cigar or the Jimmy Pipe. If they tried to pull any
Rip Van Winkle stuff alongside a smart talk about Hartenheimer’s
Morestyle Clothing, the picture of the clean-faced young
man—bright-eyed, square-jawed and everything—simply made old Rip look
like three mutilated dimes.
“So they got wise and changed their act and begun writing the kind of
real stuff about which I’ve been talking to you about. It got to be so
good, so full of real American life and everything, that some of it gets
printed every week on the page facing the highest priced full page ad in
the _Saturday Evening Post_, and that’s the proudest position in
American literature to which any man can aspire to. It used to be that
the preferred position, as the ad-men say, for an ad was next to
reading-matter. Now look at the columns of the greatest American
magazine with its millions of readers. Are the ads next to
reading-matter? No, sir, not on your life. The reading-matter is next to
the ads—and that’s saying something, believe you me.
“Now, gentlemen, let me say a few words about the book about which we
are gathered here to-night, and I will not detain you long.
“It’s a good book, a great book, and yet, my friends, it has its faults,
as whom of us has not?
“Friend author, for all he calls himself a realist and pretends he don’t
shy at nothing in calling a spade a spade, don’t do it. No, sir, he
don’t. Take that chapter in this book, now, about me getting up and
getting dressed. What’s he say there? Why he talks about ‘the best of
nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm clocks.’ Now,
anybody here knows he means a Big Bob, and why not say it right out,
just like that? Why, he just as well say ‘he removed the superfluous
growth of hair from his countenance by means of an instrument designed
for that purpose,’ when he means ’he shaved his face with a razor.’
“But these realistic fictitious writers will come to it, and just to
help them I’ll tell you how that chapter ought to be wrote.
“The Big Bob alarm clock gave him a jolt that knocked all the sleep out
of him. He drug his legs, in Matchless Pajamas, out from under the
Downiwool Blanket and sat on the edge of the Ostermarsh Mattress,
supported by the Neversag Spring. While he paddled around with his feet
to find his Comfy Slippers, he looked out at his new Flimsibilt
Sectional Garage, which looked good to him.
“Then he beat it to the good old warm bathroom, all tiled with
Shiniwhite Glazed Tiles. The bathroom was fitted with a Staykleen Bath
Tub, a Porcellow Washstand and other sanitary fixtures all complete,
including a Nasco All-Steel Medicine Cabinet.
“He cleaned his teeth with a Rubwell toothbrush and a squeeze of
Lillidol to get the fuzzy taste out of his mouth.
“Then he rubbed a gob of Whiskerine on his face to soften his beard and
lathered her good with Shavo Cream on his Bristletite Shaving Brush. The
good old Neverkeen Safety Razor did the rest.
“A D. V. undershirt and knee-length drawers started the job of dressing,
followed by a Bronx Shirt, onto which he buttoned a Spear Collar with a
Kalisch One-Piece Collar Button. Then he put on his Hartenheimer Suit
and a pair of Walkstrate Shoes.
“Then he put in his pockets a Walgin Watch with a Wearever Gold Chain, a
Leakwell Fountain Pen and a Neverpoint Pencil.
“For breakfast he had a Moonshine Orange, a plate of Mothers’ Wild Oats,
a slice of Mawruss Ham and two ordinary unadvertised eggs, Digesto
Bread, spread with Prunella Butter and a cup of Moko-Boko Coffee, and,
when he had lighted a good old Ginko Cigar, George F. Babbitt was ready
for the fray.
“There, my friends, I don’t pretend to be a literary gink, but you give
me my good old fountain pen and the advertising pages of the _Saturday
Evening Post_ and I’ll show you how to marry literature and life
together. That’s what we want, gentlemen. That’s real, true blue United
States one hundred per cent realism.”
JOSEPH AND THE BRIGHT SHAWL
He had never before heard of Cuba, but a chance mention of its name,
Cuba, dominated Joseph completely. The Spaniards were shooting Cubans
down there. Boys, younger than himself. And they were shot with muskets,
guns. That was so much more horrible than if they were shot with
candlesticks or white mice.
Instantly he knew that he must liberate Cuba. He must shoot the beastly
Spanish Captain-General in his gold-laced abdomen, tummy; himself be
shot in return or elsewhere, and die heroically, while a competent
brass-band played “Annie Laurie.” So should Cuba be free.
He quickly settled every visible, every audible detail save one, his
last dying words. “Don’t give up the ship!” seemed inappropriate. “I owe
a cock to Æsculapius; see that it is paid,” was too long. “Kiss me,
Hardy!” was short, but heaven knew what utter stranger might accept the
invitation. At last he fixed upon “Sic semper tyrannis!” to be said as
he fired, and “Et tu, brute!” as he was shot; “brute” with a small “b”
seemed so nicely to combine defiance and grim humor.
⁂
Providing a costume for the event was a puzzling matter. It should be of
the period, but what was the present year of grace? It was in the fall,
exactly forty years before the return of the Americans from the Great
War in 1919. Was this then 1879? Impossible, since Grant was President,
and Fish, Secretary of State, and that would make it not later than
1876.
He gave it up, threw chronology to the winds, bought a plum-colored
cape, vintage of the Regency, and a lot of very high stocks, period of
Daniel Webster. Perhaps, in this he was misled by reading in a newspaper
that stocks were very high.
His armament was one small pearl-handled derringer, date 1849. He wore
it suspended by a string inside of one leg of a trouser, a pant, and
could always verify its presence by sitting down. It had been given him
by his father and was not really a dangerous weapon, since it was
necessary to turn down all its grease-cups daily, else it would not go
off, shoot.
⁂
On the deck of the _Morro Castle_, whence all but he had fled, stood a
solitary figure, little Joe, the Boy Liberator. The tallest of stocks
seemed to proclaim the Duke of Wellington; the plum-coloredest of capes,
Beau Brummell. Like Napoleon, he depended greatly on his heavy
artillery, which, in turn, depended inside a nicely-cut trouser.
⁂
Andrés Escobar called on him at the Hotel Inglaterra.
“Is this your first visit to Cuba?” he asked. “What do you think of our
Cuban women?”
“It is. I do not,” laconic Joseph replied.
“I mean I don’t think about them at all,” he continued. “My mind has
been singularly purified. I have a sensation of remoteness from my
flesh.”
“Ah,” said Andrés, “I see. Something like _un esqueleto_, a skeleton.
Very nice for the hot weather.”
“Not exactly,” said Joseph doubtfully. “Still, come to think of it,
there is something in what you say. But lissen, friend, _amigo_! I came
here to shoot, _tirar, el Capitan-General_ in his gold-laced tummy and
to get shot in the fracas or somewhere else. Thus Cuba shall be freed.
“I have been here twenty-four hours. We are both still alive and Cuba is
not yet free. My fiery nature will not brook such delays. Can you not
lead me to _el Capitan-General_, so that I may fulfil muh destiny?”
Andrés clasped his hand. “_Maravilloso!_” he cried. “We Cubans are not
so _precipitado_. We bide our _tiempo_. Let me tell you our watchword,
college-yell, _secretissimo_! ‘Wait, wait for ’98!’ Ah, then, Cuba shall
be _libre_. Meanwhile we conspire, oh! so discreetly.”
⁂
At Escobar’s house, the entire family sat in a silent circle, upon gilt
chairs. A crystal chandelier cast upon them an icy flood of light,
bathed them in a vitreous fluid, preserving them in a hard pallor
_forever_—think of that! The Escobars had been much besought by
ambitious undertakers desiring to use this really effective embalming
process.
Andrés and Joseph came in. Andrés, silent, faultless, sat down immobile.
But Joseph and Narcissa, the daughter, withdrew to the balcony.
It was night. Narcissa was decidedly fetching. But, fetch her darnedest,
she could not fetch Joseph.
“I love you,” said she.
Joseph put his arm, one arm, around her shoulders, not her waist, and
kissed her cheek, not her lips—_once_.
“Lissen,” said he, “love is not for me. You know my name. Have you
grasped its significance? Read your bible! Moreover,” he continued, “I
am devoted to one purpose. I must shoot _el Capitan-General_ in his
gold-laced—well—that is—in his gold-laced uniform—yes. And get shot
myself in—well—that is a detail, a mere detail. Anyhow, thus shall Cuba
be _libre_.”
“Now lissen you to me,” said Narcissa. “I’m in trouble. I’m engaged to
marry a fat planter of fifty. I loathe him. I shall kill him or myself.
Get me out of this. Get me on a steamer, so I can go to my aunt in New
York. Help me!”
