“In this kind of weather,” said the young man, “charity avails itself

of the proverb, and both begins and ends at home.”

And the Preacher and his vehement lieutenant struck up a last hymn of

petition to Providence and man. Those of the Bed Liners whose windpipes

still registered above 32 degrees hopelessly and tunelessly joined in.

In the middle of the second verse Thomas saw a sturdy girl with

wind-tossed drapery battling against the breeze and coming straight

toward him from the opposite sidewalk. “Annie!” he yelled, and ran

toward her.

“You fool, you fool!” she cried, weeping and laughing, and hanging upon

his neck, “why did you do it?”

“The Stuff,” explained Thomas briefly. “You know. But subsequently nit.

Not a drop.” He led her to the curb. “How did you happen to see me?”

“I came to find you,” said Annie, holding tight to his sleeve. “Oh, you

big fool! Professor Cherubusco told us that we might find you here.”

“Professor Ch–––– Don’t know the guy. What saloon does he work in?”

“He’s a clairvoyant, Thomas; the greatest in the world. He found you

with the Chaldean telescope, he said.”

“He’s a liar,” said Thomas. “I never had it. He never saw me have

anybody’s telescope.”

“And he said you came in a chariot with five wheels or something.”

“Annie,” said Thoms solicitously, “you’re giving me the wheels now. If

I had a chariot I’d have gone to bed in it long ago. And without any

singing and preaching for a nightcap, either.”

“Listen, you big fool. The Missis says she’ll take you back. I begged

her to. But you must behave. And you can go up to the house to-night;

and your old room over the stable is ready.”

“Great!” said Thomas earnestly. “You are It, Annie. But when did these

stunts happen?”

“To-night at Professor Cherubusco’s. He sent his automobile for the

Missis, and she took me along. I’ve been there with her before.”

“What’s the professor’s line?”

“He’s a clearvoyant and a witch. The Missis consults him. He knows

everything. But he hasn’t done the Missis any good yet, though she’s

paid him hundreds of dollars. But he told us that the stars told him we

could find you here.”

“What’s the old lady want this cherry-buster to do?”

“That’s a family secret,” said Annie. “And now you’ve asked enough

questions. Come on home, you big fool.”

They had moved but a little way up the street when Thomas stopped.

“Got any dough with you, Annie?” he asked.

Annie looked at him sharply.

“Oh, I know what that look means,” said Thomas. “You’re wrong. Not

another drop. But there’s a guy that was standing next to me in the bed

line over there that’s in bad shape. He’s the right kind, and he’s got

wives or kids or something, and he’s on the sick list. No booze. If you

could dig up half a dollar for him so he could get a decent bed I’d

like it.”

Annie’s fingers began to wiggle in her purse.

“Sure, I’ve got money,” said she. “Lots of it. Twelve dollars.” And

then she added, with woman’s ineradicable suspicion of vicarious

benevolence: “Bring him here and let me see him first.”

Thomas went on his mission. The wan Bed Liner came readily enough. As

the two drew near, Annie looked up from her purse and screamed:

“Mr. Walter— Oh—Mr. Walter!

“Is that you, Annie?” said the young man meekly.

“Oh, Mr. Walter!—and the Missis hunting high and low for you!”

“Does mother want to see me?” he asked, with a flush coming out on his

pale cheek.

“She’s been hunting for you high and low. Sure, she wants to see you.

She wants you to come home. She’s tried police and morgues and lawyers

and advertising and detectives and rewards and everything. And then she

took up clearvoyants. You’ll go right home, won’t you, Mr. Walter?”

“Gladly, if she wants me,” said the young man. “Three years is a long

time. I suppose I’ll have to walk up, though, unless the street cars

are giving free rides. I used to walk and beat that old plug team of

bays we used to drive to the carriage. Have they got them yet?”

“They have,” said Thomas, feelingly. “And they’ll have ’em ten years

from now. The life of the royal elephantibus truckhorseibus is one

hundred and forty-nine years. I’m the coachman. Just got my

reappointment five minutes ago. Let’s all ride up in a surface car—that

is—er—if Annie will pay the fares.”

On the Broadway car Annie handed each one of the prodigals a nickel to

pay the conductor.

“Seems to me you are mighty reckless the way you throw large sums of

money around,” said Thomas sarcastically.

“In that purse,” said Annie decidedly, “is exactly $11.85. I shall take

every cent of it to-morrow and give it to professor Cherubusco, the

greatest man in the world.”

“Well,” said Thomas, “I guess he must be a pretty fly guy to pipe off

things the way he does. I’m glad his spooks told him where you could

find me. If you’ll give me his address, some day I’ll go up there,

myself, and shake his hand.”

Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and thoughtfully felt

an abrasion or two on his knees and his elbows.

“Say, Annie,” said he confidentially, maybe it’s one of the last dreams

of booze, but I’ve a kind of a recollection of riding in an automobile

with a swell guy that took me to a house full of eagles and arc lights.

He fed me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked me down the front

steps. If it was the _d t’s_, why am I so sore?”

“Shut up, you fool,” said Annie.

“If I could find that funny guy’s house,” said Thomas, in conclusion,

“I’d go up there some day and punch his nose for him.”

VI

THE POET AND THE PEASANT

The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communion

with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor.

It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the

song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.

When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a beefsteak

dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment:

“Too artificial.”

Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, and

swallowed indignation with slippery forkfuls.

And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a

well-arrived writer of fiction—a man who had trod on asphalt all his

life, and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes except with

sensations of disgust from the windows of express trains.

Conant wrote a poem and called it “The Doe and the Brook.” It was a

fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet who had

strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the florist’s windows, and whose

sole ornithological discussion had been carried on with a waiter.

Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to the same editor.

But this has very little to do with the story.

Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next

morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped

slowly up Forty-second Street.

The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip and

hair the exact color of the little orphan’s (afterward discovered to be

the earl’s daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney’s plays. His trousers were

corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his

back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You looked expectantly,

though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its shape inaugurating

the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor.

In his hand was a valise—description of it is an impossible task; a

Boston man would not have carried his lunch and law books to his office

in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay—the rustic’s

letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of

the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the gold-brick men.

Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw the raw

stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall

buildings. At this they ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It

had been done so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see what

Coney “attraction” or brand of chewing gum he might be thus dinning

into his memory. But for the most part he was ignored. Even the

newsboys looked bored when he scampered like a circus clown out of the

way of cabs and street cars.

At Eighth Avenue stood “Bunco Harry,” with his dyed mustache and shiny,

good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be pained at the

sight of an actor overdoing his part. He edged up to the countryman,

who had stopped to open his mouth at a jewelry store window, and shook

his head.

“Too thick, pal,” he said, critically—“too thick by a couple of inches.

I don’t know what your lay is; but you’ve got the properties too thick.

That hay, now—why, they don’t even allow that on Proctor’s circuit any

more.”

“I don’t understand you, mister,” said the green one. “I’m not lookin’

for any circus. I’ve just run down from Ulster County to look at the

town, bein’ that the hayin’s over with. Gosh! but it’s a whopper. I

thought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this here town is five times

as big.”

“Oh, well,” said “Bunco Harry,” raising his eyebrows, “I didn’t mean to

butt in. You don’t have to tell. I thought you ought to tone down a

little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at your graft,

whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a glass of lager beer,” acknowledged the other.

They went to a café frequented by men with smooth faces and shifty

eyes, and sat at their drinks.

