THE STORY OF THE CALIPH WHO ALLEVIATED HIS CONSCIENCE

Old Jacob Spraggins mixed for himself some Scotch and lithia water at

his $1,200 oak sideboard. Inspiration must have resulted from its

imbibition, for immediately afterward he struck the quartered oak

soundly with his fist and shouted to the empty dining room:

“By the coke ovens of hell, it must be that ten thousand dollars! If I

can get that squared, it’ll do the trick.”

Thus, by the commonest artifice of the trade, having gained your

interest, the action of the story will now be suspended, leaving you

grumpily to consider a sort of dull biography beginning fifteen years

before.

When old Jacob was young Jacob he was a breaker boy in a Pennsylvania

coal mine. I don’t know what a breaker boy is; but his occupation seems

to be standing by a coal dump with a wan look and a dinner-pail to have

his picture taken for magazine articles. Anyhow, Jacob was one. But,

instead of dying of overwork at nine, and leaving his helpless parents

and brothers at the mercy of the union strikers’ reserve fund, he

hitched up his galluses, put a dollar or two in a side proposition now

and then, and at forty-five was worth $20,000,000.

There now! it’s over. Hardly had time to yawn, did you? I’ve seen

biographies that—but let us dissemble.

I want you to consider Jacob Spraggins, Esq., after he had arrived at

the seventh stage of his career. The stages meant are, first, humble

origin; second, deserved promotion; third, stockholder; fourth,

capitalist; fifth, trust magnate; sixth, rich malefactor; seventh,

caliph; eighth, _x_. The eighth stage shall be left to the higher

mathematics.

At fifty-five Jacob retired from active business. The income of a czar

was still rolling in on him from coal, iron, real estate, oil,

railroads, manufactories, and corporations, but none of it touched

Jacob’s hands in a raw state. It was a sterilized increment, carefully

cleaned and dusted and fumigated until it arrived at its ultimate stage

of untainted, spotless checks in the white fingers of his private

secretary. Jacob built a three-million-dollar palace on a corner lot

fronting on Nabob Avenue, city of New Bagdad, and began to feel the

mantle of the late H. A. Rashid descending upon him. Eventually Jacob

slipped the mantle under his collar, tied it in a neat four-in-hand,

and became a licensed harrier of our Mesopotamian proletariat.

When a man’s income becomes so large that the butcher actually sends

him the kind of steak he orders, he begins to think about his soul’s

salvation. Now, the various stages or classes of rich men must not be

forgotten. The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his

wealth. The trust magnate “estimates” it. The rich malefactor hands you

a cigar and denies that he has bought the P. D. & Q. The caliph merely

smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses. There is a

record of tremendous altercation at breakfast in a “Where-to-Dine-Well”

tavern between a magnate and his wife, the rift within the loot being

that the wife calculated their fortune at a figure $3,000,000 higher

than did her future _divorcé_. Oh, well, I, myself, heard a similar

quarrel between a man and his wife because he found fifty cents less in

his pockets than he thought he had. After all, we are all human—Count

Tolstoi, R. Fitzsimmons, Peter Pan, and the rest of us.

Don’t lose heart because the story seems to be degenerating into a sort

of moral essay for intellectual readers.

There will be dialogue and stage business pretty soon.

When Jacob first began to compare the eyes of needles with the camels

in the Zoo he decided upon organized charity. He had his secretary send

a check for one million to the Universal Benevolent Association of the

Globe. You may have looked down through a grating in front of a decayed

warehouse for a nickel that you had dropped through. But that is

neither here nor there. The Association acknowledged receipt of his

favor of the 24th ult. with enclosure as stated. Separated by a double

line, but still mighty close to the matter under the caption of

“Oddities of the Day’s News” in an evening paper, Jacob Spraggins read

that one “Jasper Spargyous” had “donated $100,000 to the U. B. A. of

G.” A camel may have a stomach for each day in the week; but I dare not

venture to accord him whiskers, for fear of the Great Displeasure at

Washington; but if he have whiskers, surely not one of them will seem

to have been inserted in the eye of a needle by that effort of that

rich man to enter the K. of H. The right is reserved to reject any and

all bids; signed, S. Peter, secretary and gatekeeper.

Next, Jacob selected the best endowed college he could scare up and

presented it with a $200,000 laboratory. The college did not maintain a

scientific course, but it accepted the money and built an elaborate

lavatory instead, which was no diversion of funds so far as Jacob ever

discovered.

The faculty met and invited Jacob to come over and take his A B C

degree. Before sending the invitation they smiled, cut out the C, added

the proper punctuation marks, and all was well.

While walking on the campus before being capped and gowned, Jacob saw

two professors strolling nearby. Their voices, long adapted to indoor

acoustics, undesignedly reached his ear.

“There goes the latest _chevalier d’industrie_,” said one of them, “to

buy a sleeping powder from us. He gets his degree to-morrow.”

“_In foro conscientiæ_,” said the other. “Let’s ’eave ’arf a brick at

’im.”

Jacob ignored the Latin, but the brick pleasantry was not too hard for

him. There was no mandragora in the honorary draught of learning that

he had bought. That was before the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs

Act.

Jacob wearied of philanthropy on a large scale.

“If I could see folks made happier,” he said to himself—“If I could see

’em myself and hear ’em express their gratitude for what I done for ’em

it would make me feel better. This donatin’ funds to institutions and

societies is about as satisfactory as dropping money into a broken slot

machine.”

So Jacob followed his nose, which led him through unswept streets to

the homes of the poorest.

