IT WAS one of those gilded October days when the serene sunshine is as
soft and tawny as candle-light; when the air is thin and sharp in
the early mornings, but the noontime is as comfortably genial as the
radiance of a hearth reddened with hickory embers. Dove Dulcet and I
were strolling along Riverside Park, enjoying the blue elixir of the
afternoon, in which there was just a faint prick, a gently tangible barb
of the coming arrows of the North.
“Winter sharpens her spearheads,” said Dulcet. “Aye,” was my reply.
Below us I saw the coaling-station at the Seventy-ninth Street pier.
“The merriest music the householder can hear nowadays is the roar of
coal going down the chute into the cellar.”
He sighed, and seemed touched by a sudden melancholy.
“Ben,” he said, “that coal-dump reminds me of Gloria Larsen. Did I ever
tell you about her?”
“Never,” I said. “Coal, I presume, made you think of diamonds; and
diamonds, of Miss Larsen. Were you engaged to her?”
“I might have been,” he said, sentimentally. Before us was an empty
bench, on a little knoll that looks out over the shining sweep of the
river. I drew him to it, and we filled our pipes. When you can get a
minor poet in an autobioloquacious mood, it is well to encourage him.
No one takes life so seriously as the minor poet, and consequently his
memoirs make fine sport for the disinterested bystander.
“No,” he said, blowing a waft of tobacco smoke into the soft,
sun-brimmed air, and settling down into the curve of the bench. “The
association was even more obvious than that of coal and diamonds. I
always think of Gloria when winter begins to come in.”
“Ah!” I said. “She was cold?”
He meditated, ignoring my jocularity.
*****
“It was a good many years ago,” he said at last; “before you knew me.
When I first came to town, you know, I had a fine ambition to be a
writer. I had just a little money, so I shut myself up in a hall room
at the top of a cheap lodging-house on Seventy-fifth Street, hired a
typewriter, and set about to butt my bead against all the walls that hem
in the beginner.
“It was one of those old four-story dwellings that are now mostly
boarding-houses, and it was run by a good-hearted widow who would let
her rooms only to men, because she said they were less trouble than
women. Her house was clean and incredibly cheap, and almost all the
lodgers were young fellows like myself--students, or starveling artists,
or chaps with literary ambitions. That was how I had heard of the place,
through another fellow who lived there and had built up a little sort of
coterie in the house. He was Black-more. You know his name; he gave up
art long ago. He's now the art editor of the _Mother, Home, and Heaven
Magazine_.
“Mrs. Vesey, our landlady, was quite a character. I was always rather
a favourite with her, because the very first day I came to her house
I happened to find her cat, which had wandered away some days before,
leaving her disconsolate. The cat's name, I remember, was Nemo. She had
called it so because, with that admirable virginity of mind that one
finds only in a childless married woman, she was uncertain of the
animal's sex. Anyway, it was a fine big creature, and the apple of Mrs.
Vesey's pie. She talked so much about it that we used to chaff her a
good deal on the subject, and say that we thought it was going to have
kittens, and all that sort of thing. Blackmore used to say, remembering
the title of some idiotic melodrama he had seen, that it was 'Neither
Maid, Wife, nor Widow.' He was right, for it was the kind of cat that
is not likely to be either a father or a mother without a miracle. But I
don't want to be indelicate. I only mention Nemo because it was through
him that I first talked with Gloria.
“The first day I was at Mrs. Vesey's I heard her groaning about the
vanished cat. That evening I went out to supper, feeling rather lonely,
and dropped in at an eccentric-looking little restaurant on Amsterdam
Avenue. It was called Larsen's Physical Culture Chophouse, and I have
never seen a more amusing place. Old man Larsen was a Swede, and all the
Scandinavian fads ran riot in his head--vegetarian food, for instance.