“I’m glad I come across you, mister,” said Haylocks. “How’d you like to

play a game or two of seven-up? I’ve got the keerds.”

He fished them out of Noah’s valise—a rare, inimitable deck, greasy

with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields.

“Bunco Harry” laughed loud and briefly.

“Not for me, sport,” he said, firmly. “I don’t go against that make-up

of yours for a cent. But I still say you’ve overdone it. The Reubs

haven’t dressed like that since ’79. I doubt if you could work Brooklyn

for a key-winding watch with that layout.”

“Oh, you needn’t think I ain’t got the money,” boasted Haylocks. He

drew forth a tightly rolled mass of bills as large as a teacup, and

laid it on the table.

“Got that for my share of grandmother’s farm,” he announced. “There’s

$950 in that roll. Thought I’d come to the city and look around for a

likely business to go into.”

“Bunco Harry” took up the roll of money and looked at it with almost

respect in his smiling eyes.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said, critically. “But you’ll never do it in them

clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a straw

hat with a colored band, and talk a good deal about Pittsburg and

freight differentials, and drink sherry for breakfast in order to work

off phony stuff like that.”

“What’s his line?” asked two or three shifty-eyed men of “Bunco Harry”

after Haylocks had gathered up his impugned money and departed.

“The queer, I guess,” said Harry. “Or else he’s one of Jerome’s men. Or

some guy with a new graft. He’s too much hayseed. Maybe that his—I

wonder now—oh, no, it couldn’t have been real money.”

Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he dived

into a dark groggery on a side street and bought beer. At first sight

of him their eyes brightened; but when his insistent and exaggerated

rusticity became apparent their expressions changed to wary suspicion.

Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.

“Keep that a while for me, mister,” he said, chewing at the end of a

virulent claybank cigar. “I’ll be back after I knock around a spell.

And keep your eye on it, for there’s $950 inside of it, though maybe

you wouldn’t think so to look at me.”

Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and Haylocks was

off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back.

“Divvy, Mike,” said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly at one

another.

“Honest, now,” said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. “You

don’t think I’d fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain’t no jay.

One of McAdoo’s come-on squad, I guess. He’s a shine if he made himself

up. There ain’t no parts of the country now where they dress like that

since they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he’s

got nine-fifty in that valise it’s a ninety-eight cent Waterbury that’s

stopped at ten minutes to ten.”

When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he

returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling

the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway

rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest

of the “gags” that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly

impossible, so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish

products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that

he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his

hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so

clamorously rural that even a shell-game man would have put up his peas

and folded his table at the sight of it.

Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once more

exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer one, a

twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.

“Son,” said he, “run somewhere and get this changed for me. I’m mighty

nigh out of chicken feed. I guess you’ll get a nickel if you’ll hurry

up.”

A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy’s face.

“Aw, watchert’ink! G’wan and get yer funny bill changed yerself. Dey

ain’t no farm clothes yer got on. G’wan wit yer stage money.”

On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-house. He saw

Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous.

“Mister,” said the rural one. “I’ve heard of places in this here town

where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card at

keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old Ulster to see

the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on about $9 or $10?

I’m goin’ to have some sport, and then maybe I’ll buy out a business of

some kind.”

The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left

forefinger nail.

“Cheese it, old man,” he murmured, reproachfully. “The Central Office

must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. You

couldn’t get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them Tony

Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has got you beat

a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanical

accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded

halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace.”

Rebuffed once again by the great city that is so swift to detect

artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the curb and presented his thoughts

to hold a conference.

“It’s my clothes,” said he; “durned if it ain’t. They think I’m a

hayseed and won’t have nothin’ to do with me. Nobody never made fun of

this hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks to notice you in

New York you must dress up like they do.”

So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake through their

noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line ecstatically over

the bulge in his inside pocket where reposed a red nubbin of corn with

an even number of rows. And messengers bearing parcels and boxes

streamed to his hotel on Broadway within the lights of Long Acre.

At 9 o’clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk whom Ulster

County would have foresworn. Bright tan were his shoes; his hat the

latest block. His light gray trousers were deeply creased; a gay blue

silk handkerchief flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant English

walking coat. His collar might have graced a laundry window; his blond

hair was trimmed close; the wisp of hay was gone.

For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of a

boulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his evening

pleasures. And then he turned down the gay, bright street with the easy

and graceful tread of a millionaire.

But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes in

the city had enveloped him in their field of vision. A stout man with

gray eyes picked two of his friends with a lift of his eyebrows from

the row of loungers in front of the hotel.

“The juiciest jay I’ve seen in six months,” said the man with gray

eyes. “Come along.”

It was half-past eleven when a man galloped into the West Forty-seventh

Street Police Station with the story of his wrongs.

“Nine hundred and fifty dollars,” he gasped, “all my share of

grandmother’s farm.”

The desk sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue, of Locust

Valley farm, Ulster County, and then began to take descriptions of the

strong-arm gentlemen.

When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he was

received over the head of the office boy into the inner office that is

decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown.

“When I read the first line of ‘The Doe and the Brook,’” said the

editor, “I knew it to be the work of one whose life has been heart to

heart with Nature. The finished art of the line did not blind me to

that fact. To use a somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a wild,

free child of the woods and fields were to don the garb of fashion and

walk down Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man would show.”

“Thanks,” said Conant. “I suppose the check will be round on Thursday,

as usual.”

The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can take your

choice of “Stay on the Farm” or “Don’t Write Poetry.”

VII

THE ROBE OF PEACE

Mysteries follow one another so closely in a great city that the

reading public and the friends of Johnny Bellchambers have ceased to

marvel at his sudden and unexplained disappearance nearly a year ago.

This particular mystery has now been cleared up, but the solution is so

strange and incredible to the mind of the average man that only a

select few who were in close touch with Bellchambers will give it full

credence.

Johnny Bellchambers, as is well known, belonged to the intrinsically

inner circle of the _élite_. Without any of the ostentation of the

fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice by eccentric display of

wealth and show he still was _au fait_ in everything that gave deserved

lustre to his high position in the ranks of society.

Especially did he shine in the matter of dress. In this he was the

despair of imitators. Always correct, exquisitely groomed, and

possessed of an unlimited wardrobe, he was conceded to be the

best-dressed man in New York, and, therefore, in America. There was not

a tailor in Gotham who would not have deemed it a precious boon to have

been granted the privilege of making Bellchambers’ clothes without a

cent of pay. As he wore them, they would have been a priceless

advertisement. Trousers were his especial passion. Here nothing but

perfection would he notice. He would have worn a patch as quickly as he

would have overlooked a wrinkle. He kept a man in his apartments always

busy pressing his ample supply. His friends said that three hours was

the limit of time that he would wear these garments without exchanging.

Bellchambers disappeared very suddenly. For three days his absence

brought no alarm to his friends, and then they began to operate the

usual methods of inquiry. All of them failed. He had left absolutely no

trace behind. Then the search for a motive was instituted, but none was

found. He had no enemies, he had no debts, there was no woman. There

were several thousand dollars in his bank to his credit. He had never

showed any tendency toward mental eccentricity; in fact, he was of a

particularly calm and well-balanced temperament. Every means of tracing

the vanished man was made use of, but without avail. It was one of

those cases—more numerous in late years—where men seem to have gone out

like the flame of a candle, leaving not even a trail of smoke as a

witness.