“The very thing!” said Jacob. “I will charter two river steamboats,

pack them full of these unfortunate children and—say ten thousand dolls

and drums and a thousand freezers of ice cream, and give them a

delightful outing up the Sound. The sea breezes on that trip ought to

blow the taint off some of this money that keeps coming in faster than

I can work it off my mind.”

Jacob must have leaked some of his benevolent intentions, for an

immense person with a bald face and a mouth that looked as if it ought

to have a “Drop Letters Here” sign over it hooked a finger around him

and set him in a space between a barber’s pole and a stack of ash cans.

Words came out of the post-office slit—smooth, husky words with gloves

on ’em, but sounding as if they might turn to bare knuckles any moment.

“Say, Sport, do you know where you are at? Well, dis is Mike O’Grady’s

district you’re buttin’ into—see? Mike’s got de stomach-ache privilege

for every kid in dis neighborhood—see? And if dere’s any picnics or red

balloons to be dealt out here, Mike’s money pays for ’em—see? Don’t you

butt in, or something’ll be handed to you. Youse d–––– settlers and

reformers with your social ologies and your millionaire detectives have

got dis district in a hell of a fix, anyhow. With your college students

and professors rough-housing de soda-water stands and dem rubber-neck

coaches fillin’ de streets, de folks down here are ’fraid to go out of

de houses. Now, you leave ’em to Mike. Dey belongs to him, and he knows

how to handle ’em. Keep on your own side of de town. Are you some wiser

now, uncle, or do you want to scrap wit’ Mike O’Grady for de Santa

Claus belt in dis district?”

Clearly, that spot in the moral vineyard was preempted. So Caliph

Spraggins menaced no more the people in the bazaars of the East Side.

To keep down his growing surplus he doubled his donations to organized

charity, presented the Y. M. C. A. of his native town with a $10,000

collection of butterflies, and sent a check to the famine sufferers in

China big enough to buy new emerald eyes and diamond-filled teeth for

all their gods. But none of these charitable acts seemed to bring peace

to the caliph’s heart. He tried to get a personal note into his

benefactions by tipping bellboys and waiters $10 and $20 bills. He got

well snickered at and derided for that by the minions who accept with

respect gratuities commensurate to the service performed. He sought out

an ambitious and talented but poor young woman, and bought for her the

star part in a new comedy. He might have gotten rid of $50,000 more of

his cumbersome money in this philanthropy if he had not neglected to

write letters to her. But she lost the suit for lack of evidence, while

his capital still kept piling up, and his _optikos needleorum

camelibus_—or rich man’s disease—was unrelieved.

In Caliph Spraggins’s $3,000,000 home lived his sister Henrietta, who

used to cook for the coal miners in a twenty-five-cent eating house in

Coketown, Pa., and who now would have offered John Mitchell only two

fingers of her hand to shake. And his daughter Celia, nineteen, back

from boarding-school and from being polished off by private instructors

in the restaurant languages and those études and things.

Celia is the heroine. Lest the artist’s delineation of her charms on

this very page humbug your fancy, take from me her authorized

description. She was a nice-looking, awkward, loud, rather bashful,

brown-haired girl, with a sallow complexion, bright eyes, and a

perpetual smile. She had a wholesome, Spraggins-inherited love for

plain food, loose clothing, and the society of the lower classes. She

had too much health and youth to feel the burden of wealth. She had a

wide mouth that kept the peppermint-pepsin tablets rattling like hail

from the slot-machine wherever she went, and she could whistle

hornpipes. Keep this picture in mind; and let the artist do his worst.

Celia looked out of her window one day and gave her heart to the

grocer’s young man. The receiver thereof was at that moment engaged in

conceding immortality to his horse and calling down upon him the

ultimate fate of the wicked; so he did not notice the transfer. A horse

should stand still when you are lifting a crate of strictly new-laid

eggs out of the wagon.

Young lady reader, you would have liked that grocer’s young man

yourself. But you wouldn’t have given him your heart, because you are

saving it for a riding-master, or a shoe-manufacturer with a torpid

liver, or something quiet but rich in gray tweeds at Palm Beach. Oh, I

know about it. So I am glad the grocer’s young man was for Celia, and

not for you.

The grocer’s young man was slim and straight and as confident and easy

in his movements as the man in the back of the magazines who wears the

new frictionless roller suspenders. He wore a gray bicycle cap on the

back of his head, and his hair was straw-colored and curly, and his

sunburned face looked like one that smiled a good deal when he was not

preaching the doctrine of everlasting punishment to delivery-wagon

horses. He slung imported A1 fancy groceries about as though they were

only the stuff he delivered at boarding-houses; and when he picked up

his whip, your mind instantly recalled Mr. Tackett and his air with the

buttonless foils.

Tradesmen delivered their goods at a side gate at the rear of the

house. The grocer’s wagon came about ten in the morning. For three days

Celia watched the driver when he came, finding something new each time

to admire in the lofty and almost contemptuous way he had of tossing

around the choicest gifts of Pomona, Ceres, and the canning factories.

Then she consulted Annette.

To be explicit, Annette McCorkle, the second housemaid who deserves a

paragraph herself. Annette Fletcherized large numbers of romantic

novels which she obtained at a free public library branch (donated by

one of the biggest caliphs in the business). She was Celia’s

side-kicker and chum, though Aunt Henrietta didn’t know it, you may

hazard a bean or two.

“Oh, canary-bird seed!” exclaimed Annette. “Ain’t it a corkin’

situation? You a heiress, and fallin’ in love with him on sight! He’s a

sweet boy, too, and above his business. But he ain’t susceptible like

the common run of grocer’s assistants. He never pays no attention to

me.”

