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[Illustration: cover]
CUPID'S MIDDLEMAN
[Illustration: CUPID'S MIDDLEMAN.]
CUPID'S
MIDDLEMAN
BY
EDWARD B. LENT
AUTHOR OF "BEING DONE GOOD"
ILLUSTRATED BY
H. B. MATTHEWS
NEW YORK
CUPPLES & LEON
Copyright, 1906, by
CUPPLES & LEON
TO MY FRIEND,
HERBERT F. GUNNISON,
OF THE
BROOKLYN EAGLE.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
CUPID'S MIDDLEMAN _Frontispiece_
"WHY, WHO IN THE WORLD COULD HAVE WRITTEN THIS
NONSENSE?" LAUGHED HYGEIA 214
"YOU ADVERTISE ROOMS FOR LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING" 238
"I WROTE IT, GABRIELLE--AND FORGIVE ME" 286
"I CAME TO APOLOGIZE TO YOU, MR. TESCHERON" 322
PREFACE
John Alden was a celebrated Cupid's middleman. In presenting the cause
of Miles Standish to Priscilla, however, he did not attend strictly to
business as a jobber. He was not able to resist the lady when she asked:
"Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" That famous question has
practically made it impossible for the middleman to make much headway in
the assumed part. Benjamin Hopkins, of Oswegatchie County, was not a
traitor--perhaps because he never met the fair Priscillas face to face.
This story can teach no new lesson; it can only recall the ancient
wisdom which filled Miles Standish when it was too late. In the poem by
Longfellow, the Plymouth Captain says:
"* * * I should have remembered the adage--
If you would be well served, you must serve yourself; and moreover,
No man can gather cherries in Kent at the season of Christmas!"
E. B. L.
Cupid's Middleman
CHAPTER I
"Jim, it's years since you asked me to help you out in a love affair," I
said. "Has your old heart grown cold, shriveled up, or what's the
matter?"
"You're right, Ben; it must be a long time back. But why don't you put
out a few letters for yourself?"
"I wish I could get a dollar a ton for all I have written for you," said
I; "then I'd have a fortune and all the girls would be chasing me for my
money."
"Say, was it as bad as that, do you think?"
"Well, cut the price in two and I'd be satisfied."
"What a fool I was, Ben, to let you trifle with my fair friends in that
way! You came near putting me in a terrible hole several times."
"Is that so? You never said anything about it. Tell me now."
"Not for a mansion and forty servants would I tell you. Well, I should
say not. Nay! Nay!"
"I'll bet you profited by my efforts and you're not willing to let on.
Do you think that is a friendly attitude to take toward an agent who has
increased the range of your powers of fascination?"
"You came near increasing the length of my neck by several inches. Why,
the fathers and big brothers of some of those girls you wrote to came
near lynching me."
"Well, I wasn't to blame for that, was I?"
"You certainly were. You laid it on too thick."
"Not too thick to please the girls, did I?"
"Suited some of the girls first rate, but it's bad to write so much.
It's apt to come back at you when you least expect it."
"What do you care so long as the girls were pleased? You were not
courting the father. If you had intended to have the old gentleman read
them I could easily have changed the style from a Grade A love to a nice
assortment of short business phrases. But, say, Jim, you ought to tell
me what happened. Come, now! Any bull's-eyes?"
"Do you know that you wrote enough letters to my girls to have married
me off a dozen times or more? There are some streets I dare not pass
through now--there's that foolish creature in West Thirty-eighth Street,
for example."
I knew that Jim would leak a little if persistently tapped with
interrogations.
"What about her? Did we send her many or was she easily won?" I asked.
"Hard or soft?" As the middleman it was purely business with me.
"That girl was a queer case," said Jim, and he reflected for a moment.
"Why, do you know, you had her running to clairvoyants for advice. She
didn't think anything of putting up five dollars to learn how it was
going to turn out. As soon as I heard that I quit calling and shut you
off, for it was either that or get shot, I believed."
"That's quite a case, Jim. Let me into all of that, won't you?"
"I'm not going to tell you. It's past now, so let it go. You got me into
enough trouble to fill a book. The book won't be written, though, for
the inside story dies with me."
"Come, come, Jim; it's not fair to shut me out from all the excitement
and fun after I did all the drudgery. Think how I used to struggle here
to keep up my end."