In May, Tom Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam, two of Bellchambers’ old

friends, went for a little run on the other side. While pottering

around in Italy and Switzerland, they happened, one day, to hear of a

monastery in the Swiss Alps that promised something outside of the

ordinary tourist-beguiling attractions. The monastery was almost

inaccessible to the average sightseer, being on an extremely rugged and

precipitous spur of the mountains. The attractions it possessed but did

not advertise were, first, an exclusive and divine cordial made by the

monks that was said to far surpass benedictine and chartreuse. Next a

huge brass bell so purely and accurately cast that it had not ceased

sounding since it was first rung three hundred years ago. Finally, it

was asserted that no Englishman had ever set foot within its walls.

Eyres and Gilliam decided that these three reports called for

investigation.

It took them two days with the aid of two guides to reach the monastery

of St. Gondrau. It stood upon a frozen, wind-swept crag with the snow

piled about it in treacherous, drifting masses. They were hospitably

received by the brothers whose duty it was to entertain the infrequent

guest. They drank of the precious cordial, finding it rarely potent and

reviving. They listened to the great, ever-echoing bell, and learned

that they were pioneer travelers, in those gray stone walls, over the

Englishman whose restless feet have trodden nearly every corner of the

earth.

At three o’clock on the afternoon they arrived, the two young

Gothamites stood with good Brother Cristofer in the great, cold hallway

of the monastery to watch the monks march past on their way to the

refectory. They came slowly, pacing by twos, with their heads bowed,

treading noiselessly with sandaled feet upon the rough stone flags. As

the procession slowly filed past, Eyres suddenly gripped Gilliam by the

arm. “Look,” he whispered, eagerly, “at the one just opposite you

now—the one on this side, with his hand at his waist—if that isn’t

Johnny Bellchambers then I never saw him!”

Gilliam saw and recognized the lost glass of fashion.

“What the deuce,” said he, wonderingly, “is old Bell doing here? Tommy,

it surely can’t be he! Never heard of Bell having a turn for the

religious. Fact is, I’ve heard him say things when a four-in-hand

didn’t seem to tie up just right that would bring him up for

court-martial before any church.”

“It’s Bell, without a doubt,” said Eyres, firmly, “or I’m pretty badly

in need of an oculist. But think of Johnny Bellchambers, the Royal High

Chancellor of swell togs and the Mahatma of pink teas, up here in cold

storage doing penance in a snuff-colored bathrobe! I can’t get it

straight in my mind. Let’s ask the jolly old boy that’s doing the

honors.”

Brother Cristofer was appealed to for information. By that time the

monks had passed into the refectory. He could not tell to which one

they referred. Bellchambers? Ah, the brothers of St. Gondrau abandoned

their worldly names when they took the vows. Did the gentlemen wish to

speak with one of the brothers? If they would come to the refectory and

indicate the one they wished to see, the reverend abbot in authority

would, doubtless, permit it.

Eyres and Gilliam went into the dining hall and pointed out to Brother

Cristofer the man they had seen. Yes, it was Johnny Bellchambers. They

saw his face plainly now, as he sat among the dingy brothers, never

looking up, eating broth from a coarse, brown bowl.

Permission to speak to one of the brothers was granted to the two

travelers by the abbot, and they waited in a reception room for him to

come. When he did come, treading softly in his sandals, both Eyres and

Gilliam looked at him in perplexity and astonishment. It was Johnny

Bellchambers, but he had a different look. Upon his smooth-shaven face

was an expression of ineffable peace, of rapturous attainment, of

perfect and complete happiness. His form was proudly erect, his eyes

shone with a serene and gracious light. He was as neat and well-groomed

as in the old New York days, but how differently was he clad! Now he

seemed clothed in but a single garment—a long robe of rough brown

cloth, gathered by a cord at the waist, and falling in straight, loose

folds nearly to his feet. He shook hands with his visitors with his old

ease and grace of manner. If there was any embarrassment in that

meeting it was not manifested by Johnny Bellchambers. The room had no

seats; they stood to converse.

“Glad to see you, old man,” said Eyres, somewhat awkwardly. “Wasn’t

expecting to find you up here. Not a bad idea though, after all.

Society’s an awful sham. Must be a relief to shake the giddy whirl and

retire to—er—contemplation and—er—prayer and hymns, and those things.

“Oh, cut that, Tommy,” said Bellchambers, cheerfully. “Don’t be afraid

that I’ll pass around the plate. I go through these thing-um-bobs with

the rest of these old boys because they are the rules. I’m Brother

Ambrose here, you know. I’m given just ten minutes to talk to you

fellows. That’s rather a new design in waistcoats you have on, isn’t

it, Gilliam? Are they wearing those things on Broadway now?”

“It’s the same old Johnny,” said Gilliam, joyfully. “What the devil—I

mean why— Oh, confound it! what did you do it for, old man?”

“Peel the bathrobe,” pleaded Eyres, almost tearfully, “and go back with

us. The old crowd’ll go wild to see you. This isn’t in your line, Bell.

I know half a dozen girls that wore the willow on the quiet when you

shook us in that unaccountable way. Hand in your resignation, or get a

dispensation, or whatever you have to do to get a release from this ice

factory. You’ll get catarrh here, Johnny—and— My God! you haven’t any

socks on!”

Bellchambers looked down at his sandaled feet and smiled.

“You fellows don’t understand,” he said, soothingly. “It’s nice of you

to want me to go back, but the old life will never know me again. I

have reached here the goal of all my ambitions. I am entirely happy and

contented. Here I shall remain for the remainder of my days. You see

this robe that I wear?” Bellchambers caressingly touched the

straight-hanging garment: “At last I have found something that will not

bag at the knees. I have attained—”

At that moment the deep boom of the great brass bell reverberated

through the monastery. It must have been a summons to immediate

devotions, for Brother Ambrose bowed his head, turned and left the

chamber without another word. A slight wave of his hand as he passed

through the stone doorway seemed to say a farewell to his old friends.

They left the monastery without seeing him again.

And this is the story that Tommy Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam brought

back with them from their latest European tour.

VIII

THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT

The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a

conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the

Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from

speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden

toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to

a pulp.

Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he comes to New York for a

rest. He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and Thou in the

wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure to him as

sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft. “Give me,”

says Pogue, “a big city for my vacation. Especially New York. I’m not

much fond of New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only place on the

globe where I don’t find any.”

While in the metropolis Pogue can always be found at one of two places.

One is a little second-hand book-shop on Fourth Avenue, where he reads

books about his hobbies, Mahometanism and taxidermy. I found him at the

other—his hall bedroom in Eighteenth Street—where he sat in his

stocking feet trying to pluck “The Banks of the Wabash” out of a small

zither. Four years he has practised this tune without arriving near

enough to cast the longest trout line to the water’s edge. On the

dresser lay a blued-steel Colt’s forty-five and a tight roll of tens

and twenties large enough around to belong to the spring

rattlesnake-story class. A chambermaid with a room-cleaning air

fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized

by the stocking feet, aghast at the Colt’s, yet powerless, with her

metropolitan instincts, to remove herself beyond the magic influence of

the yellow-hued roll.

I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No one could be franker

or more candid in his conversation. Beside his expression the cry of

Henry James for lacteal nourishment at the age of one month would have

seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram. He told me stories of his profession

with pride, for he considered it an art. And I was curious enough to

ask him whether he had known any women who followed it.