“He will to me,” said Celia.

“Riches—” began Annette, unsheathing the not unjustifiable feminine

sting.

“Oh, you’re not so beautiful,” said Celia, with her wide, disarming

smile. “Neither am I; but he sha’n’t know that there’s any money mixed

up with my looks, such as they are. That’s fair. Now, I want you to

lend me one of your caps and an apron, Annette.”

“Oh, marshmallows!” cried Annette. “I see. Ain’t it lovely? It’s just

like ‘Lurline, the Left-Handed; or, A Buttonhole Maker’s Wrongs.’ I’ll

bet he’ll turn out to be a count.”

There was a long hallway (or “passageway,” as they call it in the land

of the Colonels) with one side latticed, running along the rear of the

house. The grocer’s young man went through this to deliver his goods.

One morning he passed a girl in there with shining eyes, sallow

complexion, and wide, smiling mouth, wearing a maid’s cap and apron.

But as he was cumbered with a basket of Early Drumhead lettuce and

Trophy tomatoes and three bunches of asparagus and six bottles of the

most expensive Queen olives, he saw no more than that she was one of

the maids.

But on his way out he came up behind her, and she was whistling

“Fisher’s Hornpipe” so loudly and clearly that all the piccolos in the

world should have disjointed themselves and crept into their cases for

shame.

The grocer’s young man stopped and pushed back his cap until it hung on

his collar button behind.

“That’s out o’ sight, Kid,” said he.

“My name is Celia, if you please,” said the whistler, dazzling him with

a three-inch smile.

“That’s all right. I’m Thomas McLeod. What part of the house do you

work in?”

“I’m the—the second parlor maid.”

“Do you know the ‘Falling Waters’?”

“No,” said Celia, “we don’t know anybody. We got rich too quick—that

is, Mr. Spraggins did.”

“I’ll make you acquainted,” said Thomas McLeod. “It’s a strathspey—the

first cousin to a hornpipe.”

If Celia’s whistling put the piccolos out of commission, Thomas

McLeod’s surely made the biggest flutes hunt their holes. He could

actually whistle _bass_.

When he stopped Celia was ready to jump into his delivery wagon and

ride with him clear to the end of the pier and on to the ferry-boat of

the Charon line.

“I’ll be around to-morrow at 10:15,” said Thomas, “with some spinach

and a case of carbonic.”

“I’ll practice that what-you-may-call-it,” said Celia. “I can whistle a

fine second.”

The processes of courtship are personal, and do not belong to general

literature. They should be chronicled in detail only in advertisements

of iron tonics and in the secret by-laws of the Woman’s Auxiliary of

the Ancient Order of the Rat Trap. But genteel writing may contain a

description of certain stages of its progress without intruding upon

the province of the X-ray or of park policemen.

A day came when Thomas McLeod and Celia lingered at the end of the

latticed “passage.”

“Sixteen a week isn’t much,” said Thomas, letting his cap rest on his

shoulder blades.

Celia looked through the lattice-work and whistled a dead march.

Shopping with Aunt Henrietta the day before, she had paid that much for

a dozen handkerchiefs.

“Maybe I’ll get a raise next month,” said Thomas. “I’ll be around

to-morrow at the same time with a bag of flour and the laundry soap.”

“All right,” said Celia. “Annette’s married cousin pays only $20 a

month for a flat in the Bronx.”

Never for a moment did she count on the Spraggins money. She knew Aunt

Henrietta’s invincible pride of caste and pa’s mightiness as a Colossus

of cash, and she understood that if she chose Thomas she and her

grocer’s young man might go whistle for a living.

Another day came, Thomas violating the dignity of Nabob Avenue with

“The Devil’s Dream,” whistled keenly between his teeth.

“Raised to eighteen a week yesterday,” he said. “Been pricing flats

around Morningside. You want to start untying those apron strings and

unpinning that cap, old girl.”

“Oh, Tommy!” said Celia, with her broadest smile. “Won’t that be

enough? I got Betty to show me how to make a cottage pudding. I guess

we could call it a flat pudding if we wanted to.”

“And tell no lie,” said Thomas.

“And I can sweep and polish and dust—of course, a parlor maid learns

that. And we could whistle duets of evenings.”

“The old man said he’d raise me to twenty at Christmas if Bryan

couldn’t think of any harder name to call a Republican than a

‘postponer,’” said the grocer’s young man.

“I can sew,” said Celia; “and I know that you must make the gas

company’s man show his badge when he comes to look at the meter; and I

know how to put up quince jam and window curtains.”

“Bully! you’re all right, Cele. Yes, I believe we can pull it off on

eighteen.”

As he was jumping into the wagon the second parlor maid braved

discovery by running swiftly to the gate.

“And, oh, Tommy, I forgot,” she called, softly. “I believe I could make

your neckties.”

“Forget it,” said Thomas decisively.

“And another thing,” she continued. “Sliced cucumbers at night will

drive away cockroaches.”

“And sleep, too, you bet,” said Mr. McLeod. “Yes, I believe if I have a

delivery to make on the West Side this afternoon I’ll look in at a

furniture store I know over there.”

It was just as the wagon dashed away that old Jacob Spraggins struck

the sideboard with his fist and made the mysterious remark about ten

thousand dollars that you perhaps remember. Which justifies the

reflection that some stories, as well as life, and puppies thrown into

wells, move around in circles. Painfully but briefly we must shed light

on Jacob’s words.