"You struggle! Where do you suppose I came in? Still, I'll say no more
about it, for I see you are trying to pump me. Let it pass. How do you
find the state of the country to-night?"
Jim swung from the interesting subject to my hobby, political economy
and measures for saving the nation from its impending doom. A man who
can't make much headway toward home-building before or after marriage
usually becomes a reformer. Men with families take things as they are,
if they live at home instead of a club, and find plenty to do. I could
not be moved without a protest.
"Never mind, Jim," said I. "You may want me to help you out some day and
I shall not undertake to handle the case unless it is clearly stated in
the contract that I am to be in at the finish."
"Agreed; Ben, you are to be there."
"Even though you're going to be lynched, don't hesitate to send for me."
"That'll probably be the finish, if I give my secrets away to you again.
Still, I am past that now." He seemed to doubt his words, however.
"Hanging or wedding, I'm to be there--is that agreed?"
"You'll be the best man in any event and you may stand just as close as
the minister or the mob will allow."
I could see that he was in a good humor and had noticed its increasing
hold upon him for several weeks. Such a fine specimen of farm-bred
manhood as Jim Hosley could not escape, although he had kept from the
net and in the free waters of bachelorhood until he was thirty. Six feet
two inches, broad-shouldered, fair-haired, and as rosy as a schoolboy,
he seemed born to remain young and handsome always. Well do I remember
this conversation now, and how little we then realized the nature of the
fruitage of our folly which we discussed so airily that evening in our
bachelor apartments where we kept house together.
I regret that I am not a literary man. I never corresponded with
magazine editors without paying the return postage and therefore I am
not in shape to put in the soft touches where they belong, and I am also
aware that the field is too big for me, for it includes the heart of a
woman, a domain in which I am easily lost, although I did set up to be a
pilot for my friend.
As for my own matrimonial prospects, they were dim. I really cared
nothing about them, for I understood I was such a small potato I
wouldn't be noticed for seed, and there seemed poor prospects for me to
ever sprout into anything that would attract attention enough to draw a
handful of paris green and plaster. I had a better opinion of my ideas
on saving the country, however. I found a lot of people who agreed with
me that the country was going to the bad; that there wasn't much use
trying to get money enough ahead to go into business, because if you did
you would only net fresh air and exercise and an appetite that would cut
whale oil and consume the margin.
Jim found it an easy matter to turn me from prying into his private
affairs. I had just been reading my paper. "Shall Autocrats Rule Us?"
was the subject of the editor's heavy work for the evening and it
stirred me up. That fellow used "strong and powerful" language, as our
dominie used to say when he was preaching and got two feet away from his
notes on the pulpit and doubled on his tracks.
"You can put it down in your notebook, Jim, that I say the country is in
a bad fix."
"That's right, Ben, and unless you get the job of mending it, no George
Washington will appear."
"Listen to this," said I, paying no attention to his guying.
"'Everywhere the voice is that of Democracy, but the hand and the
checkbook are those of a respectable Autocracy.' Isn't that so? Why,
when I had ploughed through a stack of those magazines" (and I pointed
to our parlor table and its load of ten-cent literature) "I burned two
fillings of the lamp, and I tell you I had to swallow hard on a lot of
big words that would have kept old Webster chasing to the fellows he
stole from; I wound in and out a lot of trotting sentences that broke
twice to the line on a track that was laid out by a park gardener to go
as far as possible without reaching anywhere, and I fetched up this
morning with a swelled head, stuffed full of cold-microbes that had
formed a combine from the nozzle of my Adam's apple clean up to a mass
of chronic gooseflesh that had crusted on the top of my crown as solid
as if it had been put there by a file-maker, expert in permanent
pimpling--"
"Yes, I noticed them when you were at breakfast this morning," sniffed
Jim.
"Why, it's no joke, Jim; this discussion about the country will wind up
in some sort of a revolution. I have been talking around lately among
the plain people, and a lot of them declare straight up and down that
the country is going to peter out like the water in the tap here in our
fifth flat when I am completely soaped up and have to stand there and
feel it crackle and dry in my ears and burn me blind. Pretty soon those
people who read my paper, say the prosperity of the United States will
slow down into a quiet trickle, then a dribble shading off into a blast
of air and a maddening gurgle, while folks stick their heads out the
window and swear at the government for not giving them notice."
"It's an awful big country to save," said Jim. "Look at the
Prohibitionists."