“Ladies?” said Pogue, with Western chivalry. “Well, not to any great

extent. They don’t amount to much in special lines of graft, because

they’re all so busy in general lines. What? Why, they have to. Who’s

got the money in the world? The men. Did you ever know a man to give a

woman a dollar without any consideration? A man will shell out his dust

to another man free and easy and gratis. But if he drops a penny in one

of the machines run by the Madam Eve’s Daughters’ Amalgamated

Association and the pineapple chewing gum don’t fall out when he pulls

the lever you can hear him kick to the superintendent four blocks away.

Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go up against. He’s the

low-grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay. Two times

out of five she’s salted. She can’t put in crushers and costly

machinery. He’d notice ’em and be onto the game. They have to pan out

what they get, and it hurts their tender hands. Some of ’em are natural

sluice troughs and can carry out $1,000 to the ton. The dry-eyed ones

have to depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo

walk, cowhide whips, ability to cook, sentimental juries,

conversational powers, silk underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous

letters, violet sachet powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms,

carbolic acid, moonlight, cold cream and the evening newspapers.”

“You are outrageous, Ferg,” I said. “Surely there is none of this

‘graft’ as you call it, in a perfect and harmonious matrimonial union!”

“Well,” said Pogue, “nothing that would justify you every time in

calling Police Headquarters and ordering out the reserves and a

vaudeville manager on a dead run. But it’s this way: Suppose you’re a

Fifth Avenue millionaire, soaring high, on the right side of copper and

cappers.

“You come home at night and bring a $9,000,000 diamond brooch to the

lady who’s staked you for a claim. You hand it over. She says, ‘Oh,

George!’ and looks to see if it’s backed. She comes up and kisses you.

You’ve waited for it. You get it. All right. It’s graft.

“But I’m telling you about Artemisia Blye. She was from Kansas and she

suggested corn in all of its phases. Her hair was as yellow as the

silk; her form was as tall and graceful as a stalk in the low grounds

during a wet summer; her eyes were as big and startling as bunions, and

green was her favorite color.

“On my last trip into the cool recesses of your sequestered city I met

a human named Vaucross. He was worth—that is, he had a million. He told

me he was in business on the street. ‘A sidewalk merchant?’ says I,

sarcastic. ‘Exactly,’ says he, ‘Senior partner of a paving concern.’

“I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him on Broadway one

night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place. He was all silk

hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him

you would have only looked yourself in the face. I looked like a cross

between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster. I was out of luck. I had—but

let me lay my eyes on that dealer again.

“Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few minutes and then he took me to

a high-toned restaurant to eat dinner. There was music, and then some

Beethoven, and Bordelaise sauce, and cussing in French, and

frangipangi, and some hauteur and cigarettes. When I am flush I know

them places.

“I declare, I must have looked as bad as a magazine artist sitting

there without any money and my hair all rumpled like I was booked to

read a chapter from ‘Elsie’s School Days’ at a Brooklyn Bohemian

smoker. But Vaucross treated me like a bear hunter’s guide. He wasn’t

afraid of hurting the waiter’s feelings.

“‘Mr. Pogue,’ he explains to me, ‘I am using you.’

“‘Go on,’ says I; ‘I hope you don’t wake up.’

“And then he tells me, you know, the kind of man he was. He was a New

Yorker. His whole ambition was to be noticed. He wanted to be

conspicuous. He wanted people to point him out and bow to him, and tell

others who he was. He said it had been the desire of his life always.

He didn’t have but a million, so he couldn’t attract attention by

spending money. He said he tried to get into public notice one time by

planting a little public square on the east side with garlic for free

use of the poor; but Carnegie heard of it, and covered it over at once

with a library in the Gaelic language. Three times he had jumped in the

way of automobiles; but the only result was five broken ribs and a

notice in the papers that an unknown man, five feet ten, with four

amalgam-filled teeth, supposed to be the last of the famous Red Leary

gang had been run over.

“‘Ever try the reporters,’ I asked him.

“‘Last month,’ says Mr. Vaucross, ‘my expenditure for lunches to

reporters was $124.80.’

“‘Get anything out of that?’ I asks.

“‘That reminds me,’ says he; ‘add $8.50 for pepsin. Yes, I got

indigestion.’

“‘How am I supposed to push along your scramble for prominence?’ I

inquires. ‘Contrast?’

“‘Something of that sort to-night,’ says Vaucross. ‘It grieves me; but

I am forced to resort to eccentricity.’ And here he drops his napkin in

his soup and rises up and bows to a gent who is devastating a potato

under a palm across the room.

“‘The Police Commissioner,’ says my climber, gratified. ‘Friend’, says

I, in a hurry, ‘have ambitions but don’t kick a rung out of your

ladder. When you use me as a stepping stone to salute the police you

spoil my appetite on the grounds that I may be degraded and

incriminated. Be thoughtful.’

“At the Quaker City squab en casserole the idea about Artemisia Blye

comes to me.

“‘Suppose I can manage to get you in the papers,’ says I—‘a column or

two every day in all of ’em and your picture in most of ’em for a week.

How much would it be worth to you?’

“‘Ten thousand dollars,’ says Vaucross, warm in a minute. ‘But no

murder,’ says he; ‘and I won’t wear pink pants at a cotillon.’

“‘I wouldn’t ask you to,’ says I. ‘This is honorable, stylish and

uneffeminate. Tell the waiter to bring a demi tasse and some other

beans, and I will disclose to you the opus moderandi.’

“We closed the deal an hour later in the rococo rouge et noise room. I

telegraphed that night to Miss Artemisia in Salina. She took a couple

of photographs and an autograph letter to an elder in the Fourth

Presbyterian Church in the morning, and got some transportation and

$80. She stopped in Topeka long enough to trade a flashlight interior

and a valentine to the vice-president of a trust company for a mileage

book and a package of five-dollar notes with $250 scrawled on the band.

“The fifth evening after she got my wire she was waiting, all

décolletée and dressed up, for me and Vaucross to take her to dinner in

one of these New York feminine apartment houses where a man can’t get

in unless he plays bezique and smokes depilatory powder cigarettes.

“‘She’s a stunner,’ says Vaucross when he saw her. ‘They’ll give her a

two-column cut sure.’

“This was the scheme the three of us concocted. It was business

straight through. Vaucross was to rush Miss Blye with all the style and

display and emotion he could for a month. Of course, that amounted to

nothing as far as his ambitions were concerned. The sight of a man in a

white tie and patent leather pumps pouring greenbacks through the large

end of a cornucopia to purchase nutriment and heartsease for tall,

willowy blondes in New York is as common a sight as blue turtles in

delirium tremens. But he was to write her love letters—the worst kind

of love letters, such as your wife publishes after you are dead—every

day. At the end of the month he was to drop her, and she would bring

suit for $100,000 for breach of promise.

“Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she won the suit that was all;

and if she lost she was to get it anyhow. There was a signed contract

to that effect.

“Sometimes they had me out with ’em, but not often. I couldn’t keep up

to their style. She used to pull out his notes and criticize them like

bills of lading.

“‘Say, you!’ she’d say. ‘What do you call this—letter to a Hardware

Merchant from His Nephew on Learning that His Aunt Has Nettlerash? You

Eastern duffers know as much about writing love letters as a Kansas

grasshopper does about tugboats. “My dear Miss Blye!”—wouldn’t that put

pink icing and a little red sugar bird on your bridal cake? How long do

you expect to hold an audience in a court-room with that kind of stuff?