“Oh, really, you know, I couldn’t,” replied dauntless Joseph. “I might
get arrested or spanked or something—and sent home to mother before I
get properly shot. Oh! it wouldn’t do at all.”
No, it wouldn’t do. It would free only a single Cuban, Narcissa. He must
free the whole Cuban people, _caboodle_, and perish in the attempt.
⁂
He was at the theatre, _teatro_, when he first saw the Shawl—that
orange, blue, emerald, scarlet, magenta, vermilion, crimson atrocity.
Incidentally, there was a woman inside it, La Clavel, the dancer. Joseph
thought it was the woman who thrilled him until he could support it no
longer—it made him so ashamed of himself! But it wasn’t. It was the
Shawl, for he was—Joseph.
He went to her room, sat there, day after day. They talked, conversed,
interminably—and that was all. Once she kissed him and was severely
frost-bitten. He was annoyed, seriously, and told her he didn’t know
what she would think of him for letting her do a thing like that.
She gave him messages for his friends, the Fabians, cunctators, who
conspired so sweetly to pass the time until 1898. Joseph felt that he
was just the cutest little plotter in all Cuba. Oh! it was grand!
⁂
He was in her room when Santaclaus entered, Capitan Santaclaus, one of
the rudest of the rude Spaniards.
“You are conspiring against the King, _el Rey_,” said Santaclaus. “You
and your young devotee, little Josie here. You will both be killed. It
will be very enjoyable.”
The time had come! Santaclaus, while not the _Capitan-General_, was
notably well equipped for the proper reception of the sacred bullet.
Joseph hoisted out the artillery, leveled it, pulled the trigger. Click!
Nothing more. Joseph stared dully at the faithless weapon. “Oh, sugar!
You’re a mean old thing!” was all he said.
“Ah! ha!” sneered Santaclaus. “You forgot to turn down the grease-cups
this morning.”
It was sneerly his last sneer. Although he knew it not, he was sneering
his end. La Clavel had not yet begun to fight. When she did there
certainly was one turrible old battle. Joseph stood bravely by, a chair
raised above his head, almost resolved to give Santaclaus a hard knock.
One round was all. Santaclaus, prostrate, prone, defunct, dead, took the
count. Joseph carefully replaced the chair.
“Now look what you’ve done,” said he. “Now, remember, _you_ killed him.
I didn’t do a thing to him. Don’t tell on me—please! I came down here to
get killed, nice and clean, with _one_ bullet. I certainly don’t want to
get all mussed up by a firing-squad. Mother wouldn’t like me to.”
La Clavel was arrested—tortured, shot, hung, drawn and quartered, for
all Joseph knew. But she sent him the Shawl. So it was his lucky day,
after all.
⁂
Pilar de Lima was a lovely little Chink. She tried it on with Joseph,
but Joseph continued to be—Joseph. Andrés took her up.
“Lend me the Shawl, _viejo cimo_, old top!” said he. “Pilar wants it to
wear at the _danzon_, dance.”
“No,” Joseph responded, answered.
“_Mio caro compañero_, my dear fellow,” protested Andrés, “please
remember that The Bright Shawl is the principal character in this piece,
the title rôle. It must have stage-center and the spotlight all the
time. The whole show is built around it. And _this_ is to be the climax
of the third act.”
“True,” said Joseph, “true. If it wasn’t for The Bright Shawl, where
would all of us be?—Still in the inkwell.”
⁂
Pilar wore it at the _danzon_ in the _teatro_. Joseph sat in a box and
Arco de Vaca told him that Andrés was about to be killed. He loved
Andrés with his whole soul, such as it was, so he watched the last scene
with interest from a safe place. To free Cuba and be shot while the band
played was one thing. To mix up in the murder of his best friend and
maybe get arrested—that was something else again.
But his iron nerve failed him. He took his hat and fled blindly—right
into the midst of the fracas, where Pilar was stabbing Andrés and ink
flowed like blood. Some kind friend batted Joseph over the head and he
passed out. Curtain.
⁂
That was about all—except that the S. P. C. C. shipped the little
dare-devil back to his mother, unpunctured.
He thought the matter over for forty years and was finally inclined to
the belief that the blow on his head....
Well, maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. Who can tell?
THE JUDGE
_or_
TURNING THE TEA TABLES
_Illustrating the influence of Henry James upon an otherwise perfectly
good novelist_,
REBECCA WEST
CHAPTER XI
“Tea?” asked Marion.
Through the long casement window, which lazily unfolded its unaustere
yet deliberate length in a benediction of sunlight, not more
interminable than the crepitant genuflection of the waveless ocean, came
the tall dark cry of the curlew, as it lashed its angry though querulous
tail in intermittent certitude. Perhaps that was why the shiny,
untarnished mud flats, blue veined with the tortuous eternal channels of
the running tides, interspersed with the nostalgic counterparts of
antiquity, and the gray green marshes, where the red shanks choired in
uninterrupted but not unvexed prolixity, despite their propinquity, had
always seemed to her as remote from the perpetual imbroglio with
spiritual things that makes man the most ridiculous of animals, though
just emerged from a brave dive in some pool of vitality, whose
whereabouts are the secret that makes the mouth vigilant.
“Yes, please,” answered Ellen, smiling.
Perhaps that was why the chair, on which she sat, so dully gleaming in
its polished adroitness that not even in her childhood, when the
saffron-tinted memories of yesterday were mellowed in glorious
achievement, could she withstand the monotonous testimony of its
faultlessness, seemed now to her to concentrate and reveal what either
simple necessity or pain-flawed consanguinity had crowded back into the
stuffed closets of perpetual oblivion, darkling upon the wimpled surface
of an efflorescent yet intangible conviction. She could not but recall
to mind another night, more than thirty years before, when she stood in
the barnyard where it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing
neat about it all, yet the mellow cry of well-fed cattle lambently
surged through the windows of the tumbledown sheds, with their thatched
eaves like thick brows over eyes ever gazing at the strange fluctuations
of the wine-like light, as if they were consciously preserving the
cattle from the magic of any enchantment, and the round red moon hung on
the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were hidden in an amethystine
haze, and held in her arms two little Berkshire pigs.
“Sugar?”
It was because of this sterility of outlook that Richard’s father’s
tomb, standing whitely in its futile magnificence, abruptly, almost
innately, yet clandestinely intricate in its classic contour, could
never have called to her with the high ecstatic voice with which the
Pentlands, so remote, but not untutored nor conflicting with the
harmonious interposition of all that was sagely beneficial, challenged
Ellen. No one, not even he, had ever engendered a skepticism of the
value of all activities, rose-tinted but not blue, shining vaguely like
a great cloud galleon, whose shrill cry drilled a tiny hole in the
ensphering silence. Richard had never done that.
“Two lumps, please,” she replied.
Her voice trailed away from her mouth in a long ambiguous spiral of
malachite-green silk, shot through with golden gleams like porphyry, so
that the other, knowing nothing of its source could not have supposed
that, with the conscious artistry of the unprecedented, yet not
unembarrassed by all the implications of a too great inattention, there
could be other than the most delicate intimation of flattery in its rich
effulgency, tempered by the knowledge of interminable philanthropy, that
so often masquerades as the unseen offspring of a nature, noble in its
essential attributes, yet not unhampered by the apparent inelasticity of
its unchangeable, though not immutable, because finely tempered,
intimations of immortality. Never had there been any doubt of this.
“Lemon?”
It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as
sharp as the shears click-clacking with never-ceasing vigilance through
the exiguous fleeces of the lanate lambs now, in alliterative honesty,
so palely, so profitably become shorn sheep, and yet not angry, though
with an acerbating asperity evident in every tone of its fluctuating
timbre, running indefatigably up the switch-backs and circling in the
merry-go-rounds, capriciously perambulating on which the voices of
French-women, from the lucent symbolism of the errant wife of Charles
Martel, bathed in the ineffable luxury of mediæval intricacy, to the
misguided, yet pitiable, complacency of a Parisian midinette, travel
eternally, since that French thrift, which made her clean her shoes at
home and thereby maim herself into something new and strange, seared by
the hot vapors of the exploding benzine, that desired to assassinate
love, sacred and profane, whenever she saw it, made her terribly
exercised at the potency of starvation to dull the edge of appetite into
the semblance of inarticulate inevitability, the crucifixion of honest
hunger. Richard himself was aware of that.
“No, thank you.”