"Well, Jim, I must say I get discouraged when I read of one man being
worth a thousand million dollars. It makes me feel mighty poor. I don't
see any use in being ambitious and taking any stock at all in anything
so far as I am concerned, but I do hate to see the government come to
harm. I get to thinking that if the Declaration of Independence isn't
going to hold out that I'll change my politics and then see what will
happen. When a fellow who is as set in his ways as I am changes his
politics, reform must be coming, for I would probably be the last man to
flop."
"If you could stick to one girl the way you do to the Republican party,"
said Jim, "you would soon be letting the country go to blazes."
I could see that he was inclined toward shallow conversation. It was
evident that he had more to tell me than he dared in view of the
calamity which had followed his former confidences. I said nothing,
merely making note of his mental condition. I was not through with the
country by any means. It was best to pump Jim by indirect conversation.
"It's an awful thing to think of changing your politics," I continued.
"Why, up in Oswegatchie County, as far back as anybody can remember or
read in the town papers on file, my folks have been Republicans and have
been honored with office, earned good salaries and some of the longest
obituary poems ever penned by that necrological songbird, Amelia
Benson."
"She sang like a catbird for fifty cents a column," remarked Jim.
"Her style was good for the price and it was preferred because it never
struck below the belt," I added. "Her occasional verse was a trifle
worse. Don't you know 'The Pain Killer' used to be full of it when
advertisements ran low?"
"I always liked that paper in your town," said Jim--"for shaving."
Our paper was called "The Pain Killer" down in Jerusalem Corners and
other distant places when it was so full of stomach-bitters
advertisements that the news of the week had to be left out for a couple
of issues and seemed such ridiculous reading when it appeared,
especially to the sick who were then out ploughing and the parents of
the babies that had been hinted about some time before and were then
swaddled, exercising with the colic and ready to have their names in
print as among those present.
Jim had an important engagement and dressed with some care to meet what
was evidently a social demand of consequence. I had observed of late
that clothes were playing a greater part in his society drama. It seemed
to me he must be getting close to a leading lady.
The conversation ended with a "Good-night" from Jim and he passed out
leaving me to ponder alone. The hermits of the country have time to
consider its welfare, so I went to reading my magazines to gather more
inspiration for denouncing the United States Senate and the rest of the
rascals.
The railroads are to blame. I hold them responsible, for one of them
brought me down to New York ten years ago on a ten-dollar excursion
ticket, and an old Sunday-school teacher of mine who had seen all he
could pay for here wanted to get back, so he made me an offer of five
dollars for the return half, and after practicing my handwriting for a
spell he got so accurate he could write my name about as well as I
could, in case the conductor cornered him and wanted to throw him off
into the Black River. He landed home all right and nobody was the wiser.
Would that all my trickery had died as gentle a death! But I see now
that fooling with another fellow's courtship and cheating a railroad are
different, because the railroad is everybody's business and the other is
supposed to be a private affair. Cheating a railroad used to be no crime
till they got to cheating us so hard. I remember up in Oswegatchie
County that all of my folks in the County Clerk's office held passes and
seldom complained about the railroad robbing us of our land, so that
five dollars taken contrary to the contract on the ticket did not worry
me overmuch, because I knew my dad would have closed on it like Jim
Jackson's foot always accidentally trod on and spiked anything that
rolled his way in the old man's store.
Jim Hosley and I, two bachelors who have been down here in this great
metropolis for ten years, looking for the fortunes we always hear about
at the annual Waldorf dinners of the Oswegatchie County Society as being
a part of the perquisites of our northern tribe, then lived together in
a top apartment pretty well down-town, conveniently situated five
flights up without an elevator and the same number back on the turn
when anything was needed from the corner store. Jim came from Gorley and
I from Dazer Falls. The solitude of the upper air, therefore, suited us.
A man can stand for five hours at any corner in Dazer Falls and shout
"Fire" through a forty-inch megaphone without starting up a native.