The foundation of his fortune was made when he was twenty. A poor

coal-digger (ever hear of a rich one?) had saved a dollar or two and

bought a small tract of land on a hillside on which he tried to raise

corn. Not a nubbin. Jacob, whose nose was a divining-rod, told him

there was a vein of coal beneath. He bought the land from the miner for

$125 and sold it a month afterward for $10,000. Luckily the miner had

enough left of his sale money to drink himself into a black coat

opening in the back, as soon as he heard the news.

And so, for forty years afterward, we find Jacob illuminated with the

sudden thought that if he could make restitution of this sum of money

to the heirs or assigns of the unlucky miner, respite and Nepenthe

might be his.

And now must come swift action, for we have here some four thousand

words and not a tear shed and never a pistol, joke, safe, nor bottle

cracked.

Old Jacob hired a dozen private detectives to find the heirs, if any

existed, of the old miner, Hugh McLeod.

Get the point? Of course I know as well as you do that Thomas is going

to be the heir. I might have concealed the name; but why always hold

back your mystery till the end? I say, let it come near the middle so

people can stop reading there if they want to.

After the detectives had trailed false clues about three thousand

dollars—I mean miles—they cornered Thomas at the grocery and got his

confession that Hugh McLeod had been his grandfather, and that there

were no other heirs. They arranged a meeting for him and old Jacob one

morning in one of their offices.

Jacob liked the young man very much. He liked the way he looked

straight at him when he talked, and the way he threw his bicycle cap

over the top of a rose-colored vase on the centre-table.

There was a slight flaw in Jacob’s system of restitution. He did not

consider that the act, to be perfect, should include confession. So he

represented himself to be the agent of the purchaser of the land who

had sent him to refund the sale price for the ease of his conscience.

“Well, sir,” said Thomas, “this sounds to me like an illustrated

post-card from South Boston with ‘We’re having a good time here’

written on it. I don’t know the game. Is this ten thousand dollars

money, or do I have to save so many coupons to get it?”

Old Jacob counted out to him twenty five-hundred-dollar bills.

That was better, he thought, than a check. Thomas put them thoughtfully

into his pocket.

“Grandfather’s best thanks,” he said, “to the party who sends it.”

Jacob talked on, asking him about his work, how he spent his leisure

time, and what his ambitions were. The more he saw and heard of Thomas,

the better he liked him. He had not met many young men in Bagdad so

frank and wholesome.

“I would like to have you visit my house,” he said. “I might help you

in investing or laying out your money. I am a very wealthy man. I have

a daughter about grown, and I would like for you to know her. There are

not many young men I would care to have call on her.”

“I’m obliged,” said Thomas. “I’m not much at making calls. It’s

generally the side entrance for mine. And, besides, I’m engaged to a

girl that has the Delaware peach crop killed in the blossom. She’s a

parlor maid in a house where I deliver goods. She won’t be working

there much longer, though. Say, don’t forget to give your friend my

grandfather’s best regards. You’ll excuse me now; my wagon’s outside

with a lot of green stuff that’s got to be delivered. See you again,

sir.”

At eleven Thomas delivered some bunches of parsley and lettuce at the

Spraggins mansion. Thomas was only twenty-two; so, as he came back, he

took out the handful of five-hundred-dollar bills and waved them

carelessly. Annette took a pair of eyes as big as creamed onion to the

cook.

“I told you he was a count,” she said, after relating. “He never would

carry on with me.”

“But you say he showed money,” said the cook.

“Hundreds of thousands,” said Annette. “Carried around loose in his

pockets. And he never would look at me.”

“It was paid to me to-day,” Thomas was explaining to Celia outside. “It

came from my grandfather’s estate. Say, Cele, what’s the use of waiting

now? I’m going to quit the job to-night. Why can’t we get married next

week?”

“Tommy,” said Celia. “I’m no parlor maid. I’ve been fooling you. I’m

Miss Spraggins—Celia Spraggins. The newspapers say I’ll be worth forty

million dollars some day.”

Thomas pulled his cap down straight on his head for the first time

since we have known him.

“I suppose then,” said he, “I suppose then you’ll not be marrying me

next week. But you _can_ whistle.”

“No,” said Celia, “I’ll not be marrying you next week. My father would

never let me marry a grocer’s clerk. But I’ll marry you to-night,

Tommy, if you say so.”

Old Jacob Spraggins came home at 9:30 P. M., in his motor car. The make

of it you will have to surmise sorrowfully; I am giving you

unsubsidized fiction; had it been a street car I could have told you

its voltage and the number of wheels it had. Jacob called for his

daughter; he had bought a ruby necklace for her, and wanted to hear her

say what a kind, thoughtful, dear old dad he was.

There was a brief search in the house for her, and then came Annette,

glowing with the pure flame of truth and loyalty well mixed with envy

and histrionics.

“Oh, sir,” said she, wondering if she should kneel, “Miss Celia’s just

this minute running away out of the side gate with a young man to be

married. I couldn’t stop her, sir. They went in a cab.”

“What young man?” roared old Jacob.

“A millionaire, if you please, sir—a rich nobleman in disguise. He

carries his money with him, and the red peppers and the onions was only

to blind us, sir. He never did seem to take to me.”

Jacob rushed out in time to catch his car. The chauffeur had been

delayed by trying to light a cigarette in the wind.

“Here, Gaston, or Mike, or whatever you call yourself, scoot around the

corner quicker than blazes and see if you can see a cab. If you do, run

it down.”

There was a cab in sight a block away. Gaston, or Mike, with his eyes

half shut and his mind on his cigarette, picked up the trail, neatly

crowded the cab to the curb and pocketed it.