He didn't absolutely condemn meat, for he would serve it if you
insisted, but all his joy was in weird combinations of calory, protose,
and vitamine, or whatever those things are called. Bean “cutlets,” and
protose “steak” that turned out, on examination, to be made of chopped
walnuts and lentils, and the “Thousand-Calory Combination Dinner,” of
which he made a specialty. When you sat down, if you were a regular
customer, old Larsen would come round and look you over and diagnose
from your complexion the kind and quantity of calories you needed for
that meal, and would give you combinations of spinach croquettes and
lentil pie that he warranted would purge the blood and compose the mind.
On the walls were charts of Swedish exercises and systems of
calisthenics, and he sold a little pamphlet that he himself had written
telling how to be strong and merry and full of physique.
“Well, to come back to my first visit to Larsen's restaurant. I hadn't
been in there many minutes before I noticed the girl at the cashier's
desk. My, my, what a girl! My table was close to her little throne, and
I couldn't help watching her out of the end of my eye. I wondered if
she was raised entirely on protose and lentils, for I have never seen
anything so gloriously and vitally physical in my life. Great, bold blue
eyes, and crisp, sparkling golden hair, and blood that spoke delicately
through her skin, and a figure--well, just our old friend of Melos
over again, that lively combination of grace and strength. She was just
curves and waves and athletic softness--the kind of creature that makes
your arms tingle, you know. No corset, I suppose. In the old man's
booklet on physical culture he defended the gymnastic doctrine that
women should develop what he called a muscle corset by bending and
swaying from the hips a thousand times a day. He said it must be
done--well, _au naturel_, in front of an open window in one's bedroom in
the morning. I'd be ashamed to admit that we fellows at Mrs. Vesey's
used to set our alarm clocks at half-past six to go round the corner to
Amsterdam Avenue----”
Dulcet paused a while and watched the river pensively.
“But about the cat,” I reminded him presently.
“Yes,” he said. “Well, that first night I was at the chop-house I
noticed a very fine, fat cat browsing about under the tables. I was
amused at the corpulence of the animal. I said to myself that a cat
as large as that must surely get some meat somewhere, because, while
vegetarian protose food may be all right for Swedes, a cat is a realist
in the matter of carnal meals. And when I went to the desk to pay my
check, wanting some excuse to get into talk with the superb Gloria--who
was, of course, the old man's daughter--I remarked on the sleek, healthy
appearance of her cat.
“'Oh, it's not ours,' she said. 'It came in here yesterday. I don't know
whose he is.'
“I'll bet I know whose it is,” I said.
I told her that Mrs. Vesey, who ran the bachelor lodging-house on
Seventy-Fifth Street, had lost her Nemo. She listened with interest,
those thrilling blue eyes sizing me up in a keen, humorous way.
“'I shouldn't wonder it's hers,' she said.
“Welcoming any pretext for prolonging the discussion, I borrowed the
phone at Gloria's elbow, and, studying the heart-rending curves of her
chin and cheek and throat, I called up Mrs. Vesey and told her I thought
I had found her pet. Mrs. Vesey hurried round to the restaurant,
and swept up the vagabond Nemo with cries of joy into her lean and
affectionate bosom. Nemo purred, and I escorted Mrs. Vesey home,
recapitulating in my mind the perfect contours of the girl's heavenly
form. My enthusiasm was even such that when the other men came in I
could not refrain from telling them all about her. I saw that I had made
a mistake, for instantly Blackmore swore he would get her to sit for
him.
“Of course, from that time on, the Physical Culture Chophouse became the
nightly haunt of our little party. The other men had seen it many times,
but the vegetarian threats in the window had frightened them away. But
now, none of us dared to be absent very many dinners, for fear the
rest would gain some advantage with the girl. I cannot give you any
conception of the humorous glamour of that time unless I insist that she
was the most superbly luscious thing I have ever glimpsed; and one sees
a good many covetable creatures on the streets of New York. Some of them
said she was cold; that in spite of all the nutritious algebra printed
on old Larsen's menus (he used to put down all sorts of preposterous
formulas about starch, and albumen, and phosphorus, and proteids, and so
on)--she was lacking in calories. But I know that when we sat at table,
and she came round to ask if everything was all right, and leaned over
us with her clear eyes, as blue as a special-delivery stamp, and that
cream-white neck, and the faint glimmer of a blue ribbon shining through
the hilly slopes of her blouse-----Oh, well, Ben, we were young, and we
ate red meat for lunch, anyway.