You want to get down to business, and call me “Tweedlums Babe” and

“Honeysuckle,” and sign yourself “Mama’s Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy Boy”

if you want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs.

Get sappy.’

“After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible tabasco. His notes

read like something or other in the original. I could see a jury

sitting up, and women tearing one another’s hats to hear ’em read. And

I could see piling up for Mr. Vaucross as much notoriousness as

Archbishop Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese-on-salad ever

enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at the prospects.

“They agreed on a night; and I stood on Fifth Avenue outside a solemn

restaurant and watched ’em. A process-server walked in and handed

Vaucross the papers at his table. Everybody looked at ’em; and he

looked as proud as Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five-cent

cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good as ours.

“About two hours later somebody knocked at my door. There stood

Vaucross and Miss Artemisia, and she was clinging—yes, sir, clinging—to

his arm. And they tells me they’d been out and got married. And they

articulated some trivial cadences about love and such. And they laid

down a bundle on the table and said ‘Good night’ and left.

“And that’s why I say,” concluded Ferguson Pogue, “that a woman is too

busy occupied with her natural vocation and instinct of graft such as

is given her for self-preservation and amusement to make any great

success in special lines.”

“What was in the bundle that they left?” I asked, with my usual

curiosity.

“Why,” said Ferguson, “there was a scalper’s railroad ticket as far as

Kansas City and two pairs of Mr. Vaucross’s old pants.”

IX

THE CALL OF THE TAME

When the inauguration was accomplished—the proceedings were made smooth

by the presence of the Rough Riders—it is well known that a herd of

those competent and loyal ex-warriors paid a visit to the big city. The

newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks the old broad-brimmed hats

and leather belts that they wear to North Beach fish fries, and mixed

with the visitors. No damage was done beyond the employment of the

wonderful plural “tenderfeet” in each of the scribe’s stories. The

Westerners mildly contemplated the skyscrapers as high as the third

story, yawned at Broadway, hunched down in the big chairs in hotel

corridors, and altogether looked as bored and dejected as a member of

Ye Ancient and Honorable Artillery separated during a sham battle from

his valet.

Out of this sightseeing delegations of good King Teddy’s Gentlemen of

the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye, of Pin Feather, Ariz.

The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue’s rush hour swept him away from the

company of his pardners true. The dust from a thousand rustling skirts

filled his eyes. The mighty roar of trains rushing across the sky

deafened him. The lightning-flash of twice ten hundred beaming eyes

confused his vision.

The storm was so sudden and tremendous that Greenbrier’s first impulse

was to lie down and grab a root. And then he remembered that the

disturbance was human, and not elemental; and he backed out of it with

a grin into a doorway.

The reporters had written that but for the wide-brimmed hats the West

was not visible upon these gauchos of the North. Heaven sharpen their

eyes! The suit of black diagonal, wrinkled in impossible places; the

bright blue four-in-hand, factory tied; the low, turned-down collar,

pattern of the days of Seymour and Blair, white glazed as the letters

on the window of the open-day-and-night-except-Sunday restaurants; the

out-curve at the knees from the saddle grip; the peculiar spread of the

half-closed right thumb and fingers from the stiff hold upon the

circling lasso; the deeply absorbed weather tan that the hottest sun of

Cape May can never equal; the seldom-winking blue eyes that

unconsciously divided the rushing crowds into fours, as though they

were being counted out of a corral; the segregated loneliness and

solemnity of expression, as of an Emperor or of one whose horizons have

not intruded upon him nearer than a day’s ride—these brands of the West

were set upon Greenbrier Nye. Oh, yes; he wore a broad-brimmed hat,

gentle reader—just like those the Madison Square Post Office mail

carriers wear when they go up to Bronx Park on Sunday afternoons.

Suddenly Greenbrier Nye jumped into the drifting herd of metropolitan

cattle, seized upon a man, dragged him out of the stream and gave him a

buffet upon his collar-bone that sent him reeling against a wall.

The victim recovered his hat, with the angry look of a New Yorker who

has suffered an outrage and intends to write to the Trib. about it. But

he looked at his assailant, and knew that the blow was in consideration

of love and affection after the manner of the West, which greets its

friends with contumely and uproar and pounding fists, and receives its

enemies in decorum and order, such as the judicious placing of the

welcoming bullet demands.

“God in the mountains!” cried Greenbrier, holding fast to the foreleg

of his cull. “Can this be Longhorn Merritt?”

The other man was—oh, look on Broadway any day for the pattern—business

man—latest rolled-brim derby—good barber, business, digestion and

tailor.

“Greenbrier Nye!” he exclaimed, grasping the hand that had smitten him.

“My dear fellow! So glad to see you! How did you come to—oh, to be

sure—the inaugural ceremonies—I remember you joined the Rough Riders.

You must come and have luncheon with me, of course.”

Greenbrier pinned him sadly but firmly to the wall with a hand the

size, shape and color of a McClellan saddle.

“Longy,” he said, in a melancholy voice that disturbed traffic, “what

have they been doing to you? You act just like a citizen. They done

made you into an inmate of the city directory. You never made no such

Johnny Branch execration of yourself as that out on the Gila. ‘Come and

have lunching with me!’ You never defined grub by any such terms of

reproach in them days.”

“I’ve been living in New York seven years,” said Merritt. “It’s been

eight since we punched cows together in Old Man Garcia’s outfit. Well,

let’s go to a café, anyhow. It sounds good to hear it called ‘grub?’

again.”

They picked their way through the crowd to a hotel, and drifted, as by

a natural law, to the bar.

“Speak up,” invited Greenbrier.

“A dry Martini,” said Merritt.

“Oh, Lord!” cried Greenbrier; “and yet me and you once saw the same

pink Gila monsters crawling up the walls of the same hotel in Cañon

Diablo! A dry—but let that pass. Whiskey straight—and they’re on you.”

Merritt smiled, and paid.

They lunched in a small extension of the dining room that connected

with the café. Merritt dexterously diverted his friend’s choice, that

hovered over ham and eggs, to a purée of celery, a salmon cutlet, a

partridge pie and a desirable salad.

“On the day,” said Greenbrier, grieved and thunderous, “when I can’t

hold but one drink before eating when I meet a friend I ain’t seen in

eight years at a 2 by 4 table in a thirty-cent town at 1 o’clock on the

third day of the week, I want nine broncos to kick me forty times over

a 640-acre section of land. Get them statistics?”

“Right, old man,” laughed Merritt. “Waiter, bring an absinthe frappé

and—what’s yours, Greenbrier?”

“Whiskey straight,” mourned Nye. “Out of the neck of a bottle you used

to take it, Longy—straight out of the neck of a bottle on a galloping

pony—Arizona redeye, not this ab—oh, what’s the use? They’re on you.”

Merritt slipped the wine card under his glass.

“All right. I suppose you think I’m spoiled by the city. I’m as good a

Westerner as you are, Greenbrier; but, somehow, I can’t make up my mind

to go back out there. New York is comfortable—comfortable. I make a

good living, and I live it. No more wet blankets and riding herd in

snowstorms, and bacon and cold coffee, and blowouts once in six months

for me. I reckon I’ll hang out here in the future. We’ll take in the

theatre to-night, Greenbrier, and after that we’ll dine at—”

“I’ll tell you what you are, Merritt,” said Greenbrier, laying one

elbow in his salad and the other in his butter. “You are a

concentrated, effete, unconditional, short-sleeved, gotch-eared Miss

Sally Walker. God made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle

and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore you have suffered his

handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to New York and putting on

little shoes tied with strings, and making faces when you talk. I’ve

seen you rope and tie a steer in 42½. If you was to see one now you’d

write to the Police Commissioner about it. And these flapdoodle drinks

that you inoculate your system with—these little essences of cowslip

with acorns in ’em, and paregoric flip—they ain’t anyways in assent

with the cordiality of manhood. I hate to see you this way.”