“What t’ell you doin’?” yelled the cabman.

“Pa!” shrieked Celia.

“Grandfather’s remorseful friend’s agent!” said Thomas. “Wonder what’s

on his conscience now.”

“A thousand thunders,” said Gaston, or Mike. “I have no other match.”

“Young man,” said old Jacob, severely, “how about that parlor maid you

were engaged to?”

A couple of years afterward old Jacob went into the office of his

private secretary.

“The Amalgamated Missionary Society solicits a contribution of $30,000

toward the conversion of the Koreans,” said the secretary.

“Pass ’em up,” said Jacob.

“The University of Plumville writes that its yearly endowment fund of

$50,000 that you bestowed upon it is past due.”

“Tell ’em it’s been cut out.”

“The Scientific Society of Clam Cove, Long Island, asks for $10,000 to

buy alcohol to preserve specimens.”

“Waste basket.”

“The Society for Providing Healthful Recreation for Working Girls wants

$20,000 from you to lay out a golf course.”

“Tell ’em to see an undertaker.”

“Cut ’em all out,” went on Jacob. “I’ve quit being a good thing. I need

every dollar I can scrape or save. I want you to write to the directors

of every company that I’m interested in and recommend a 10 per cent.

cut in salaries. And say—I noticed half a cake of soap lying in a

corner of the hall as I came in. I want you to speak to the scrubwoman

about waste. I’ve got no money to throw away. And say—we’ve got vinegar

pretty well in hand, haven’t we?’

“The Globe Spice & Seasons Company,” said secretary, “controls the

market at present.”

“Raise vinegar two cents a gallon. Notify all our branches.”

Suddenly Jacob Spraggins’s plump red face relaxed into a pulpy grin. He

walked over to the secretary’s desk and showed a small red mark on his

thick forefinger.

“Bit it,” he said, “darned if he didn’t, and he ain’t had the tooth

three weeks—Jaky McLeod, my Celia’s kid. He’ll be worth a hundred

millions by the time he’s twenty-one if I can pile it up for him.”

As he was leaving, old Jacob turned at the door, and said:

“Better make that vinegar raise three cents instead of two. I’ll be

back in an hour and sign the letters.”

The true history of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid relates that toward the

end of his reign he wearied of philanthropy, and caused to be beheaded

all his former favorites and companions of his “Arabian Nights”

rambles. Happy are we in these days of enlightenment, when the only

death warrant the caliphs can serve on us is in the form of a

tradesman’s bill.

XVIII

THE GIRL AND THE HABIT

HABIT—a tendency or aptitude acquired by custom or frequent repetition.

The critics have assailed every source of inspiration save one. To that

one we are driven for our moral theme. When we levied upon the masters

of old they gleefully dug up the parallels to our columns. When we

strove to set forth real life they reproached us for trying to imitate

Henry George, George Washington, Washington Irving, and Irving

Bacheller. We wrote of the West and the East, and they accused us of

both Jesse and Henry James. We wrote from our heart—and they said

something about a disordered liver. We took a text from Matthew

or—er—yes, Deuteronomy, but the preachers were hammering away at the

inspiration idea before we could get into type. So, driven to the wall,

we go for our subject-matter to the reliable, old, moral, unassailable

vade mecum—the unabridged dictionary.

Miss Merriam was cashier at Hinkle’s. Hinkle’s is one of the big

downtown restaurants. It is in what the papers call the “financial

district.” Each day from 12 o’clock to 2 Hinkle’s was full of hungry

customers—messenger boys, stenographers, brokers, owners of mining

stock, promoters, inventors with patents pending—and also people with

money.

The cashiership at Hinkle’s was no sinecure. Hinkle egged and toasted

and griddle-caked and coffeed a good many customers; and he lunched (as

good a word as “dined”) many more. It might be said that Hinkle’s

breakfast crowd was a contingent, but his luncheon patronage amounted

to a horde.

Miss Merriam sat on a stool at a desk inclosed on three sides by a

strong, high fencing of woven brass wire. Through an arched opening at

the bottom you thrust your waiter’s check and the money, while your

heart went pit-a-pat.

For Miss Merriam was lovely and capable. She could take 45 cents out of

a $2 bill and refuse an offer of marriage before you could—Next!—lost

your chance—please don’t shove. She could keep cool and collected while

she collected your check, give you the correct change, win your heart,

indicate the toothpick stand, and rate you to a quarter of a cent

better than Bradstreet could to a thousand in less time than it takes

to pepper an egg with one of Hinkle’s casters.

There is an old and dignified allusion to the “fierce light that beats

upon a throne.” The light that beats upon the young lady cashier’s cage

is also something fierce. The other fellow is responsible for the

slang.

Every male patron of Hinkle’s, from the A. D. T. boys up to the

curbstone brokers, adored Miss Merriam. When they paid their checks

they wooed her with every wile known to Cupid’s art. Between the meshes

of the brass railing went smiles, winks, compliments, tender vows,

invitations to dinner, sighs, languishing looks and merry banter that

was wafted pointedly back by the gifted Miss Merriam.

There is no coign of vantage more effective than the position of young

lady cashier. She sits there, easily queen of the court of commerce;

she is duchess of dollars and devoirs, countess of compliments and

coin, leading lady of love and luncheon. You take from her a smile and

a Canadian dime, and you go your way uncomplaining. You count the

cheery word or two that she tosses you as misers count their treasures;

and you pocket the change for a five uncomputed. Perhaps the

brass-bound inaccessibility multiplies her charms—anyhow, she is a

shirt-waisted angel, immaculate, trim, manicured, seductive,

bright-eyed, ready, alert—Psyche, Circe, and Ate in one, separating you

from your circulating medium after your sirloin medium.