“I guess old man Larsen, who spent most of his time in the kitchen,
encouraged her to kid us along, for he never seemed to mind our open
admiration of his daughter. He probably saw that she was a bigger
business asset than any number of calory charts. Every now and then he
would come out and chin with us, for our party became a nightly event
in the café. Before long we had sampled every kind of vegetarian
combination on the list, and had him busy inventing new ones. We used to
ask him if he had raised a girl like that on nothing but vegetables, and
he would laugh and swear that Gloria had never tasted blood until she
was sixteen. It seemed queer to us that the restaurant wasn't full of
her suitors. I should have thought, with a girl like her, they'd have
been standing in line waiting for a look at her. I suppose that people
who feed on nothing but vegetables are rather puny in such matters.
It's an odd thing, but I've always noticed that most of the people who
frequent these crank physical-culture and dietetic eating-places are a
queer, sick-looking lot--youths with rolling Adam's apples, and sallow,
soup-stained girls. Certainly our little gang, so very jovial and
fancy-free, made a quaint contrast to most of the patrons of the house.
In a few days we felt as if we owned the place, and had the old man
slide two tables together just underneath Gloria's cash register, where
we met every evening for dinner.
“As for Larsen, he was a crank on many subjects but he was no fool.
He was an athletic, erect fellow with a bristling gray moustache and
cropped hair and a forcible gray eye. On the wall was a huge photo
of him in a kind of Sandow pose, with a leopard-skin apron round his
middle, showing terrific knotty biceps and back muscles. Gloria told us
that at one time he had been a physical instructor in the Swedish army,
and the head of a _Turnverein_, or something of that sort. There was a
certain physical and gymnastic candour about him that amused us. He was
awfully proud of Gloria, whom he had raised himself (being a widower)
according to his own hygienic and athletic principles. After we had all
bought his booklets, and promised to take up his system of calisthenics,
he became quite chummy and showed us a lot of photographs of Gloria at
different ages, doing her gymnastic exercises, beginning as a little
plump Venus and ending as a stunning profile in tights. We tried to
maintain an attitude of merely scientific detachment toward those
pictures, admiring them only as connoisseurs of physical culture; but we
ended by begging him for copies, insisting that they would be a useful
guide to us in our own private exercising. But Larsen said he
was keeping them to illustrate a new enlarged edition of his
physical-culture book. We told him that it would sell a million copies,
and I think we all volunteered to act as selling-agents for the book.
Annette Kellermann and Susanna Cocroft, we cried, were scarecrows
compared to Gloria.
“To all this banter Gloria would listen calmly and unembarrassed, for
she had a magnificent unconsciousness of her own superb allure. We would
each try to get a moment alone with her to describe the exercises we
were taking, and to ask her advice about our muscular development.
I remember that Blackmore, after secret practice that we had not
suspected, took the wind out of our sails one evening when some of us
were bragging of our accomplishment in bending and touching the floor
while standing on tiptoe. He jumped up and caught hold of the lintel of
the doorway, and chinned himself on it a dozen times or so. We were
all crestfallen by this feat until Gloria came forward--all the other
customers had gone home--and did the same thing about twenty times. She
went back to her counter with a heavenly flush of pride, while Blackmore
dashed to a table and did a little sketch of her from memory, with the
lovely lines of her figure silhouetted against the doorway.
“But it was I who was first to think of the subtlest compliment that any
one could pay her, which was to ask the privilege of feeling her biceps.
And what an arm she had! Not a great, fleshy, flabby washerwoman's
limb, but the rippling marble of a Greek statue brought to warm life!
Blackmore used to sit at meal-times neglecting his protose steak and
making sketches of her while she wasn't looking. The best I could do was
write verses about her. And while she played no favourites, I think
she really gave me a little the inside track, because I talked physical
culture with her more seriously than the others, who tried to make love
to her a little too baldly.