Dazer Falls is a study in village still life. In Gorley silence and race
suicide are equally common and not noticed except by strangers. Up in
the fifth flat we got away from the world almost as well, except that
the clatter of our dish-washing and the thumping of our disagreeing
opinions would at times sound like the whirr of industry, for Jim and I
did our own housework, our own thinking and lived as cheaply as monopoly
will permit (monopoly, that is the thing I am against as a political
economist, I can tell you). The pile that was to come our way we had not
yet receipted for. Once or twice, years before, we had thought we were
getting close to it, but we found we'd have to change our politics to
get farther. After that I lost all personal ambition, as I could get so
few people to listen to my plans for making everything right. These
kickers spent all their time kicking against monopoly, but wouldn't let
me show them how to slay it. When I began my studies along this line I
hesitated whether to begin war near the top with the United States
Senate or at the bottom with the poor masses in the slums. Down at the
bottom I would be more at home, for I know full well what it is to be
bleached by the blues of adversity. In saving the masses though, by a
direct appeal, I did not think I could do much to brag about down here,
for they don't understand more than half you say to them in English and
their suspicion sours the half they take in before they make any use of
it. This would have made it extra hard for me, because advice was all I
had to use in saving the country. Up in the United States Senate I used
to think I might do something, but it was such a long way up from where
I stood. They have been taking tremendous fees up there for their own
advice, generally given to other members of their distinguished body or
to members of their own State legislatures, as to how to vote wisely on
this or that piece of law ordered by their clients. Therefore, it seemed
to me it would be only reasonable for them to take my advice, as they
might be able to turn it over at a good figure a little later on when
the custom-made law business picked up again. Just now I don't suppose
they could do much with it, for most of those old codgers are as glum
as a funeral march; but, of course, I admit I am no judge of chin music
and could not understand what they said, probably, if they spoke.
I want to state right here, though, that it is a mistake for a man to
undertake to save the country and to have ideas on that subject when he
tries to help another fellow win the heart of a girl and gets mixed up
in the tangle that such interference is bound to bring on anybody who
attempts it. I didn't know, and therefore I should have thrown up the
job as soon as I began to get wound in it. You have heard that gentle
hum of the buzz-saw? You have seen how still it runs and how its
feathery edge seems calm during the lull in the sawmill? You also
noticed that no one who understands the sawmill business ever goes near
it to give it a friendly tap just when it is looking that way? It is the
same with the other fellow's love affairs. Leave them alone when all is
quiet, and when there are ructions leave them alone. They are buzz-saws
for theorists. A man with ideas on saving the country is the poorest man
in the world to undertake to help save a friend with a sick heart. The
little matter of the country is a cinch compared to that job. Why, the
little matter of stringing a few extra stars to make traveling at night
safer on the Milky Way would be an easy contract compared to that. But I
touched the saw and it certainly did cut off a lot of opinions I used to
be proud of.
Jim and I had a habit of going over the sad state of the country pretty
thoroughly during our leisure moments in the evening. There were chairs
in our parlor that fitted us to a dot. They were seldom if ever dusted,
unless they were accidentally turned over and then some would fall off,
but no one ever disturbed them and ruffled them into hard knots just to
improve their appearance. We sat on the chairs, not on their appearance.
During our talks Jim did the listening. This constituted a _de facto_
conversation. His knowledge of Gorley and up-State affairs, after an
absence of ten years, was well maintained by regularly reading the
county papers, but his knowledge of monopoly and our foreign affairs
came wholly from me while we would sit and cure the air of our front
room with our smoking corncobs. And dad, who used them in his
smokehouse, used to say they beat sawdust for flavor. We mixed a little
short-cut tobacco to sweeten the cob. This was not our ideal way of
spending the evening, for we had a Perfecto ambition. For ten years,
though, we had been gradually squeezing ourselves to fit circumstances
and had come to realize that the pipe and kerosene oil are the cheapest
fuel and light the trusts offer in New York. A gallon of oil a week, a
pound of tobacco and seven scuttles of coal stood us in for our quota of
comfort, and as we paid our humble tributes to the concerns that had
cornered these articles we were happy in the thought that it wasn't as
bad as it might be. They had not yet cornered the air necessary to
oxidize these commodities, although they had the connecting link, the
match, and would no doubt soon get the air.
We perched there in the top flat after a long trial of the abnormalities
of boarding-house life. I heard them called that once and it seemed to
me that it fitted. We were fairly cosy, although, as I have hinted,
there was nothing over-ornate about the furnishings. No woman had ever
seen the place and therefore our ideas as to keeping it always the same
were never disturbed, and it had never been spoken ill of. In the winter
we kept house with more system than we did in the summer, when
dish-washing became too much of a burden and appetite dwindled to
chipped beef and angel cake, two simple things to serve. We got fagged
out in this climate in the summer, and if you had been born in
Oswegatchie County, where forty degrees below zero is as common as at
the North Pole, and had then lived up there beneath the roof of that
flat, you would understand. In all our wanderings through the art
galleries and the comic papers we had never found an artist who could
draw the sun like that tin roof.