In all of this there had been nothing to distract her attention, which
so often divagated intermittently, as with the pulsing beat of the
tides, now lapsing into desuetude, in the purple-bathed intricacies of
interminable monotony, from a candid valuation of the dress of the other
so blue, so deeply blue, that, from depths unsounded, whence ghostly
memories of her childhood emerging, appeared and beat upon her nether
eyelids, there was now extruded none of those waves of intelligent
vacuity, whose infrequency alone gave her pleasant physical sensations
as of creeping gooseflesh at the roots of her hair and the desire to
erase from the pages of her memory the pictures of the Christmas number
of the _Graphic_, though all their colors seemed to refuse to travel
from her eyes to her nerves and back again, as with rhythmic diastole,
pendulously they swung in their predestined arc, such as she usually
experienced when the turbid instancy of old rose impinged in somnolent
ecstasy upon the complicated convolutions of her brain. Richard was
right after all.
THE PERILS OF PEREGRINE
_à la_
JEFFREY FARNOL
I
I awoke very sore from the gruelling adventures of the previous day.
Being more hungry than was my wont, I quickly despatched the hunch of
crusty bread and bit of cheese, which the highwayman had left me, and
fared forth upon my journeying. My way lay adown a leafy lane, lined
with hedgerows, gemmed with myriad sparkling dew drops, wherein birds
sang a jubilant pæan. So faring forth, I crossed a small rustic bridge
spanning a murmurous brook and so into a dense wood, whose twisted,
writhen branches and myriad leaves made a dim twilight, wherein a wind
dank and chill moaned fitfully, very dismal to hear.
I sought to flee these gloomy shades, but tripped and fell headlong into
a leafy glade, where sat a small, fierce, quick, keen-eyed tinker
a-tinkering.
“Oh!” said I, “pray pardon my intrusion.”
“’Old ’ard!” quoth he in mighty voice, “that’s a good word. I’m a poet
myself. Wot d’ye think o’ this?
“Full fathom five my father lies
In Xanadu with Kubla Khan.
With a heigh and a ho and a hey nonny-no!
Night and day on me he cries
‘Go fetch to me a pint o’ wine!’
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
So was it when my life began
So is it now that I’m a man
I’ve always had to chase the can.
Heigho, fair Rosaline!”
“Oh!” cried I, “you say that is original?”
“Aye, it is,” he answered.
“Strange how much you resemble your father,” quoth I, and left him.
II
I had scarce advanced an hundred paces ere I espied a murmurous brook
and at the same time was aware of snapping of twigs and sounds of one,
who burst through all obstacles in desperate flight. I gazed wildly
about and espied a gypsy girl, who came bounding adown the steep. At
sight of me she checked and stood at gaze.
There she stood, a young dryad of the woods, gray eyes adream,
passionate with life yet boldly virginal.
“Who the hell are you?” she murmured softly. Then she seized me by the
hand. “Come, let’s run,” she quoth; “they’re after me.”
“Oh,” I gasped, “who?”
“Shadrach, Meschech and Abednego,” she stated briefly, “The Rommany
Three. Count them!” and so saying, she fled, I perforce following.
Ensued wild scramble through dismal wood, where mournful wind stirred,
trees dankly dripped, wet leaves brushed faces, rain-sodden underbrush
clung about wearied limbs. Came we at last out upon a broad highway,
between grassy banks, topped by hedgerows and trees, whose wide-flung
rustling leafage cast a pleasant shade, while, high in air, a lark
caroled, faint and sweet against the blue.
III
Then looked I again upon my companion so vivid with life, so boldly
virginal, and, catching my breath, which had hitherto eluded me,
“Some runner!” I quoth. “Haven’t I met you somewhere before?”
“I dessay,” she lightly answered. “You see, George Borrow was my father
and I played _Isopel Berners_ to his _Lavengro_. You’ll meet a lot of
those old troupers before you’re through this book. There’s the Tinker
now, and old Mrs. Herne. She plays _Azor_ in this piece. Oh! them was
the days!” she sighed, “when we was playin’ in the legit, before we come
down to this movie stuff.”
“Oh,” quoth I, “then I suppose I ought to teach you grammar. It seems to
me——”
“Cut it out!” she responded wearily. “Don’t! _Lavengro_ done that once
and for all. You can’t improve on him.”
IV
After a space were we ware of a wayside inn, the yard whereof was
a-throng with gigs, carts, currycombs and other vehicles. One was a
handsome closed traveling carriage, with blood horses stamping impatient
hoofs and tossing proud heads. Standing by it was a man, tall, slim,
superlatively dark, clad in garments of quiet elegance. His handsome
pale face was paler by contrast with locks of raven hue. When we drew
anear, he espied Diana.
“Come, my goddess, let us fly,” said he, and, seizing her by the waist,
half lifted, half tossed her into the carriage, leapt lightly after. In
an instant the carriage, rocking and reeling with its swift motion,
disappeared in a cloud of dust. Dazed, I looked about me, but Diana was
nowhere to be seen.
V
Not a moment was to be lost. Seizing the nearest horse, a jet black
creature with blood-red nostrils, I leapt lightly into the saddle and
was after them. Hedges, gemmed with dewdrops, trees, with wide-flung
leafage, spun by as my gallant steed fell into his racing stride. Onward
we flew, mile after mile, horse after carriage, me after her. Ever I
gained upon the pursued. At last drew level with whiffle-trees, stooped
over, with one stroke of knife cut the traces. I was at the door of the
carriage as it lurched to a full stop.
“Come, Diana,” I said, “this is no place for you. I do not think this is
a very nice man. And as for you, sir, I shall spare you now because,
methinks, you will get yours in the last chapter but one.” With that we
left him.
VI
And now our way lay adown a leafy lane lined with grassy banks, topped
by hedgerows and trees, whose wide-flung rustling leafage cast a
pleasant shade, while, high in air, a lark caroled faint and sweet
against the blue. Crossing by a rustic bridge, a murmurous brook, I was
ware of a rough-clad, villainous-looking man, who stood opposed to us,
powerful legs apart, hairy fist grasping a short heavy stick or
bludgeon, as the case may be. Evil face outthrust, he leered upon
Diana’s loveliness.
“Oh,” said I, “what do you want?”
“Not you!” he snarled and, snarling, leapt at me. With his bludgeon he
struck full force a crashing blow upon my hat. Staggering back, I reeled
for a moment’s space, but as he made to smite again, I leapt lightly
aside. “Strike one!” I cried, the joy of battle welling within me. Then
my right flashed and smote him full on his bristly chin. His great body
shrank horribly upon itself, rolled a limp and twisted lump upon the
ground and lay still. I turned to look for Diana, but she was nowhere to
be seen.
VII
So I went my way, sorrowing for my lost love adown leafy lanes lined
with hedgerows, gemmed with myriad sparkling dew drops, wherein birds
sang a jubilant pæan, till I came to a broad highway lined with grassy
banks, topped by trees, whose wide-flung rustling leafage cast a
pleasant shade, while, high in air, a lark caroled faint and sweet
against the blue. Full many a weary mile I trod before I was ware of
strange sounds from a dingle hard by. Crashing into the dingle, I came
at last to behold Diana struggling in the arms of a man and him none
other than he from which I had so lately rescued her. Then, as I stood
at gaze, ere yet I leapt lightly to her succor, a hand gripped me.
VIII
I turned and saw a little man, his slender figure erect, one hand in the
bosom of his coat.
“Devereux!” he called, with a terrible loud voice.
The villain started, loosed Diana and turned upon the speaker of the
evening.
“Meaning me, withal?” he sneered; “that’s not my name.”
“Quite unimportant,” said the little man. “Devereux, Haredale,
Marmaduke, Chester, Steerforth—name’s unimportant. I’ve met you a
hundred times in a hundred books and plays and whatever the name, you’re
always the same.”
The stranger’s lips curled from gnashing teeth, as he seized his heavy
riding whip. A blinding flash, a deafening report, the oncoming figure
stopped, right arm dangling helplessly, then lurched and stumbled out of
sight, as the little man restored his little silver-mounted
pocket-pistol to his pocket.
“My child,” said he, “yonder comes my man with the tea equipage. He
always comes when he hears me shoot any one. Let us have tea. I am the
Earl of Wyvelstoke.”
So we had tea but lingered not long, as yet there was much to be done
ere the rising of the orbed moon gave us surcease of action.
IX
And so we fared forth many a weary mile along the broad highway, lined
with grassy banks, topped by——
“Hist!” remarked Diana.
“Oh,” said I, “my dear! You must not interrupt my description of the
scenery. Pray, why hist?”
“Shadrach, Meschech and Abednego!” she averred, pointing to where three
evil faces peered through three gaps in the hedgerow.