“By this time she had us all doing calisthenics. The creaky floors of
Mrs. Vesey's house used to resound night and morning with the agonies
of our gymnastics. There was one exercise that Gloria told us she found
particularly helpful. It was to lie down with the feet under a bureau or
any other heavy piece of furniture, extend the arms behind the head, and
then raise and lower the body a hundred times, pivoting from the waist.
This was only one of fifty or more laborious accomplishments that we
undertook for the sake of our goddess. No woman was ever wooed with
more honest pangs, or with more repeated genuflections. As we lay on
the floor before going to bed, raising our legs in the air two hundred
times, or groaned in some sinew-cracking, twisting contortion devised
by the pitiless Swede, it was the vision of Gloria's beauty of snow and
rose that gave us courage. If any passer-by ever looked up at the front
of Mrs. Vesey's house in the early mornings, he must have been startled
to see a white figure near every window, furiously going through the
Swedish manual. One of us, we fondly thought, would some day spend a
healthy Swedish honeymoon performing these motions in ecstatic company
with Gloria; and we did not want to be shamed by her incomparable
perfection. If she worshipped bodily symmetry, our goal was nothing
less. We wanted to be lithe, supple, very panthers of elasticity and
grace. The evening I was able to stand on one leg in the restaurant and
proudly raise my other foot to touch a gas-jet some six feet from the
floor, I felt that Gloria might some day be mine.”
Dove paused again, and seemed to fall into a reminiscent reverie.
Unconsciously he stiffly extended one leg in front of him, and I divined
that he was inwardly rehearsing that act of calisthenic triumph.
“By gracious!” he said, “I've never forgotten the night I got her
father's permission to take her to some gymnastic tournament, or
something of that sort, down at Madison Square Garden. How annoyed the
other men were when they went to the chop-house that night for their
evening penance of lentils, and found Gloria absent! Yes, it was an odd
wooing. I had found the measurements of the Venus de Milo in some Sunday
paper, and that night, when we became quite sentimental, I made her
promise to take her own dimensions, so that we could compare the
proportions of the two. And we had some very happy little jokes, quite
simple ones that she would understand, about her arms being much more
lovely than those of the statue, and that sort of thing. How deliciously
she blushed the next day when she gave me her list of measurements,
written out on a sheet of paper. Of course, I pretended not to
understand which was which. I wrote a little poem about them.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that you were getting on very well. What was
the trouble? You didn't marry her, did you?”
“Old man Larsen,” he continued, gravely, “had a number of other hobbies
besides vegetarianism and physical culture. He was a mechanical
genius in his way. I remember once, after we had expressed exaggerated
admiration of some atrocious compound of lentils and nuts and
fruit, Gloria took us through the kitchen to show us an ingenious
sandwich-making machine her father had contrived. You fed in loaves of
pumpernickel bread and pats of nut butter on one side, hard-boiled eggs
and lettuce and dressing on the other, and out came egg-salad sandwiches
through a slot, as neat as you could want to see. But the best of his
stunts was a sort of miniature vacuum cleaner which the waitresses used
for taking the crumbs off the tables. You've seen those little hot-air
pistols they use at swell shoe-shining stands to dry the liquid cleanser
off your shoes before they put on the polishing paste? Well, Larsen's
decrumbing machine, as we used to call it, looked rather like those. You
screwed a plug into an electric light socket, ran the little gun over
the table, and in a jiffy it sucked up crumbs and cigarette ashes and
spilled lentils and matches, and left the cloth neat. Larsen was so
proud of it he said he was going to patent it.
“I never cared so very much for the old man, he was a little too
eccentric; and I began to think, after a while, that he used his
daughter a little too crudely as a business bait; but he was full of
ideas. He had a big motor-truck that he used to cruise around town,
visiting the markets himself, to get the pick of the vegetables; and he
was always tinkering with that truck, planning new mechanical tricks of
some kind. He had an insatiable curiosity, too. He used to sit down
at the table with us sometimes, late in the evening, and ask about our
work, and where we lived, and what Mrs. Vesey was like, and what time of
day we were home, and all sorts of fool questions like that.