Jim was almost as much interested as I was in having no harm come to the
government, but not quite. We both worked for the city, holding civil
service jobs. His was only a small city job, that of Sealer of Weights
and Measures, while I was connected with the Department of Health as an
Inspector of Offensive Trades, with more pay to offset the larger
responsibilities.
Jim once asked me what I did and I explained it this way:
"An Inspector of Offensive Trades must have a nose as delicately trained
as a Sousa's ear, so that when a blast from the full olfactory orchestra
rolls up from Newtown Creek and its stupefying vibrations are wafted on
the fog billows driven by a gusty east wind toward the Department of
Health, he can detect strains of the glue hoofs quite independently of
the abattoir's offal bass, and tell at a sniff if discord breathes from
the settling tanks of the fish factory or if the aroma of the
fertilizer grinder is two notes below standard pitch as established by
the officials to meet the approval of the sensitive ladies of the civic
smelling committees."
You can see that my work called for a peculiar kind of brains.
Jim, in those days, went around to the grocery stores and made sure that
the scales were in working order and that the weights balanced with the
official weights he carried in a small bag. If he found a groceryman
using weights that had been bored out to make them lighter he made an
arrest and usually laid off for two days because he had to be a witness
against the prisoner at court. He took these vacations at regular
intervals, about twice a month, so I figured he did not pounce down on a
man as soon as he found him giving short weight, but saved those
desirable cases for use at regular periods when he required rest with a
day or two at home.
Jim was not lazy, but he was not so spry as he was ten years ago when he
was fresh from playing full-back on our scrub team. For a number of
years he had been tramping around outdoors all day and had been inclined
to play full front on the gastronomic flying wedge at the restaurants,
where we commuted for our meals as long as we could stand it before
taking up the primitive notions of the culinary art practiced in our own
kitchen. Our cooking became very simple. After we tackled making fried
cakes and both went to bed with headaches from the cottonseed oil, I
asked Jim to take what we had turned out to a neighboring machine shop
and see if they didn't want some three-inch washers for locomotive work.
The farmer and the manicure artist have discovered the same law of
compensation. If a man has a big ear he may have only a little corn.
With Jim it was about the same. He chased short-weight fellows all day
and when it came night he piled on all the weight he could just to lift
himself out of the under-weight rut of the day's work. Fat kept Jim
sociable--I don't mean that he was portly, but he was filled out well
over the angles of youth. This was desirable, because a lean bachelor
can't live with another lean one. I don't know why, except it's Nature's
law. He hyenas in the same cage act the same way.
Before Jim started in to take on weight he had been passing through
quite a long correspondence with a young woman, and it was so long that
I began to give out on poetry and was thinking of laying in more stock
in that line to drive the arrow home to a finish. Jim had never done
any courting without consulting me. I attended to the correspondence and
rather liked my job, because it gave me experience that might be useful.
Now that it is all over, of course, I know better--I look the other way.
At the time we were very busy in one of these affairs, I remember, Jim
was blue-eared, ragged-nerved and petulant to such a degree that I began
to think of shipping him back to the old farm, where pork gravy and
fried cakes would certainly restore his nervous system; otherwise I felt
he would land in a padded cell. Nothing he ate agreed with him and I
felt sure it must be a bad case of unrequited love. He looked sour upon
all the world, mistaking me most of the time for the man who ran it. We
were both on the point of getting a divorce when he began to take a
bottle of ale regularly at dinner. The first week Jim mounted a pound a
day and we were both overjoyed to note the improvement in our relations
which the ugly co-respondent (did you ever see a co-respondent that
wasn't ugly?) had threatened to disturb with the Dakota chills.
The remedy proved it was not a girl who bothered him. For a long time
after when Jim felt nervous I would recommend ale. I did not believe it
was possible for a woman to disturb him, but I was wrong again.
When Jim had returned two cases of empties we were on thoroughly good
terms again. Of course we are glad he tried the ale, but if we had
parted then and there we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble.
The small amount the junk man would have paid for our outfit might have
been better than what we netted.