Ensued a scrambling rush of three dark figures, with upraised heavy
sticks or bludgeons. One, snarling as was his wont, strode me-wards. I
leapt lightly aside only to meet both the other weapons, which
simultaneously descended upon my head. Instant blackness overwhelmed me,
interspersed, however, with luminaries of dazzling hue. When I recovered
consciousness, Diana was nowhere to be seen.
X
So I went my way, sorrowing for my lost love. It was growing dusk when I
reached a ruined and desolate barn. A solitary place and dismal, remote
from the world, a very sinister place forsooth, such indeed as might be
the haunt of grisly specters and angry moo-cows. Breath in check, with
eyes of horror stared I at that dreadful barn, whence emanated the sound
of hollow knocks. Instantly I was transformed into a cool,
dispassionate, relentless creature, intent upon one desperate purpose,
though as yet I wot not what that purpose was.
“Be damned to ye, Shadrach!” panted a hoarse voice. “’Eave, man! ’Eave!
Her’s a sittin’ on th’ trap door.”
I crept toward the ladder whereon they stood, leapt and smote with all
my might. Ensued a battle grim and great. Ensued thereupon a silence, an
emptiness, a stillness and from afar I heard lugubrious voices growing
fainter and fainter.
“Oh,” cried I, “Diana! Ah there, Diana!”
“Well, what’s wanted?” queried she.
“Will you marry me, Diana?”
“Don’t be foolish, kid. You’ve mixed your cues. That line belongs in the
last chapter. You’d better go to bed now. You’ve had a busy day.”
So, knowing that the morrow would bring further adventure, I lay down
and fell into a dreamless sleep, but when I awoke in the morning, Diana
was nowhere to be seen.
ONE OF HERS
_Long After_
WILLA CATHER
CHAPTER I
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes, just as he had done often before. The
dreary monotony of his day thus monotonously began. He turned on one
elbow and gazed at his shirt hanging on the chair beside his bed. It was
the same shirt which he had worn yesterday, would wear to-morrow. But it
was not the monotony of the shirt that deluged him with self-pity. It
was the fact that he had only one collar-button. Other people, the
Erlich boys in Lincoln, his own father, had two. Claude had but one,
which fastened his shirt in front. When he wore a collar he had to
fasten it at the back with an old piece of string, which Mahailey had
given him.
Claude would have liked to buy another collar-button. He had more than
enough money; and his father was a rich farmer. He tried to excuse his
cowardice to himself, but in his heart he knew that it was too difficult
for him to do this simple thing.
He arose wearily and dressed. He crept down a flight of stairs to the
second floor, thence he descended to the first floor by a rude ladder.
There had been a staircase where the ladder stood but, in an access of
humility, Claude had slid down the banisters two weeks before. Mistaking
his self-effacement for hilarity, his father, laughing heartily, had
removed the stairs with an ax. Nat Wheeler was a large easygoing affable
man with a strong sense of humor.
It made little difference with the habits of the household. The men used
the ladder freely. Mahailey slept in the cellar on a hanging shelf,
which Claude had built for her, so that the rats could not get at her.
She used to put herself to sleep by swinging the shelf to and fro, while
she sang “And they laid Jesse James in his grave.” It was one of her
quaint customs, a survival of her early arboreal life in Virginia. It
added much to the gloom which overspread the household.
Mrs. Wheeler suspected that this removal of the stairs was a joke. She
had learned that her husband’s humor might wear any guise. But she was
old fashioned. She thought it improper either to descend or ascend a
ladder, if there were any men below, and as the men always arose before
she did and stayed up after her bed-time, she was practically confined
to the second floor.
Claude could hear her now, walking up and down the passage above. He
could hear her wandering, uncertain footsteps. He knew that she had both
hands pressed tightly to her breast, that she was lost in religious
meditation. He feared that, in her absence of mind, she might descend by
the ladder and then be unable to overcome her scruples against
ascending. There would be no place for her to sleep, except with
Mahailey in the cellar. He had not made the shelf wide enough for two.
His mother might die for want of sleep. He felt bitterly about that. He
heard her voice calling him. She was blinking down at him over the
banisters.
“It is circus day, Claude, and I’m so worried about your collar-button.
I have a piece of an old can-opener here. Do you think you could make
that do?”
“Don’t bother about it, mother. I’ll use a shingle nail.”
“Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!” she said softly and resumed her
wanderings.
He went out into the kitchen to wash. Other people had used the bathroom
before him and he was very exclusive. In Mahailey’s old broken mirror,
he looked at himself. He was a handsome boy with a red face, pink
eyebrows and a square head upon which his red hair stood up like a
cock’s comb. He hated his head, however, because he always had to wear a
soft hat. A stiff derby abraded the sharp corners.
Mahailey came with a low, padding step, her apron thrown over her face,
as usual. She always wore it this way. In the Wheeler family, no one but
Claude had ever seen her face. Sometimes she shyly removed her apron,
when no one was about, and gave him one look. It was enough. Claude knew
why she kept the apron over it.
When Claude saw her coming, he ran out of doors, down the hillside
toward the barn. Molly, the faithful old three-legged cow, was
mournfully chewing her cud. She had lost her other leg in the Civil War.
He put his arms around her neck and kissed her. She stopped chewing and
kissed him in return. He remained there a long time and thought about
the life of a farmer.
A farmer raised good corn and wheat and sold them. In return he got
clothes that wore out in two or three years, a house that would not
stand more than a century, an automobile good for less than fifty
thousand miles, furniture that broke down in two generations, food that
lasted hardly a day.
The life of a farmer was useless, vain, empty, unsatisfying, monotonous,
depressing, dreary. He was a farmer and he had but one collar-button.
A terrible joy clutched at the boy’s heart. He knew that he was playing
the part to perfection. If he could keep it up through four hundred and
fifty-nine pages the book would be a success. _The Young Hamlet of the
Prairies_ would make a hit.
CHAPTER XIX
Claude and his men, B Company, were holding the Boar’s Head trench. He
knew that the German attack might be expected about dawn. The smoke and
darkness had begun to take on the livid color that announced the coming
of daybreak, when a corporal hurried to him, saluted and announced that
the linemen had completed the connection and that Claude was called on
the telephone.
He went to the dug-out, took down the receiver.
“Lieutenant Wheeler, in command B Company in H-2, speaking.”
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
“What? Miss _Willa_? For the land’s sake, what’re _you_ doing way out
here?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“_Course_ you are, Miss Willa. I know that, but you hadn’t ought to come
out in such a dangerous place, just to look out for _me_. _Really_,
ma’am, I’m getting along all right. You don’t have to tell me every
little thing.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“You want me to _what_?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“On the _parapet_ when the attack comes? You don’t mean _really_ do it,
Miss Willa!”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Why, good Lord, Miss Willa, I wouldn’t do that for a farm. They’ll be
shootin’ honest-to-God _lead bullets_!”
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
“I _got_ to do it? How’s that? I don’t see why.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Yes’m, I know that. I know you are. I read it in a piece in a magazine.
Said you were one of America’s serious novelists. Yes’m, called you a
serious artist of high purpose, the piece did.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“But, say, you know that’s _awful_ dangerous. I might easy get killed.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“You _expect_ me to? Look here, lady, I don’t know what you’re driving
at.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, yes, o’ course, I know that. I know I got to do what you say after
I signed up with you.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“No’m, I might not be. I know that. I might be in the draft at a
trainin’ camp or somewhere back there or prob’ly I’d got exempted on
account of bein’ the only one on the farm—if it wasn’t for you.”
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
“Well, if you was right out in this trench now I don’t think you’d think
there was any special thanks due for your gettin’ me here.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“No, _ma’am! I don’t!_ I ain’t hungry for just that kind o’ glory. _You
bet not._ I’ll be satisfied to go home alive.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, Lord, yes! I got plenty to do when I get home.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“How’s that? Spoiled? Oh, no, Miss Willa, my life ain’t spoiled _yet_,
but I’ve got a hunch it would be if I got up on that parapet. Oh, no,
I’ve got a lot o’ plans. Don’t you worry about that. Ain’t many young
fellows gets their life spoiled at twenty-three.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“My wife? Sure, she’s left me, all right. An’, Miss Willa, I hope you
won’t get mad if I say I think that was really your fault. I’m pretty
sure Enid wouldn’t of gone to China ’f you hadn’t kind of mesmerized her
and made her go. I think ’f you’d a let her alone, she’d be on the farm
now.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Yes’m, she did. She went, all right, and I’m not sure she’s comin’
back, but if she don’t, why—I don’t know as I’d die of grief. You see,
she was a kind of cold proposition. Her and I never—oh, well, there’s
plenty more. Gladys, f’r instance. An’ that’s another thing I kind of
got against you, Miss Willa. If you’d left the three of us alone, I
think me and Gladys might of——”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, yes, course I know that—there wouldn’t of been much of a book ’f
you hadn’t mixed in some. Still, ’f I get home I think I can straighten
things out. After I get a good rest on the farm, I’m thinkin’ some of
goin’ into the movies. Put a pair of goggles on me an’ you couldn’t tell
me from Harold Lloyd.”