“Well, the time went on, and it began to be cold weather. I noticed this
sooner than the other fellows, I think, because whereas most of them
went to offices during the daytime, I stayed home at Mrs. Vesey's,
trying to write in my narrow coop of a top bedroom. You know how
depressing an instrument a typewriter is when your hands are cold. I
haven't forgotten some dreary vigils I had up there, struggling to write
short stories. Sometimes I used to give it up weakly, and go round to
Larsen's, where it was always warm and cozy, to drink herb coffee and
eat those brittle Swedish biscuits and chat with Gloria. I used to
complain to her about the cold in my room, and she would laugh and say
that I just ought to try a winter in Sweden.
“'Swedish exercises,' she would say. 'That's the thing to stir up your
blood! They'll keep you warm.'
“And then, in her enchanting way, she would tell me a new one, and if
there were no customers (as there generally weren't in the middle of
the afternoon) she would illustrate how it should be done. Sometimes she
would even allow me what she called a Swedish kiss--a very fleeting
and provocative embrace. And then I would show her my new perfection in
doing the backward stoop or some such muscular oddity, and return to my
cold citadel.
“But in spite of the fact that we were all busy much of the time going
through our manual of exercises, presently the chill of Mrs. Vesey's
lodgings became severe. Mrs. Vesey was a rather obstinate and frugal old
dear, and she herself dwelt down in the kitchen, where her big gas-range
kept her comfortable. When we complained of the cold, she had all sorts
of excuses for postponing lighting the furnace. There was a big coal
strike that year, and she was quite right in suspecting that once her
present supply was exhausted it would be very hard to get more. Also,
she said, her furnace man had quit, but she was hunting for another. On
one pretext or another, she kept on putting us off, until finally it was
mid-November, and we were doing our exercises in rooms where our breath
showed like clouds of fog. And then one day Mrs. Vesey came up in great
glee to say that a coal man had called that very morning, of his own
accord, and had offered to give her five tons. She had promptly snapped
at the chance, and he had put the coal in the cellar; so we should have
heat the very next day, when the new furnace man was expected.
“Naturally we were all cheered by this good news. We sped round to
Larsen's restaurant in high spirits, and adored our divinity with even
more than usual abandon.
“'Now my fingers will be warm again, Gloria,' I said, 'I'll be able to
write some more poems about you.'
“'Yes,' cried Blackmore, 'and now it will be warm enough for you to
come and pose for me in my lovely attic at Mrs. Vesey's. If you had come
before, I should have called my painting “The Chilblain Venus.”'
“'Silly boys!' said Gloria, with that delicious, soft Swedish accent
which I can't even try to imitate. 'You are hot-blooded enough as it is.
You don't need all that warming up. Look at us vegetarians; you make fun
of us, but our lentils keep our blood circulating. Try Brussels sprouts;
they are full of calories.'
“'Ah!' we shouted. 'But you seem to keep this place warm enough.'
“Old Larsen, who passed through the room just then, broke in crossly:
“'We have to, for the sake of the customers,' he said. 'Gloria, stop
fooling with the gentlemen and attend to business.' He seemed in a bad
humour that night.
“The next day must have been some sort of holiday, for I know we all
went out to see a football game. We got back about supper-time and found
the house perishing chill. With shouts and protests we called Mrs. Vesey
from her kitchen, but she explained that the expected furnace man had
not turned up.
“'Well,' said Blackmore, 'this can't go on any longer, Mrs. Vesey. I'll
go down and light the fire myself. We'll take turns and keep it going
till your man comes.'
“He ran down to the basement, but a minute later he was up again.
“'Mrs. Vesey,' he shouted, 'what is all this nonsense? Are you kidding
us? There's no coal down there at all!'
“'No coal?' she exclaimed. 'Why, there was a good three or four tons,
and the man said he put five tons more in yesterday. I heard him do
it--never heard such a noise in my life. I paid him ten dollars a ton.