“Well, Mr. Greenbrier,” said Merritt, with apology in his tone, “in a

way you are right. Sometimes I do feel like I was being raised on the

bottle. But, I tell you, New York is comfortable—comfortable. There’s

something about it—the sights and the crowds, and the way it changes

every day, and the very air of it that seems to tie a one-mile-long

stake rope around a man’s neck, with the other end fastened somewhere

about Thirty-fourth Street. I don’t know what it is.”

“God knows,” said Greenbrier sadly, “and I know. The East has gobbled

you up. You was venison, and now you’re veal. You put me in mind of a

japonica in a window. You’ve been signed, sealed and diskivered.

Requiescat in hoc signo. You make me thirsty.”

“A green chartreuse here,” said Merritt to the waiter.

“Whiskey straight,” sighed Greenbrier, “and they’re on you, you

renegade of the round-ups.”

“Guilty, with an application for mercy,” said Merritt. “You don’t know

how it is, Greenbrier. It’s so comfortable here that—”

“Please loan me your smelling salts,” pleaded Greenbrier. “If I hadn’t

seen you once bluff three bluffers from Mazatzal City with an empty gun

in Phoenix—”

Greenbrier’s voice died away in pure grief.

“Cigars!” he called harshly to the waiter, to hide his emotion.

“A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine,” said Merritt.

“They’re on you,” chanted Greenbrier, struggling to conceal his

contempt.

At seven they dined in the Where-to-Dine-Well column.

That evening a galaxy had assembled there. Bright shone the lights o’er

fair women and br—let it go, anyhow—brave men. The orchestra played

charmingly. Hardly had a tip from a diner been placed in its hands by a

waiter when it would burst forth into soniferousness. The more beer you

contributed to it the more Meyerbeer it gave you. Which is reciprocity.

Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner. Greenbrier was his old

friend, and he liked him. He persuaded him to drink a cocktail.

“I take the horehound tea,” said Greenbrier, “for old times’ sake. But

I’d prefer whiskey straight. They’re on you.”

“Right!” said Merritt. “Now, run your eye down that bill of fare and

see if it seems to hitch on any of these items.”

“Lay me on my lava bed!” said Greenbrier, with bulging eyes. “All these

specimens of nutriment in the grub wagon! What’s this? Horse with the

heaves? I pass. But look along! Here’s truck for twenty round-ups all

spelled out in different directions. Wait till I see.”

The viands ordered, Merritt turned to the wine list.

“This Medoc isn’t bad,” he suggested.

“You’re the doc,” said Greenbrier. “I’d rather have whiskey straight.

It’s on you.”

Greenbrier looked around the room. The waiter brought things and took

dishes away. He was observing. He saw a New York restaurant crowd

enjoying itself.

“How was the range when you left the Gila?” asked Merritt.

“Fine,” said Greenbrier. “You see that lady in the red speckled silk at

that table. Well, she could warm over her beans at my campfire. Yes,

the range was good. She looks as nice as a white mustang I see once on

Black River.”

When the coffee came, Greenbrier put one foot on the seat of the chair

next to him.

“You said it was a comfortable town, Longy,” he said, meditatively.

“Yes, it’s a comfortable town. It’s different from the plains in a blue

norther. What did you call that mess in the crock with the handle,

Longy? Oh, yes, squabs in a cash roll. They’re worth the roll. That

white mustang had just such a way of turning his head and shaking his

mane—look at her, Longy. If I thought I could sell out my ranch at a

fair price, I believe I’d—

“Gyar—song!” he suddenly cried, in a voice that paralyzed every knife

and fork in the restaurant.

The waiter dived toward the table.

“Two more of them cocktail drinks,” ordered Greenbrier.

Merritt looked at him and smiled significantly.

“They’re on me,” said Greenbrier, blowing a puff of smoke to the

ceiling.

X

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY

The poet Longfellow—or was it Confucius, the inventor of

wisdom?—remarked:

“Life is real, life is earnest;

And things are not what they seem.”

As mathematics are—or is: thanks, old subscriber!—the only just rule by

which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust

our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great

goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures—unassailable sums in

addition—shall be set over against whatever opposing element there may

be.

A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would

say: “Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that X plus—that is, that

life is real—then things (all of which life includes) are real.

Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the

proposition that ‘things are not what they seem,’ why—”

But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we

would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued,

satisfying, mysterious X.

Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an

old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated the discovery that

bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that

the flour crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no

perceptible effect on the growing wheat, Mr. Kinsolving cornered the

flour market.

The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never

had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accommodated) bought a

five-cent loaf of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which

went to Mr. Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.

A second result was that Mr. Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000

prof—er—rake-off.

Mr. Kinsolving’s son Dan was at college when the mathematical

experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and

found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading “Little Dorrit”

on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square.

He had retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from

bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the

earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.

Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village

to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always admired

Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious,

mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of

oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning

watch-making in his father’s jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial,

easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers. The two

foregathered joyously, being opposites. And then Dan went back to

college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings—and to his private library in

the rear of the jewelry shop.

Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the

accumulations of B. A. and two years of Europe thick upon him. He took

a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving’s elaborate tombstone in Greenwood

and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family

lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire,

hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.

Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his

parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches

for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington

Square. Dan had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a dignity

that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz was more serious, more

intense, more learned, philosophical and socialistic.

“I know about it now,” said Dan, finally. “I pumped it out of the

eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad’s collections

of bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken. And I am told that

he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of

bread at little bakeries around the corner. You’ve studied economics,

Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and the masses, and octopuses,

and the rights of laboring people. I never thought about those things

before. Football and trying to be white to my fellow-man were about the

extent of my college curriculum.

“But since I came back and found out how dad made his money I’ve been

thinking. I’d like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give

up too much money for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income

for a good many yards; but I’d like to make it square with ’em. Is

there any way it can be done, old Ways and Means?”

Kenwitz’s big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin, intellectual face

took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan’s arm with the grip of a

friend and a judge.

“You can’t do it!” he said, emphatically. “One of the chief punishments

of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent you find

that you have lost the power to make reparation or restitution. I

admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can’t do anything. Those

people were robbed of their precious pennies. It’s too late to remedy

the evil. You can’t pay them back”

“Of course,” said Dan, lighting his pipe, “we couldn’t hunt up every

one of the duffers and hand ’em back the right change. There’s an awful

lot of ’em buying bread all the time. Funny taste they have—I never

cared for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with the

Roquefort. But we might find a few of ’em and chuck some of dad’s cash

back where it came from. I’d feel better if I could. It seems tough for

people to be held up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn’t mind

standing a rise in broiled lobsters or deviled crabs. Get to work and

think, Ken. I want to pay back all of that money I can.”

“There are plenty of charities,” said Kenwitz, mechanically.

“Easy enough,” said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. “I suppose I could give

the city a park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But I don’t

want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold

Peter. It’s the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken.”

The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.

“Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the losses of

consumers during that corner in flour?” he asked.

“I do not.” said Dan, stoutly. “My lawyer tells me that I have two

millions.”

“If you had a hundred millions,” said Kenwitz, vehemently, “you

couldn’t repair a thousandth part of the damage that has been done. You

cannot conceive of the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth.

Each penny that was wrung from the lean purses of the poor reacted a

thousandfold to their harm. You do not understand. You do not see how

hopeless is your desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance

can it be done.”

“Back up, philosopher!” said Dan. “The penny has no sorrow that the

dollar cannot heal.”

“Not in one instance,” repeated Kenwitz. “I will give you one, and let

us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick Street.

He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of flour went up he

had to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor to pay it,

Boyne’s business failed and he lost his $1,000 capital—all he had in

the world.”

Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow with his fist.

“I accept the instance,” he cried. “Take me to Boyne. I will repay his

thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery.”

“Write your check,” said Kenwitz, without moving, “and then begin to

write checks in payment of the train of consequences. Draw the next one

for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his failure and set fire to the

building from which he was about to be evicted. The loss amounted to

that much. Boyne died in an asylum.”

“Stick to the instance,” said Dan. “I haven’t noticed any insurance

companies on my charity list.”

“Draw your next check for $100,000,” went on Kenwitz. “Boyne’s son fell

into bad ways after the bakery closed, and was accused of murder. He

was acquitted last week after a three years’ legal battle, and the

state draws upon taxpayers for that much expense.”

“Back to the bakery!” exclaimed Dan, impatiently. “The Government

doesn’t need to stand in the bread line.”

“The last item of the instance is—come and I will show you,” said

Kenwitz, rising.

The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-baiter by

nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath

that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch

needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.

He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square and into ragged,

poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid

brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked

on a door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.

In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing at a machine. She

nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream of

sunlight through the dingy window burnished her heavy hair to the color

of an ancient Tuscan’s shield. She flashed a rippling smile at Kenwitz

and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry.

Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in

heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last

item of the Instance.

“How many this week, Miss Mary?” asked the watchmaker. A mountain of

coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor.

“Nearly thirty dozen,” said the young woman cheerfully. “I’ve made

almost $4. I’m improving, Mr. Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so

much money.” Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A

little pink spot came out on her round, pale cheek.

Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.

“Miss Boyne,” he said, “let me present Mr. Kinsolving, the son of the

man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do

something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that act.”

The smile left the young woman’s face. She rose and pointed her

forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in

the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.

The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism

and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the

moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared

to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him

warmly.

“I’m obliged to you, Ken, old man,” he said, vaguely—“a thousand times

obliged.”

“Mein Gott! you are crazy!” cried the watchmaker, dropping his

spectacles for the first time in years.

Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway

with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the

proprietor.

A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.

“These loaves are ten cents,” said the clerk.

“I always get them at eight cents uptown,” said the lady. “You need not

fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home.”

The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.

“Mr. Kenwitz!” cried the lady, heartily. “How do you do?”

Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension

on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.

“Why, Miss Boyne!” he began.

“Mrs. Kinsolving,” she corrected. “Dan and I were married a month ago.”

XI

THE THING’S THE PLAY

Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free

passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the

popular vaudeville houses.

One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much

past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a

taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I

regarded the man.

“There was a story about that chap a month or two ago,” said the

reporter. “They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was

to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to

like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I’m working

on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the

details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned

in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I

couldn’t seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you

could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I’ll give

you the details.”

After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts

over the Würzburger.

“I see no reason,” said I, when he had concluded, “why that shouldn’t

make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn’t have

acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real

actors in a real theatre. I’m really afraid that all the stage is a

world, anyhow, and all the players men and women. ‘The thing’s the

play,’ is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare.”

“Try it,” said the reporter.

“I will,” said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a

humorous column of it for his paper.

There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there

has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions

and stationery are sold.

One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the

store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was

married to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen,

and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the

headlines of a “Wholesale Female Murderess” story from Butte, Mont. But

after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized

your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as

one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west

side.

Frank Barry and John Delaney were “prominent” young beaux of the same

side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other

every time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra

seats and fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has

turned up in the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen’s

hand. When Frank won, John shook his hand and congratulated

him—honestly, he did.

After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was

getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to Old

Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of gibbering

cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress

gaiters and paper bags of hominy.

Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the

mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his

forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one,

entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or

any old place where there are Italian skies and _dolce far niente_.

It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him.

With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by demanding

whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that way.

In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had possessed

him departed. He bowed low, and said something about “irresistible

impulse” and “forever carry in his heart the memory of”—and she

suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going down.

“I will away,” said John Delaney, “to the furthermost parts of the

earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another’s. I will

to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for—”

“For goodness sake, get out,” said Helen. “Somebody might come in.”

He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that he

might give it a farewell kiss.

Girls, was this choice boon of the great little god Cupid ever

vouchsafed you—to have the fellow you want hard and fast, and have the

one you don’t want come with a damp curl on his forehead and kneel to

you and babble of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shall

forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To know your power, and to

feel the sweet security of your own happy state; to send the unlucky

one, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourself

as he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails are

well manicured—say, girls, it’s galluptious—don’t ever let it get by

you.

And then, of course—how did you guess it?—the door opened and in

stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.

The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen’s hand, and out of the

window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.

A little slow music, if you please—faint violin, just a breath in the

clarinet and a touch of the ‘cello. Imagine the scene. Frank,

white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from him.

Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her

wrists and tears them from his shoulders—once, twice, thrice he sways

her this way and that—the stage manager will show you how—and throws

her from him to the floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he

cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from the house

through the staring groups of astonished guests.

And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience must

stroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow gray,

rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of twenty years which

must precede the rising of the curtain again.

Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she could

have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and

general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but

she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth

balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.

One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and

ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him.

“I’m really much obliged to you,” said Helen, cheerfully, “but I

married another man twenty years ago. He was more a goose than a man,

but I think I love him yet. I have never seen him since about half an

hour after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just

writing fluid?”

The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a

respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes,

however romantic, may be overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight,

beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have got from her

lovers were approaches and adieus. Worse still, in the last one she had

lost a customer, too.

Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two large

rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Roomers

came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode

of neatness, comfort and taste.

One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above.

The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend had

sent him to this oasis in the desert of noise.

Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short,

pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and

his artist’s temperament—revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic

manner—was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.

Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was

singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side

of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the

floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and

office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business

letters; and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red

light and sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that

he spent much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of

Paris, where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy

fiddler.

Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40’s,

with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes.

He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of

Romeo and Othello’s tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes

and wooed her by respectful innuendo.

From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the

presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the

days of her youth’s romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to it,

and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor in

that romance. And then with a woman’s reasoning (oh, yes, they do,

sometimes) she leaped over common syllogisms and theory, and logic, and

was sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyes

love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and

remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love requited,

which is the _sine qua non_ in the house that Jack built.

But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twenty

years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers

laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar.

There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration. A little

purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be

trusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or

suspected.

And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent out

on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing

story of—but I will not knock a brother—let us go on with the story.

One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen’s hall-office-reception-room and

told his love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist.

His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the

heart of a man who is a dreamer and doer combined.