____ ____ ____
“No’m, I ain’t tryin’ to get off the point.”
____ ____ ____
“Go out on that parapet when the attack begins an’ get killed? No,
ma’am, I most certainly an’ absolutely _will not_.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Yes’m, I know it. I told you I know you’re a serious novelist an’ I
suppose you got to do those kind o’ things to make it tragic and
important an’ all that, so’s not to have a happy endin’.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“No’m, I don’t think it is natural, if that’s what you want. There ain’t
only about six killed in action out of a thousand Americans in this war,
an’ I don’t see why you pick on me. How’d I get elected?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Yes, _ma’am_, I said three times already I know you’re serious. Good
lan’! Miss Willa, I ought to know. Why, I ain’t had a real good laugh,
hardly once since I begun working for you. But you don’t seem to
understand I’m serious, too, an’ this whole business you’re proposin’ is
more serious to me than it’s got any chance of bein’ to you. I’ve got a
_lot_ of things to do in the next fifty years.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“No, lady, _I will not_.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Well, first place, that’s no place for an officer in command. Officers
are supposed to take care of theirselves an’ not expose theirselves
unnecessarily. They got to look out for their men, not try to be heroes
or anything.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Well, I s’pose it will. But, see here, if I’ve got to choose between
spoilin’ the book an’ gettin’ spoiled myself—forever, it’s only natural,
ain’t it?—_Say, listen!_ D’you ever go to the _movies_?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, ex_cuse me_. I thought maybe you might of once or twice.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, nothin’. Never mind. But, say, have I really got to get shot on the
parapet? Won’t anything else do?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“A-a-ll _right_, then. I s’pose I _got_ to. I’ll manage it somehow. You
leave it to me. Don’t you worry.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Don’t mention it. That’s all right. Anything to oblige a serious lady
novelist. Good-by, Miss Willa.”
Claude was very busy for the next fifteen minutes. Just as he again took
his position on the firing-step, the Hun advance began.
There they were, coming on the run. His men were on their feet again.
The rifles began firing. Then something extraordinary happened. There
was their commanding officer on the parapet, outlined against the
Eastern sky! Stiffly erect he stood, one arm upraised, facing the
oncoming foe. They heard his voice, “Steady, men! Steady! It’s up to
you!”
They were amazed, astounded, but they responded. A withering fire swept
the Hun lines, men were stumbling and falling. Then the solitary figure
on the parapet was discovered by the enemy. A bullet rattled on the tin
hat, one struck it in the shoulder. It swayed, lost its balance,
plunged, face down, outside the parapet. Hicks caught a projecting foot,
pulled—and it came off in his hand.
At the same moment the Missourians ran yelling up the communication
trench, threw their machine-guns up on the sand-bags and went into
action.
Hicks stood petrified, staring at the foot in his hand, when Claude,
clad in his Jaegers only, appeared, reached out and dragged the limp
figure in by both legs.
“Here, Sergeant, help me with this to the dug-out, so I can get my
clothes on before it gets too public.”
“My God, Lieutenant, I thought you was killed. What’s this for? To fool
the Heinies?”
“No—that was for the home-folks that read serious novels.”
PARADISE BE DAMNED!
_By_
F. SCOTT FITZJAZZER
_This story was written between 10_ P. M. _and 3_ A. M. _of one night
while I was playing bridge._ THE SWIFT SET _paid me enough for it to
recoup what I lost at bridge and leave me the price of a diamond tiara
and two theatre tickets. The movie rights brought me $60,000. It is
probably the worst story I ever wrote—though, for that distinction, it
has many rivals._
GRANDPA AND PAPA
Anthony Blaine’s grandfather had all the money in the known world and
lived in Tarrytown—a remarkable coincidence. Entirely surrounded by cold
cash, he had acquired an austere frigidity of manner and was commonly
called “Old Chill Blaine.” This relationship made Anthony constantly
conscious of social security, since an aristocracy founded sheerly on
money postulates wealth in the particular—whatever that means.
His father, an ineffectual æsthete of that prehistoric period known as
the Nineties, had died before he was born, apparently thus reversing the
customarily usual process of nature—a phenomenon explicable only on the
hypothesis that language sometimes obscures the thought it is supposed
to elucidate. The fact is that Anthony was a posthumorous child—a kind
of practical joke on his surprised mother.
Anthony inherited from his father nothing but his last name, his taper
fingers and a million dollars—a miserable heritage.
MOTHER DEAR
But his mother, Beatrice Blaine! She was a woman!—by curious chance.
Born in Boston of the old Puritan family of O’Hara, she was educated in
Rome—also in Watertown and Ogdensburg, having been fired from three
schools successively. She went abroad and was polished in Poland and
finished in Finland.
She learned to smoke Camels in the Desert of Sahara and, at the Hague,
to drink the national beverage, double strength. All in all, she
absorbed a sort of education and an amount of liquor that it will be
impossible ever again to find in this country.
In an absent-minded moment, she married Stephen Blaine, because she was
a little bit weary, a little bit sad and more than a little bit
pie-eyed. He tried to keep step with her, but in less than a year
cheerfully died. So Anthony was born fatherless.
LITTLE CHILD, WHO MADE YOU?
His childhood and youth were spent in the midst of privations—private
cars, private yachts and private tutors.
At the age of seven he bit bell-boys, at eight smoked cigarettes, at
nine played poker, at ten read Rabelais, at eleven imbibed intoxicants,
at twelve kissed chorus-girls, and at thirteen his mother died of
delirium tremens. He was sent to school at St. Ritz’s.
TOM BROWN AT RUGBY
St. Ritz’s isn’t Eton but it is pretty strong on drinkin’. Anthony’s
private stock was recruited from all parts of the world.
“What’s ’is pink stuff, Anthony?” asked a fellow dipsomaniac of the
fourth form, in the intimacy of intoxication.
“’At’s ole genevieve from Geneva. ‘At green’s grenadine from Grenada,
an’ ‘at yellow’s yataghan from Yap. Make a fairish cocktail, if you lace
it with l’il ole wood-alcohol. Keeps a fella fit, ’is stuff does.”
He drank liquors of incomparable strength and iridescent beauty, in
whose mysterious depths all the lost lures of Mont Marter and of 42nd
and Broadway shivered and shimmied languorously in resplendent
redundancy. Also he took a shot of hop now and then.
He read enormously. In his first term he accomplished Rousseau’s
Confessions, “The Newgate Calendar,” Boswell’s Life of Johnston, “Frank
in the Mountains,” Kant’s Critique, The Arabian Nights in fourteen
volumes, “Ten Nights in a Bar-room,” “The Dutch Twins,” the Memoirs of
Cazanova, Petronius, Suetonius, Vitruvius, Vesuvius, Plato, Cato, Keats,
Yeats and all the Elsie books.
INCIDENT OF THE IMPUDENT HEADMASTER
Clad in an opalescent dressing-gown, the color of peacock’s eyes and
emu’s fins, Anthony was lying on a luxurious lounge of mauve satin
stuffed with eiderdown and aigrettes, reading Ghunga Dhin and drinking
Ghordon Ghin. A timid knock on the door preceded the entrance of the
headmaster. He stood in the doorway sheepishly, hat in hand, pulling an
obsequious forelock.
“Blaine—er—er—Mister Blaine,” he said.
“Well, Margotson? What is it?”
“I called—er—to ask you, sir, if—er—er—you wouldn’t kindly attend a
recitation—er—now and then—er—just as a matter of form, you know?”
“Go to hell!” said Anthony coldly, turning again to his liquor.
“Yes, sir. Very good, sir.”
The headmaster faded through the doorway and, doubtless, went as he had
been directed.
“Damn his impudence!” muttered Anthony.
INCIDENTAL DIVERSIONS
He was leading man in all the school plays, editor of the _St. Ritz
Bartenders’ Guide_, quarterback on the eleven, first base on the nine,
second bass on the glee club, forward on the hockey team and backward in
his studies. He carried off first honors in the hundred-yards, the mile,
the hurdles, the hammer-throw, the standing long drink, the debating
society and the bacchanalian orgies.
Thus Anthony at eighteen, six feet tall and narrow in proportion, green
eyes that shone through a tangled mass of tawny eyelashes, scornful of
the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat, entered Princeton.