“'Impossible!' Blackmore cried, angrily. 'There's not enough down there
to fry Nemo with. About three shovelfuls, that's all. What is this--some
kind of a game to freeze us out?'
“Mrs. Vesey wrung her hands, and we all ran down to the cellar. It was
as Blackmore had said. The bins were empty, save for a few lumps.”
Dove gazed down thoughtfully at the coal office on the pier below us,
where a wagon was loading.
“On a mellow afternoon like this,” he said, “coal doesn't seem quite
so pressing a concern; but I tell you, in a bleak boarding-house about
Thanksgiving time, with no heat of any sort available but a gas-jet, it
is a different matter. We were an angry and puzzled lot that night. Mrs.
Vesey protested so pitifully that there had been coal in the bins only
the day before, and asserted so repeatedly that she had heard the
noise of the new load going in, that we could not help believe her. She
promised to call up her coal man the first thing the next morning, and
we also agreed to go round and visit him in a body, to add our personal
appeals; but how on earth several tons of coal could have been stolen
out of the cellar without any one hearing it seemed to us a mystery.
“The next morning we visited the coal-dealer _en masse_--in a coalition,
as Blackmore said--and by spirited imprecation and paying cash we
extracted a promise to have a couple of tons sent at once. His office
was some distance up on Columbus Avenue, and on our way back we passed
through one of the cross-streets--Eighty-Third, I think it was, because
one of us wanted to get some stamps at the post-office. As we came
along, we heard the rumble of coal passing down a chute, and saw a
coal-wagon in the distance.
“'There's somebody in luck,' said one.
“'But what an odd-looking coal-wagon,' said another, as we approached.
“It was a large motor-truck with a hinged metal top, something like a
huge street-cleaning cart. The engine was throbbing, and the coal was
roaring noisily in the chute, which led down into the cellar window of
a brownstone dwelling. The chute, instead of being the customary shallow
trough, was a large circular pipe, so that we could not actually see the
coal pouring downward, but only hear it crashing through the metal
tube. That struck me as a good idea for preventing the coal-dust from
spreading over everything near.
“But we were all interested not only in the odd appearance of the truck,
but in the extraordinary din it caused. Delivering coal is never a
silent job, naturally; but this racket was really terrific. The driver
seemed to have left his engine running full tilt, and the whole truck
quivered and shook with the power. We stood amazed at the furious rattle
and uproar. The noise was too great for spoken words to be caught, but I
pointed out the circular chute to Blackmore. It was made in telescoping
sections, to slide into itself, and was an interesting novelty.
“It occurred to me that this dealer, whoever he might be--there was no
name on the truck--could perhaps let Mrs. Vesey have some coal. We could
see the feet of the driver, who was standing on the other side of the
truck, and I went round to speak to him. It was a stocky man with a
flowing bush of black beard and wearing a suit of very grimy overalls.
At the top of my voice I yelled:
“'Got any coal to sell?'
“He shook his head in a surly way and turned his back on me.
“I could not tell from his gesture whether he had answered my question,
or was indicating that he could not hear; so I shouted at him again.
“At the same time I noticed Blackmore and the others gathered at the
cellar window, looking in curiously over the slope of the delivery
pipe. The coal man seized a lever and shut off his power, for the engine
stopped, and after a little sliding and rumbling in the tube the racket
ceased. He picked up a shovel and ran to the group by the chute.
“'Here, let that alone!' he cried, angrily. “'Keep your shirt on,' said
Blackmore. 'We're just looking at this outfit of yours. It makes a devil
of a noise. Regular public nuisance, I call it!' '“It's none of your
affair,' said the man. 'Keep out of what don't concern you.'
“He returned to his truck, pulled a handle, and the roar of the coal
began again. I was standing near him, while the others were on the
opposite side of the wagon, so I was the only one to see a curious
thing. There were several revolving cogwheels at the side of the truck,
and in his irritation, I suppose the driver stooped over them too
closely. At any rate, his beard caught in the cogs, and I gave a cry of
dismay, thinking he would be cruelly hurt. To my amazement the beard was
whisked quickly from his face, and I saw that he was Larsen. He looked
at me with an expression of alarm and anger that was laughable.