The young men who broke bread at Hinkle’s never settled with the

cashier without an exchange of badinage and open compliment. Many of

them went to greater lengths and dropped promissory hints of theatre

tickets and chocolates. The older men spoke plainly of orange blossoms,

generally withering the tentative petals by after-allusions to Harlem

flats. One broker, who had been squeezed by copper proposed to Miss

Merriam more regularly than he ate.

During a brisk luncheon hour Miss Merriam’s conversation, while she

took money for checks, would run something like this:

“Good morning, Mr. Haskins—sir?—it’s natural, thank you—don’t be quite

so fresh . . . Hello, Johnny—ten, fifteen, twenty—chase along now or

they’ll take the letters off your cap . . . Beg pardon—count it again,

please—Oh, don’t mention it . . . Vaudeville?—thanks; not on your

moving picture—I was to see Carter in Hedda Gabler on Wednesday night

with Mr. Simmons . . . ’Scuse me, I thought that was a quarter . . .

Twenty-five and seventy-five’s a dollar—got that ham-and-cabbage habit

yet. I see, Billy . . . Who are you addressing?—say—you’ll get all

that’s coming to you in a minute . . . Oh, fudge! Mr. Bassett—you’re

always fooling—no—? Well, maybe I’ll marry you some day—three, four and

sixty-five is five . . . Kindly keep them remarks to yourself, if you

please . . . Ten cents?—’scuse me; the check calls for seventy—well,

maybe it is a one instead of a seven . . . Oh, do you like it that way,

Mr. Saunders?—some prefer a pomp; but they say this Cleo de Merody does

suit refined features . . . and ten is fifty . . . Hike along there,

buddy; don’t take this for a Coney Island ticket booth . . . Huh?—why,

Macy’s—don’t it fit nice? Oh, no, it isn’t too cool—these light-weight

fabrics is all the go this season . . . Come again, please—that’s the

third time you’ve tried to—what?—forget it—that lead quarter is an old

friend of mine . . . Sixty-five?—must have had your salary raised, Mr.

Wilson . . . I seen you on Sixth Avenue Tuesday afternoon, Mr. De

Forest—swell?—oh, my!—who is she? . . . What’s the matter with it?—why,

it ain’t money—what?—Columbian half?—well, this ain’t South America . .

. Yes, I like the mixed best—Friday?—awfully sorry, but I take my

jiu-jitsu lesson on Friday—Thursday, then . . . Thanks—that’s sixteen

times I’ve been told that this morning—I guess I must be beautiful . .

. Cut that out, please—who do you think I am? . . . Why, Mr.

Westbrook—do you really think so?—the idea!—one—eighty and twenty’s a

dollar—thank you ever so much, but I don’t ever go automobile riding

with gentlemen—your aunt?—well, that’s different—perhaps . . . Please

don’t get fresh—your check was fifteen cents, I believe—kindly step

aside and let . . . Hello, Ben—coming around Thursday evening?—there’s

a gentleman going to send around a box of chocolates, and . . . forty

and sixty is a dollar, and one is two . . .”

About the middle of one afternoon the dizzy goddess Vertigo—whose other

name is Fortune—suddenly smote an old, wealthy and eccentric banker

while he was walking past Hinkle’s, on his way to a street car. A

wealthy and eccentric banker who rides in street cars is—move up,

please; there are others.

A Samaritan, a Pharisee, a man and a policeman who were first on the

spot lifted Banker McRamsey and carried him into Hinkle’s restaurant.

When the aged but indestructible banker opened his eyes he saw a

beautiful vision bending over him with a pitiful, tender smile, bathing

his forehead with beef tea and chafing his hands with something frappé

out of a chafing-dish. Mr. McRamsey sighed, lost a vest button, gazed

with deep gratitude upon his fair preserveress, and then recovered

consciousness.

To the Seaside Library all who are anticipating a romance! Banker

McRamsey had an aged and respected wife, and his sentiments toward Miss

Merriam were fatherly. He talked to her for half an hour with

interest—not the kind that went with his talks during business hours.

The next day he brought Mrs. McRamsey down to see her. The old couple

were childless—they had only a married daughter living in Brooklyn.

To make a short story shorter, the beautiful cashier won the hearts of

the good old couple. They came to Hinkle’s again and again; they

invited her to their old-fashioned but splendid home in one of the East

Seventies. Miss Merriam’s winning loveliness, her sweet frankness and

impulsive heart took them by storm. They said a hundred times that Miss

Merriam reminded them so much of their lost daughter. The Brooklyn

matron, née Ramsey, had the figure of Buddha and a face like the ideal

of an art photographer. Miss Merriam was a combination of curves,

smiles, rose leaves, pearls, satin and hair-tonic posters. Enough of

the fatuity of parents.

A month after the worthy couple became acquainted with Miss Merriam,

she stood before Hinkle one afternoon and resigned her cashiership.

“They’re going to adopt me,” she told the bereft restaurateur. “They’re

funny old people, but regular dears. And the swell home they have got!

Say, Hinkle, there isn’t any use of talking—I’m on the à la carte to

wear brown duds and goggles in a whiz wagon, or marry a duke at least.

Still, I somehow hate to break out of the old cage. I’ve been

cashiering so long I feel funny doing anything else. I’ll miss joshing

the fellows awfully when they line up to pay for the buckwheats and.