SPIRES AND GURGLES
From the first he loved Princeton, the pleasantest country club in
America. He loved the tall, towering tapestries of trees, infinitely
transient, transiently infinite, yearning infinitely with infinite
melancholy—the dreamy double chocolate jiggers pleasing the palate,
drenching the innards with a joy akin to pleasure—the early moon,
mistily mysterious, more mysterious than mystery itself—the deep
insidious devotion of the dreaming peaks, in their lofty aspiration
toward the empyrean—through it all the melancholy voices, singing “Old
Nassau,” blent in a pæan of pain. While over all the two great dreaming
towers towered toward the sky, like a gigantic pair of white flannel
trousers, reversed.
THE SUB-DEB
_The time is in the evening of any day in any month in any year. The
place is the front room of an apartment in 52nd Street, New York, the
library of a house in 68th Street, the ball-room of the Ritz-Royce, a
limousine outside the Country Club in Louisville, the Princeton campus,
anywhere else you choose._
_Enter Rosalind—kissable mouth, other details unnecessary. Enter to her
Anthony Blaine._
HE: Will you kiss me?
SHE: Sure!
(_They kiss—definitely and thoroughly—in a most workmanlike manner._)
HE: Did you ever kiss anyone before?
SHE: (_Dreamily_) Dozens, hundreds, thousands of boys.
HE: Kiss me again.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: How old are you?
HE: Nineteen-past.
SHE: I’m sixteen-just.
HE: Kiss me again.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: You’re some kisser yourself.
HE: Of course—Princeton, you know.
SHE: I knew it. Now, Yale men——
HE: Don’t mention the brutes!
SHE: But Harvard men——
HE: Sissies! Kiss me again.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: When I was in——
HE: You’re so loquacious.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: By the way, who are you?
HE: Anthony Blaine.
SHE: I’ve heard——
HE: Don’t talk.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: I’m——
HE: What difference does it make who you are? Let’s get married.
SHE: Can’t. I’m engaged.
HE: Whom to?
SHE: What?
HE: To who—who to?
SHE: Oh. Why, to Dawson Ryder and Skeets McCormick and Amory Patch
and—to a boy named Wilson—don’t remember his first name and—to a Yale
boy I met in the dark and don’t know any of his names or what he looks
like and to—oh, lots of others.
HE: You love me, don’t you?
(_They kiss._)
SHE: I love you! I love you! I’m mad about you. I can’t do without you.
(_They kiss._)
HE: My God! You’re spoiling both our lives.
SHE: My God! Am I?
HE: Here! we’re losing time.
(_They kiss—kiss—kiss._)
SHE: You’ve broken my heart.
HE: My God!
SHE: My God!
HE: Time’s up. I have a date with Cecelia Connage.
SHE: She’s my sister. She’s not very good at it.
HE: Good-by! You’ve broken my heart and mussed me all up.
(_They kiss. He stumbles toward the exit—a broken man—then—throws back
his head with that proud Princeton gesture—and goes out._)
SHE: Oh, God! I want to die!
(_She looks about her—misty-eyed—with a deep aching sadness—that will
pass—that will pass in time—say, three minutes.—She looks for her
vanity-bag—powders her nose—renews the carmine on those tired lips——_)
SHE: Well? Are they going to keep me waiting all night? Next boy,
please!
MORE GURGLES
The last light fades and drifts across the land,
The low, long land, the land of towers and spires,
That wanders lonely lest the lurid lyres
Press thy pale petals with a passionate hand—
Enchanted essences and pagan pyres—
Oh, dream that sleeps and sleep that knows no dreaming!
So wert thou wrought in fragrant fadeless fires.
So wert thou wrapt in garments goldly gleaming
And dying knew not what should end this seeming.
The ghosts of evenings haunt these afternoons.
The mid-day twilight shifts with my desire.
Nor yet before my eyes do they conspire
There to distil the fragrance of the moons
That burn and are consumed with splendid fire,
And hurl them to abide in their abode
Where young Fitjazzer tuned his youthful lyre
And sang to Princeton his melodious ode
Which, what it means, there’s no one never knowed.
COLLARS AND TIES
Anthony Blaine paused in the process of adjusting the universe to
himself and looked about him—an apartment in a house of murky material,
windows that loomed gloomily down upon Fifty-second Street, voluminous
chairs, a fireplace of murky black, a flamboyant exotic rug of crimson
velvet, an orange-colored lamp—everything suggested the solidarity of
wealth, an entré into the best society.
He yawned and sauntered to his bathroom, an enormous room, where he
spent most of his time. He usually took five baths a day; on Sundays,
seven.
Emerging from his bath, he polished himself with fine sandpaper,
finishing with chamois-skin, until his smooth skin shone like satin.
From the closets bursting with clothes—underwear for an army, silk
shirts for a city, collars and ties for a multitude—he selected his
attire.
He taxied to Brooks’s, to buy him some ties and collars, then to the
grill-room of the Jazza.
LIFE IN LARGE CITIES
_The grill-room of the Jazza. Anthony seated. Enter Richard Caramel. In
person short, in pocket shorter. His figure is round—he is always round
where Anthony is buying drinks._
ANTHONY: Hello, Caramel, old sweet!
DICK: Thanks, I will.
ANTHONY: Waiter! Two double Dacharis in tea cups and four more to
follow.
DICK: Sounds to me!
ANTHONY: Pour it down, beardless boy! How many can you hold?
DICK: Don’t know—never had enough.
ANTHONY: Waiter! two dozen quadruple Dacharis in bath-tubs. Who’s the
luscious débutante across the room?
DICK: My cousin, Gloria Goodle, the Speed Girl from Kansas City.
ANTHONY: No!
DICK: Yes! These short lines are lifesavers, aren’t they?
ANTHONY: Indeed. Also this dialogue stuff—so snappy. What were we
talking about?
DICK: Gloria Goodle.
ANTHONY: Oh, yes——
DICK: The Speed Girl from Kansas City.
ANTHONY: Aren’t we nearly at the bottom of the page?
DICK: Yes, turn over.
ANTHONY: Your cousin?
DICK: Want to meet her?
ANTHONY: Gloria who?
DICK: Goodle.
ANTHONY: Funny name.
DICK: Funny girl.
ANTHONY: What’s her line?
DICK: Legs.
ANTHONY: Whose?
DICK: Her own.
ANTHONY: My God! lead me to her!
DICK: Come on.
ANTHONY: Wait a minute. I’ve got something on my mind.
DICK: Get it off before you meet Gloria.
ANTHONY: Suppose I were an Athenian—too proud to be enigmatic, too
supple to eventuate, too incongruous to ratify, too courageous to adorn—
DICK: Cut it! Suppose you were an author too young to be wise, too
self-sufficient to learn, too impatient to wait, too successful to
stop—that’s the kind of bunk you’d write.
GLORIOUS GLORIA
She was dazzling—alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a
glance—hair full of heavenly glamour—mouth full of gum drops.
“Where are you from?” inquired Anthony.
“K. C., Mo. Got any gum drops?”
“Gum drops! My God!”
The clock on the mantel struck five with a querulous fashionable beauty.
Then, as if a brutish sensibility in him was reminded by those thin,
tinny beats that the petals were falling from the flowered afternoon,
Anthony pulled her to him and held her helpless without breath, with
scarcely room to masticate the gum drops, in a kiss like a chloroformed
sponge.
The clock struck six.
PASSION VS. GUM DROPS
ANTHONY: Will you marry me, Gloria?
GLORIA: Are you rich?
ANTHONY: Haven’t a cent.
GLORIA: Thought you were a millionaire.
ANTHONY: Absolutely stony. Spent it all on neckties and collars.
GLORIA: I must have gum drops.
ANTHONY: Impossible.
GLORIA: My God! how I love you!—but I must have gum drops.
ANTHONY: My God! You’ve broken my heart!
GLORIA: My God! have I? Try a gum drop.
ANTHONY: My God! woman, you’re heartless.
GLORIA: I’m Gloria Goodle—the Speed Girl, Coast to Coast Gloria.
ANTHONY: Coast to coast!—ashes to ashes! dust to dust! My love is dead.
(_Then a thick impenetrable darkness descended on his mind—though you’d
hardly notice the difference._)
THE DAWNING OF A BRIGHTER DAY
At seven-thirty of the same evening, Anthony was sitting on the floor of
the front room of his apartment, with three books before him—a child
again playing with his stamp-albums—when Gloria and Dick came in.
“Anthony!” she cried, “your grandfather has died and left you a hundred
million bucks.”