“'When did you turn coal-dealer?' I shouted. But at this moment
Blackmore, who was still bending over the chute, sprang up and ran round
to us. He, too, was staggered to see the identity of the driver. He
dragged me a few paces away and shouted in my ear.
“'Damn queer business,' he said. 'That coal isn't going in. It's coming
out!'
“'What the deuce do you mean?' I said.
“'Just what I say. He's got some sort of a suction engine in that truck,
a kind of big vacuum cleaner, and he's simply siphoning the coal out of
somebody's cellar.'
“Larsen ran at us with a big spanner in his hand, but we grappled with
him, and while three of us held him the others examined the truck. It
was perfectly true. By an ingenious gasoline pump installed in the wagon
he was drawing out the coal. Looking into the top of the wagon through a
little glass peephole, we could see the black nuggets coming swiftly up
out of the chute. By this time a little crowd had gathered, and the lady
of the house ran out to see what was happening. I think she thought we
were trying to seduce her coal supply. She explained angrily to us that
Larsen had driven up to her door half an hour before and offered to sell
her several tons of coal. Her cellar, like everyone else's, was none too
well stocked, and she had been delighted to agree.
“While we were wondering just what to do, Larsen, who had been glaring
wickedly at us, broke away from our grasp and reversed his machinery
so that the coal began to thunder back honestly into the cellar. The
puzzled woman, not suspecting anything wrong, went back indoors after we
made some impromptu explanation for the fuss. Larsen's amputated black
beard whirled round and round, still adhering to the rolling cogs, as
we watched, while he stood by sullenly. We walked away down the block
to hold a council, and also to let the group of mystified onlookers
disperse. Of course, our first thought was to go for the police; but
then we thought of Gloria.”
Dove sighed, and tapped out his long-expired pipe.
“Well,” he said, “that's pretty near the end of the story. I'm afraid
association with Beauty blunts the sense of rectitude. No, we didn't do
anything about it, except see to it that Larsen put back that coal
in the cellar. I suppose we were really accessory to a misdemeanour,
because we gathered from some small paragraphs we saw in the papers that
a number of householders in that neighbourhood had been mysteriously
robbed of their coal. To tell you the truth, we couldn't bear the
thought of taking any action that would ruin Gloria's happiness. What
were a few tons of black, filthy coal compared to that serene and
golden-white beauty of hers, like some princess in a Norse fairy tale?
The old man was a lunatic, we supposed, and would come to grief sooner
or later. We were not going to be the ones to bring humiliation upon
him.
“We walked back, stricken, to our lodgings; and as we passed the
Physical Culture Chophouse we looked furtively through the window. We
could see Gloria laying the tables for lunch, the tall, strong curve
of her back as she leaned over, her capable white hands smoothing the
cloth. None of us had the heart to go in.
“We clubbed together to pay for Mrs. Vesey's new supply of coal,
although it broke our pocket-books for the next month or so. We were
too hard up, then, to go on eating at Larsen's. We had to patronize a
lunch-counter instead, where we gloomed over frankfurters and beans
and quarrelled with one another, in sheer misery, as to which one of us
Gloria had really liked best. We never saw her again, because about a
week later the Larsen café shut up, and they disappeared.”
“And the calisthenics?” I said. “Did you go on with those?”
“No,” he said; “we were too melancholy. Also, as soon as Mrs. Vesey's
coal arrived, we didn't need to. That was the terrible part of it. You
see, Gloria had simply egged us on to do those exercises so that we
wouldn't feel the chill when her father stole the coal. I'm afraid she
was as guilty as he was, but we tried to convince ourselves that she was
only a tool.”
We got up from our bench, for the afternoon air was growing bleak.
“Now you know,” he said, “why that coal-dump down there reminded me of
Gloria. Well, it was wonderful while it lasted--until, as you might say,
the serpent drove us out of our Garden of Sweden.”