“But before you give me an answer,” he went on, before she could accuse

him of suddenness, “I must tell you that ‘Ramonti?’ is the only name I

have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or

where I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a

hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life

before that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in

the street with a wound on my head and was brought there in an

ambulance. They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the

stones. There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to

remember. After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the

violin. I have had success. Mrs. Barry—I do not know your name except

that—I love you; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the

one woman in the world for me—and”—oh, a lot of stuff like that.

Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrill

of vanity went all over her; and then she looked Ramonti in the eyes,

and a tremendous throb went through her heart. She hadn’t expected that

throb. It took her by surprise. The musician had become a big factor in

her life, and she hadn’t been aware of it.

“Mr. Ramonti,” she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage,

remember; it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), “I’m awfully

sorry, but I’m a married woman.”

And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a heroine must do,

sooner or later, either to a theatrical manager or to a reporter.

Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to his

room.

Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand. Well she might. Three

suitors had kissed it, mounted their red roan steeds and ridden away.

In an hour entered the mysterious stranger with the haunting eyes.

Helen was in the willow rocker, knitting a useless thing in

cotton-wool. He ricocheted from the stairs and stopped for a chat.

Sitting across the table from her, he also poured out his narrative of

love. And then he said: “Helen, do you not remember me? I think I have

seen it in your eyes. Can you forgive the past and remember the love

that has lasted for twenty years? I wronged you deeply—I was afraid to

come back to you—but my love overpowered my reason. Can you, will you,

forgive me?”

Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of her hands in a

strong and trembling clasp.

There she stood, and I pity the stage that it has not acquired a scene

like that and her emotions to portray.

For she stood with a divided heart. The fresh, unforgettable, virginal

love for her bridegroom was hers; the treasured, sacred, honored memory

of her first choice filled half her soul. She leaned to that pure

feeling. Honor and faith and sweet, abiding romance bound her to it.

But the other half of her heart and soul was filled with something

else—a later, fuller, nearer influence. And so the old fought against

the new.

And while she hesitated, from the room above came the soft, racking,

petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the

noblest. The daws may peck upon one’s sleeve without injury, but

whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far from the

neck.

This music and the musician called her, and at her side honor and the

old love held her back.

“Forgive me,” he pleaded.

“Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say you

love,” she declared, with a purgatorial touch.

“How could I tell?” he begged. “I will conceal nothing from you. That

night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark

street I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him. His head had

struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with love and

jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance take him away. Although

you married him, Helen—”

“_Who Are You?_” cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching her

hand away.

“Don’t you remember me, Helen—the one who has always loved you best? I

am John Delaney. If you can forgive—”

But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs

toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for

his in each of his two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed,

cried and sang: “Frank! Frank! Frank!”

Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiard

balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn’t see anything funny in it!

XII

A RAMBLE IN APHASIA

My wife and I parted on that morning in precisely our usual manner. She

left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front door. There she

plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act

of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me to take care of my cold. I

had no cold. Next came her kiss of parting—the level kiss of

domesticity flavored with Young Hyson. There was no fear of the

extemporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite custom. With the deft

touch of long malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf pin; and

then, as I closed the door, I heard her morning slippers pattering back

to her cooling tea.

When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to occur.

The attack came suddenly.

For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a famous

railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few days previously. In

fact, I had been digging away at the law almost without cessation for

many years. Once or twice good Doctor Volney, my friend and physician,

had warned me.

“If you don’t slacken up, Bellford,” he said, “you’ll go suddenly to

pieces. Either your nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me, does a

week pass in which you do not read in the papers of a case of

aphasia—of some man lost, wandering nameless, with his past and his

identity blotted out—and all from that little brain clot made by

overwork or worry?”

“I always thought,” said I, “that the clot in those instances was

really to be found on the brains of the newspaper reporters.”

Doctor Volney shook his head.

“The disease exists,” he said. “You need a change or a rest.

Court-room, office and home—there is the only route you travel. For

recreation you—read law books. Better take warning in time.”

“On Thursday nights,” I said, defensively, “my wife and I play

cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me the weekly letter from her mother.

That law books are not a recreation remains yet to be established.”

That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney’s words. I was

feeling as well as I usually did—possibly in better spirits than usual.

I awoke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept long on the

incommodious seat of a day coach. I leaned my head against the seat and

tried to think. After a long time I said to myself: “I must have a name

of some sort.” I searched my pockets. Not a card; not a letter; not a

paper or monogram could I find. But I found in my coat pocket nearly

$3,000 in bills of large denomination. “I must be some one, of course,”

I repeated to myself, and began again to consider.

The car was well crowded with men, among whom, I told myself, there

must have been some common interest, for they intermingled freely, and

seemed in the best good humor and spirits. One of them—a stout,

spectacled gentleman enveloped in a decided odor of cinnamon and

aloes—took the vacant half of my seat with a friendly nod, and unfolded

a newspaper. In the intervals between his periods of reading, we

conversed, as travelers will, on current affairs. I found myself able

to sustain the conversation on such subjects with credit, at least to

my memory. By and by my companion said:

“You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the West sends in this

time. I’m glad they held the convention in New York; I’ve never been

East before. My name’s R. P. Bolder—Bolder & Son, of Hickory Grove,

Missouri.”

Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men will when put to it.

Now must I hold a christening, and be at once babe, parson and parent.

My senses came to the rescue of my slower brain. The insistent odor of

drugs from my companion supplied one idea; a glance at his newspaper,

where my eye met a conspicuous advertisement, assisted me further.

“My name,” said I, glibly, “is Edward Pinkhammer. I am a druggist, and

my home is in Cornopolis, Kansas.”

“I knew you were a druggist,” said my fellow traveler, affably. “I saw

the callous spot on your right forefinger where the handle of the

pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to our National Convention.”

“Are all these men druggists?” I asked, wonderingly.

“They are. This car came through from the West. And they’re your

old-time druggists, too—none of your patent tablet-and-granule

pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a prescription desk.

We percolate our own paregoric and roll our own pills, and we ain’t

above handling a few garden seeds in the spring, and carrying a side

line of confectionery and shoes. I tell you Hampinker, I’ve got an idea

to spring on this convention—new ideas is what they want. Now, you know

the shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et Pot. Tart.

and Sod. et Pot. Tart.—one’s poison, you know, and the other’s

harmless. It’s easy to mistake one label for the other. Where do

druggists mostly keep ’em? Why, as far apart as possible, on different

shelves. That’s wrong. I say keep ’em side by side, so when you want

one you can always compare it with the other and avoid mistakes. Do you

catch the idea?”

“It seems to me a very good one,” I said.

“All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it up. We’ll

make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-cream

professors that think they’re the only lozenges in the market look like

hypodermic tablets.”

“If I can be of any aid,” I said, warming, “the two bottles of—er—”

“Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and potash.”

“Shall henceforth sit side by side,” I concluded, firmly.

“Now, there’s another thing,” said Mr. Bolder. “For an excipient in

manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer—the magnesia carbonate or

the pulverised glycerrhiza radix?”

“The—er—magnesia,” I said. It was easier to say than the other word.

Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.

“Give me the glycerrhiza,” said he. “Magnesia cakes.”

“Here’s another one of these fake aphasia cases,” he said, presently,

handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon an article. “I

don’t believe in ’em. I put nine out of ten of ’em down as frauds. A

man gets sick of his business and his folks and wants to have a good

time. He skips out somewhere, and when they find him he pretends to

have lost his memory—don’t know his own name, and won’t even recognize

the strawberry mark on his wife’s left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why

can’t they stay at home and forget?”