“Go ’way,” he answered with petulant gentleness, “I’ve got a
five-pistache stamp of Jugo-Rumania and there isn’t any place for it in
the damned old book.”
“Jugo-Rumania!” gasped Dick. “Ain’t that the truth? The poor gink’s got
’em. He always was a wet one.”
“Never mind,” said glorious Gloria gently. “I’ll marry him and take him
to Arabia where the gum comes from and you can get a decent drink. His
trouble ain’t so much the humidity as the hooch.”
THE TRIALS OF TRIONA
_In_
LOCKE STEP
I
“Why is it, mother?” asked Olivia, “that we have never associated with
the county families? Why has the Squire never invited us to dinner? Why
is informal tea at the vicarage the summit of our social attainment?
Tell me, mother, tell me!”
Had Mrs. Gale lived the normal life of women—not only speaking, but
being spoken to—she might have gone to her grave with her secret
unrevealed. But infinite sorrow had weakened her and, in this, the last
poignant intimacy of her deathbed, she disclosed it to her daughter.
“My dear,” she said, “I am a Bagshawe—with the final e—of that proud old
Anglo-Indian family. My father was Bagshawe of the Indian Guides—not to
be confounded with Bradshaw of the Railway Guides. _Your_ father, my
dear, was an excellent man in his way, whom I loved as fondly as was
consistent with the difference in our positions. But they _were_
different, dearest Olivia. As Mrs. Bagshawe—with the final e—I
associated with Generals, Colonels and Sirs—and with their wives, of
course. As Mrs. Gale, only with trades-people, linen-drapers and
haberdashers, tallow-chandlers and ironmongers, with an occasional
fishmonger or drysalter, by way of variety.”
“But, why, mother? Why?” cried Olivia. “What did my father do to condemn
us to such ignominy?”
“Your father, my dear,” faltered the dying woman, “_your_ father dealt
in—_pigs_.”
That was the skeleton in the cupboard. Stephen Gale had been a fine
chap, but as someone—whose modest anonymity shall be respected—has so
finely phrased it, pigs is pigs.”
II
After her mother’s death, Olivia rented the dear old place, the home of
her ancestors for nearly twenty-five years, filled with the priceless
possessions purchased from the proceeds of the preposterously profitable
porcine proclivities of her papa, but haunted by the family ghosts of
Berkshire and Chester White. She fled to London to escape her heritage
of shame.
There she met Alexis Triona, the famous author of _Rushing Through
Russia_. With his clean-shaven face, broad forehead, gray eyes, humorous
mouth, he looked the hero that he wasn’t. He had faked his book from a
stolen diary which he always carried about with him so that, at the
proper moment, he might be found out.
He was a chauffeur, the son of a laborer, therefore his diction was
faultless. “Diction” is the word. He employed it in ordinary
conversation unsparingly—diction and contradiction—for he was a
wonderful liar. Lacking all the advantages of birth and education, he
had, nevertheless, achieved a mendacity of majestic grandeur and
ravishing art.
III
It was not until after their marriage that Olivia discovered Triona’s
essential greatness—and his essential and fatal defect.
He had taken two drinks of whisky and lay in a drunken slumber. Olivia
found on the floor beside him the original notes of the stolen story,
preserved for this dénouement. For the first time, she knew him for what
he was—no mere recorder of his own experiences and observations, no mere
note-book-and-camera author, but an imaginative artist of the first
rank.
She was almost stunned by the greatness of her discovery, the
realization that he, her husband, was worthy to be placed on a pedestal
beside the greatest writers of fictitious travels—Homer, Dante, Milton,
Munchausen, Dr. Cook.
Then she made the second, the fatal discovery—that his real name
was—_John Briggs_.
IV
The ugly monosyllables struck her like a blow between the eyes. Alexis
Triona!—John Briggs! _Briggs!_ How had she labored, erecting her scaling
ladders against the wall of exclusion, to enter the fortified city of
the upper-classes, the county families! With what daring had she climbed
the heights, bearing the banner with a strange device, “Triona”! And
now—flat on her back outside the pale, she lay—her _cartes de visite_
scattered confusedly on the ground, each inscribed “Mrs. John Briggs.”
The sound of the word, its assonance, its consonance, its dissonance,
rang in her ears. What had she fled from? The supreme horror crashed in
upon her consciousness. _Briggs!—pigs!_ Now forever inescapable, her
tragic heritage! No one would ever forget it—no one would ever try to
forget it.
“Mrs. John Briggs’s father sold pigs!” She could hear the war cry of the
aristocracy.
“Briggs—Briggs—pigs, pigs, pigs,” the drumbeat of her conquering
enemies.
“Oh, pigs is pigs and Briggs is Briggs,
And never the twain we’ll meet”——
the chant of embattled dowagers.
“One little pig went to market—so two little Briggs stay home!” the
warning, the command of the elect, the desired.
It was impossible. It was unthinkable. It was unendurable. All night she
sat and kept a ghastly vigil, to confront him in his first awakening
with proofs of his Briggishness.
V
Alexis took a ticket for Poland, fleeing the fury of a woman Briggsed.
But at Victoria station, his talent for invention revived. He would
pretend to be a traffic policeman. Up went his arms, semaphoring the
traffic. A cold, incredulous motor lorry refused to believe him. He
awoke in a hospital.
VI
Olivia returned to her old home. Blaise Olifant, her tenant there,
welcomed her, properly chaperoned by his sister, gave her a home. He was
a one-armed man with a long, long nose. He had loved Olivia long. He
longed for Olivia’s love. But he was a model of honorable
circumspection, and for some time nothing happened to disturb the
platonic calm of their relations.
Then the passion of Blaise Olifant suddenly flamed forth. (One is
careful in the choice of a verb to describe the conflagration.) He flung
his arms about her and kissed her passionately. She half-surrendered.
She tried to respond to his kiss—but couldn’t. _His long, long nose
intervened._
How he managed to kiss her, she never knew. But there it was. His long,
long nose. Impossible to love a man like that. Taper fingers, yes! Tapir
nose, no. Olifant!—Elephant!—could he be? But, whether he was or not,
she could not kiss him, try as she might. The obstacle was
insurmountable, inevitable. So she gave it up and decided to be true to
Alexis.
VII
Myra Stebbings, Olivia’s maid, was, as her name implies, long, lean,
angular and withered—had been so from the beginning of time.
She had been married but before the honeymoon was over she found her
husband wasn’t in his right mind. His mother exonerated Myra, saying:
“’Tain’t your fault. I knowed he was crazy when he said he were goin’ to
marry you.”
One day a woman called at the hospital to see John Briggs. They brought
him the name:
“Miss Myra Stebbings.”
“Oh, my God!” said he, and fainted.
Myra _had_ that effect upon sensitive natures.
VIII
When he had recovered from the effects of the motor lorry’s skepticism,
and Myra’s visit, he got a job as chauffeur. Therefore he met his wife,
walking along the road. So he ran right off a precipice. It was the only
thing to do to keep up the interest.
But he could not escape her. She came down the precipice after him.
“What are you doing in that absurd livery?”
“Chauffeuring.”
He told her the simple truth. The shock was too great. She left him.
“Go to blazes!” he called after her.
“Blaise’s? It’s not,” she answered. “It’s my own home. I only rented it
to him.”
IX
But she thought it all over later. She was Mrs. Alexis Triona, spoken
to, invited to many of the homes of the gentry. Here was John Briggs,
her husband, a chauffeur, likely to be arrested at any time for
trespassing on private precipices. Then the truth might come out! What
would the county families say to that? Something must be done.
She went out into the sweet-scented June night, to the highly perfumed
garage, where he slept.
X
“Alexis!” she cried.
“Name of John Briggs,” he answered candidly.
“Never again!” she said. “Alexis Triona, when you try on a new name and
it suits, wear it.”
She was so bright that her brilliance would have dimmed the Celestial
Hierarchy or Broadway at midnight.
She clutched him tight. “Oh, my God, if you had _only_ been killed!”
“Omit the ‘only’ and it goes,” said he.
So they talked through the sweet-scented June night into the equally
deliciously odoriferous June dawn. And, of course, she, inadvertently,
let slip—the pigs. _Magna est lingua feminae et praevalebit._ What to
do, then? “Briggs” could be buried but the paternal pigs pursued her.
Alexis rose to the occasion.
“Come, let’s go,” said he, “let us leave this snob-ridden island,
populated by porcophobes. Let us go where pigs mean Ancestry, Honors,
Family Portraits, High Society and Money in the Bank.”
“Where, oh, where is that delectable place?” she cried.
“Chicago,” he said simply.