But I can’t let this chance slide. And they’re awfully good, Hinkle; I

know I’ll have a swell time. You owe me nine-sixty-two and a half for

the week. Cut out the half if it hurts you, Hinkle.”

And they did. Miss Merriam became Miss Rosa McRamsey. And she graced

the transition. Beauty is only skin-deep, but the nerves lie very near

to the skin. Nerve—but just here will you oblige by perusing again the

quotation with which this story begins?

The McRamseys poured out money like domestic champagne to polish their

adopted one. Milliners, dancing masters and private tutors got it.

Miss—er—McRamsey was grateful, loving, and tried to forget Hinkle’s. To

give ample credit to the adaptability of the American girl, Hinkle’s

did fade from her memory and speech most of the time.

Not every one will remember when the Earl of Hitesbury came to East

Seventy–––– Street, America. He was only a fair-to-medium earl, without

debts, and he created little excitement. But you will surely remember

the evening when the Daughters of Benevolence held their bazaar in the

W––––f-A––––a Hotel. For you were there, and you wrote a note to Fannie

on the hotel paper, and mailed it, just to show her that—you did not?

Very well; that was the evening the baby was sick, of course.

At the bazaar the McRamseys were prominent. Miss Mer—er—McRamsey was

exquisitely beautiful. The Earl of Hitesbury had been very attentive to

her since he dropped in to have a look at America. At the charity

bazaar the affair was supposed to be going to be pulled off to a

finish. An earl is as good as a duke. Better. His standing may be

lower, but his outstanding accounts are also lower.

Our ex-young-lady-cashier was assigned to a booth. She was expected to

sell worthless articles to nobs and snobs at exorbitant prices. The

proceeds of the bazaar were to be used for giving the poor children of

the slums a Christmas din––––Say! did you ever wonder where they get

the other 364?

Miss McRamsey—beautiful, palpitating, excited, charming,

radiant—fluttered about in her booth. An imitation brass network, with

a little arched opening, fenced her in.

Along came the Earl, assured, delicate, accurate, admiring—admiring

greatly, and faced the open wicket.

“You look chawming, you know—’pon my word you do—my deah,” he said,

beguilingly.

Miss McRamsey whirled around.

“Cut that joshing out,” she said, coolly and briskly. “Who do you think

you are talking to? Your check, please. Oh, Lordy!—”

Patrons of the bazaar became aware of a commotion and pressed around a

certain booth. The Earl of Hitesbury stood near by pulling a pale blond

and puzzled whisker.

“Miss McRamsey has fainted,” some one explained.

XIX

PROOF OF THE PUDDING

Spring winked a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook of the _Minerva

Magazine_, and deflected him from his course. He had lunched in his

favorite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was returning to his office

when his feet became entangled in the lure of the vernal coquette.

Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward in Twenty-sixth

Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles in Fifth Avenue,

and meandered along the walks of budding Madison Square.

The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed a

pastoral; the color motif was green—the presiding shade at the creation

of man and vegetation.

The callow grass between the walks was the color of verdigris, a

poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of derelict humans that had

breathed upon the soil during the summer and autumn. The bursting tree

buds looked strangely familiar to those who had botanized among the

garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent dinner. The sky above

was of that pale aquamarine tint that ballroom poets rhyme with “true”

and “Sue” and “coo.” The one natural and frank color visible was the

ostensible green of the newly painted benches—a shade between the color

of a pickled cucumber and that of a last year’s fast-black cravenette

raincoat. But, to the city-bred eye of Editor Westbrook, the landscape

appeared a masterpiece.

And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the gentle

concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in a brief invasion of

the editor’s mind.

Editor Westbrook’s spirit was contented and serene. The April number of

the _Minerva_ had sold its entire edition before the tenth day of the

month—a newsdealer in Keokuk had written that he could have sold fifty

copies more if he had ’em. The owners of the magazine had raised his

(the editor’s) salary; he had just installed in his home a jewel of a

recently imported cook who was afraid of policemen; and the morning

papers had published in full a speech he had made at a publishers’

banquet. Also there were echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a

splendid song that his charming young wife had sung to him before he

left his up-town apartment that morning. She was taking enthusiastic

interest in her music of late, practising early and diligently. When he

had complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly

hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign, tonic

medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly adown the

wards of the convalescent city.

While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between the rows of park benches

(already filling with vagrants and the guardians of lawless childhood)

he felt his sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he was about to be

panhandled, he turned a cold and unprofitable face, and saw that his

captor was—Dawe—Shackleford Dawe, dingy, almost ragged, the genteel

scarcely visible in him through the deeper lines of the shabby.

While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight

biography of Dawe is offered.

He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook’s old acquaintances. At

one time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe had some

money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment house near

Westbrook’s. The two families often went to theatres and dinners

together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became “dearest” friends. Then

one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself,

ingurgitated Dawe’s capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park

neighborhood where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one’s

trunk under eight-branched chandeliers and opposite Carrara marble

mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor. Dawe thought to live by

writing fiction. Now and then he sold a story. He submitted many to

Westbrook. The _Minerva_ printed one or two of them; the rest were

returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious personal letter

with each rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for

considering it unavailable. Editor Westbrook had his own clear

conception of what constituted good fiction. So had Dawe. Mrs. Dawe was

mainly concerned about the constituents of the scanty dishes of food

that she managed to scrape together. One day Dawe had been spouting to

her about the excellencies of certain French writers. At dinner they

sat down to a dish that a hungry schoolboy could have encompassed at a

gulp. Dawe commented.