CAPTAIN BLOODLESS
_An Episode_
FAR FROM SABATINI
CHAPTER IXL
This swiftly executed manœuvre laid the _Saucy Arabella_ board-and-board
the great Spanish galleon. A dozen grapnels fell and tore and shivered
the timbers of the huge _San Salvador Contra Bonos Mores_. A wild,
yelling swarm of boarders swept over the rail—thirty men against six
hundred.
On the quarter-deck, Don Dago de Matador y Mantilla, Lord Admiral of
Castille y Sapolio and grandee of Spain, livid of face, short of breath,
dumb with despair, frantically raged, as all Spaniards do. Speechless,
he shouted conflicting contradictory commands to his craven crew. The
Spaniards, though outnumbering the attacking party twenty to one, were
demoralized by the knowledge that these were Englishmen, entitled to win
by all the rules of the writing game.
Wolverstone, a one-eyed giant with a most kindly disposition, led the
buccaneers. He was ably seconded by Hagthorpe, a soberly dressed
gentleman, with a clear cut, attractive countenance, and by a
golden-haired, sunny-faced Somersetshire lad, Jeremy Pitt. Up and down
the waist from the keelson to the plimsoll-mark, raged these three,
treating the Spaniards very rough, though no blood was shed by either
party.
Above them on the quarter-deck, upon which none of these
rough, common sailors thought of intruding, stood a
straight-up-and-down-slip-of-a-girl, clad in shivering gray silk. Her
oval face, upon which the tropic sun had made no impression, so
permanent was her complexion, was shaded by the broad brim of a gray hat
garnished with a scarlet austridge ploom. Her clear hazel eyes sparkled
with onwee as she witnessed the furious onslaught of the invaders upon
the crowded crew.
Yet for a space, as one might say, the battle hung uncertain. Push the
Spaniards to and fro as they might, they were so many that the gallant
little band of wild, hairy, half-naked English pirates could not keep
them in order. It seemed almost impossible that they could quell the
riot without calling out the mounted police.
“One moment, please!” A crisp, metallic voice, speaking the purest
Castilian, cut across the tumult like a Toledo blade, beautifully
damascened with golden scarabesques. At the sound of its master’s voice,
the uproar ceased as suddenly and as completely as it had begun.
Arabella, for the young lady on the quarter-deck was indeed our heroine,
gazing with childish wonder and hazel eyes, saw coming toward her,
picking his way daintily through that ghastly shambles, a man, tall,
lean, graceful, spruce, modish, etcetera.
Peter, for it was none other than he, was unscrupulously attired in a
singularly elegant costume of crimson satin, trimmed, as it were, with
gold lace. A broad brimmed hat, adorned with a scarlet feather secured
by a brooch, set with a single great quadroon, which gleamed dully like
a lambent flame, was set above beautifully marcelled and freshly oiled
ringlets of deepest black, which with a broad linen collar of finest
point, framed a swarthy, tawny, sardonic, keen, intrepid face and a pair
of light blue eyes, like pale sapphires set in copper.
Around his neck like a stole—which it probably was—he wore a madigral of
scarlet silk, from each end of which hung a silver-mounted pistol. A
gold hilted sword dangled at his side from a gold embroidered garibaldi.
In his left hand he carried daintily a tall ebony cane. His stockings
were of silk. He wore fine Spinach leather shoes—on his feet. His
suspenders were delicately hand-embroidered and his undies, though
invisible, were doubtless of equal elegance. He was a very nifty
dresser.
Moving with easy nonchalance, he came on until he fronted Don Dago. The
light blue eyes played over the speechless Spaniard like points of
steel. The level black eyebrows went up. A faint smile curled the lips
of the long mouth and, with a crisp, authoritative, faintly disdainful
manner, blended of suavity, impressiveness and mockery—not to mention
ansooseyance and savore fare—let alone savore veev and sang froyd—he
spoke in fluent Castilian, whereof he was master, and with grave
courtesy.
“Admiral, darlint, an’ is it all day yer dirthy gang o’ cutthroat
Spaniards’ll be kapin’ up this riot? Bedad, we have met again, Don Dago,
and, without offense, I may remark, how small the world is! Meseems that
no one other than yourself and your brother, Don Miggle, sails the
Spanish Main, so called, for never, forsooth, do I board a ship without
finding eyether one of you in command, be jabers. Meself ut is will be
askin’ ye to get yer dirthy carcass an’ yer blaggard crew off me ship
befoore somebody gets hurted.”
The level black eyebrows, having come down again in the same place
whence they had went up, came together above the vivid blue eyes.
Speechless, livid with rage, his mouth distorted all kind of crooked
with anger, the haughty hidalgo gazed calmly upon the intruder.
“Off _your_ ship?” he gasped inarticulately.
Again in purest Castilian, the elegantly dressed man spoke.
“Sure Mike! Is ut ye doan’t know ivry ship’s _my_ ship when me gang’s
wid me? Is it possible that you are fatuously harboring the delusion
that, with only thirty men against six hundred, I would be at a loss for
a ready expedient wherewith to bring to fruition my hopes of possessing
this noble vessel? Ah, Admiral, you have forgotten your
Horace—‘_Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum._’ Those
ancient Greeks were very wise, were they not? Look there, ye dirty scut!
Ye miserable blaggard, look forninst ye!”
He waved one hand with elegant languor toward his gallant crew, which
meantime had gathered in a compact group in the waist just abaft the
rudder. At the signal they drew aside and disclosed their secret to the
astonished eyes of the affrighted Admiral and his cowardly minions.
Agreeably to a plan concerted beforehand, these hardy, hairy buccaneers
had availed themselves of the diversion, caused by the entrance of their
leader, to collect all the ship’s ordnance, its bow-chasers, broadsides
and stern-chasers, and arrange them in a line across the deck, loaded to
their frowning muzzles and trained full upon the dense mass of
Spaniards. There in an appalling row—behind each gun a gallant English
pirate with lighted penstock in hand—were ranged nine sackbuts, seven
culverts, four spontoons and two great cuspadores.
The glittering dark eyes of Don Dago fell, as did all the rest of him,
upon the deck. With a fearful groan he expired.
The victor turned to the mere-slip-of-a-girl and spoke in purest
Palmolive, whereof he was master.
“Be not alarmed, Miss Bishop. My intentions are strictly honorable.
Object, matrimony. Not a hair of these men shall touch your little
finger.”
Her clear hazel eyes regarded him wistfully and contemptuously and in a
steady level voice she stated “Thief and pirate.”
Thief and pirate! The cruel phrase filled his brain, reëchoing and
reverberating in its vast empty spaces. Thief and pirate! Not those! My
God, not those!
“Pirate I may be, madam,” he replied stiffly with admirable candor, “but
not thief. For, know you, that naught have I taken from any man save in
the regular course of piracy. And more I have to say. Have you observed
this fight? Saw you aught of bloodshed? Did any one of these Spanish
dogs receive more severe punishment than a rough push or a sharp slap
mayhap? No, madam, I embarked upon this career on high moral grounds and
have conducted my piracy along strictly Y. M. C. A. lines and in the
most sanitary manner. You see before you the only original moral pirate.
No drop of blood stains my name. In all the Spanish main, I am known and
feared as Captain Bloodless.”
She came slowly to him and held out her hand.
“I’m ... I’m glad,” she said and strove to smile (or was it not to
smile? Who can tell?). Won’t you ... won’t you say ... good-by?”
“Good-by? Shure an’ why should I when it’s good girl I’d rather be
sayin’? Arrah, ye love me, doan’t ye? Ye’ll marry me, woan’t ye?”
She sank into his arms.
“There never, never was a pirate like you, Peter,” was all she said.
SOME FREEDOM!
“_With a great price ($2.00) obtained I This Freedom!_”
CHAPTER I
Rosalie’s first impression was that her father owned the world.
Extraordinary father! Wonderful father! Wonderful, wonderful father!
There he is bounding across a field before a bull. Wonderful bull! There
is father. There is the bull. Two theres. One after the other. The bull
there after father there. Wonderful theres! Entrancing theres!
Did her mother ever bound before a bull? Never. Her father was the only
bounder in the family—except her two brothers. All men were bounders.
Wonderful, mysterious, entrancing men! Wonderful, wonderful men!
Mother—how different! Taught all the children until each child was
eight, at her knee. “The Child’s Bible,” expurgated, hymns—“I kneed thee
every hour.” Various methods of knee-teaching. For “Child’s Bible,” _on_
the knee, her arm around you. For hymns, _at_ the knee, your hands
behind you. For deportment, _across_ the knee, her hand upraised.