“It’s Maupassant hash,” said Mrs. Dawe. “It may not be art, but I do

wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella

Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I’m hungry.”

As far as this from success was Shackleford Dawe when he plucked Editor

Westbrook’s sleeve in Madison Square. That was the first time the

editor had seen Dawe in several months.

“Why, Shack, is this you?” said Westbrook, somewhat awkwardly, for the

form of his phrase seemed to touch upon the other’s changed appearance.

“Sit down for a minute,” said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve. “This is my

office. I can’t come to yours, looking as I do. Oh, sit down—you won’t

be disgraced. Those half-plucked birds on the other benches will take

you for a swell porch-climber. They won’t know you are only an editor.”

“Smoke, Shack?” said Editor Westbrook, sinking cautiously upon the

virulent green bench. He always yielded gracefully when he did yield.

Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a sunperch, or a

girl pecks at a chocolate cream.

“I have just—” began the editor.

“Oh, I know; don’t finish,” said Dawe. “Give me a match. You have just

ten minutes to spare. How did you manage to get past my office-boy and

invade my sanctum? There he goes now, throwing his club at a dog that

couldn’t read the ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs.”

“How goes the writing?” asked the editor.

“Look at me,” said Dawe, “for your answer. Now don’t put on that

embarrassed, friendly-but-honest look and ask me why I don’t get a job

as a wine agent or a cab driver. I’m in the fight to a finish. I know I

can write good fiction and I’ll force you fellows to admit it yet. I’ll

make you change the spelling of ‘regrets’ to ‘c-h-e-q-u-e’ before I’m

done with you.”

Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with a sweetly

sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, skeptical expression—the

copyrighted expression of the editor beleagured by the unavailable

contributor.

“Have you read the last story I sent you—‘The Alarum of the Soul’?”

asked Dawe.

“Carefully. I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did. It had

some good points. I was writing you a letter to send with it when it

goes back to you. I regret—”

“Never mind the regrets,” said Dawe, grimly. “There’s neither salve nor

sting in ’em any more. What I want to know is _why_. Come now; out with

the good points first.”

“The story,” said Westbrook, deliberately, after a suppressed sigh, “is

written around an almost original plot. Characterization—the best you

have done. Construction—almost as good, except for a few weak joints

which might be strengthened by a few changes and touches. It was a good

story, except—”

“I can write English, can’t I?” interrupted Dawe.

“I have always told you,” said the editor, “that you had a style.”

“Then the trouble is—”

“Same old thing,” said Editor Westbrook. “You work up to your climax

like an artist. And then you turn yourself into a photographer. I don’t

know what form of obstinate madness possesses you, but that is what you

do with everything that you write. No, I will retract the comparison

with the photographer. Now and then photography, in spite of its

impossible perspective, manages to record a fleeting glimpse of truth.

But you spoil every dénouement by those flat, drab, obliterating

strokes of your brush that I have so often complained of. If you would

rise to the literary pinnacle of your dramatic senses, and paint them

in the high colors that art requires, the postman would leave fewer

bulky, self-addressed envelopes at your door.”

“Oh, fiddles and footlights!” cried Dawe, derisively. “You’ve got that

old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet. When the man with the black

mustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie you are bound to have the mother

kneel and raise her hands in the spotlight and say: ‘May high heaven

witness that I will rest neither night nor day till the heartless

villain that has stolen me child feels the weight of another’s

vengeance!’”

Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency.

“I think,” said he, “that in real life the woman would express herself

in those words or in very similar ones.”

“Not in a six hundred nights’ run anywhere but on the stage,” said Dawe

hotly. “I’ll tell you what she’d say in real life. She’d say: ‘What!

Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! It’s one trouble after

another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to the police-station.

Why wasn’t somebody looking after her, I’d like to know? For God’s

sake, get out of my way or I’ll never get ready. Not that hat—the brown

one with the velvet bows. Bessie must have been crazy; she’s usually

shy of strangers. Is that too much powder? Lordy! How I’m upset!’

“That’s the way she’d talk,” continued Dawe. “People in real life don’t

fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They simply can’t

do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the same

vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up their words and ideas

a little more, that’s all.”

“Shack,” said Editor Westbrook impressively, “did you ever pick up the

mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of a street

car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the distracted

mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of grief and

despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?”

“I never did,” said Dawe. “Did you?”

“Well, no,” said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. “But I can well

imagine what she would say.”

“So can I,” said Dawe.

And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play the

oracle and silence his opinionated contributor. It was not for an

unarrived fictionist to dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and

heroines of the _Minerva Magazine_, contrary to the theories of the

editor thereof.

“My dear Shack,” said he, “if I know anything of life I know that every

sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls forth an

apposite, concordant, conformable and proportionate expression of

feeling. How much of this inevitable accord between expression and

feeling should be attributed to nature, and how much to the influence

of art, it would be difficult to say. The sublimely terrible roar of

the lioness that has been deprived of her cubs is dramatically as far

above her customary whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent

utterances of Lear are above the level of his senile vaporings. But it

is also true that all men and women have what may be called a

sub-conscious dramatic sense that is awakened by a sufficiently deep

and powerful emotion—a sense unconsciously acquired from literature and

the stage that prompts them to express those emotions in language

befitting their importance and histrionic value.”

“And in the name of the seven sacred saddle-blankets of Sagittarius,

where did the stage and literature get the stunt?” asked Dawe.

“From life,” answered the editor, triumphantly.

The story writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently but

dumbly. He was beggared for words with which to formulate adequately

his dissent.

On a bench nearby a frowzy loafer opened his red eyes and perceived

that his moral support was due a downtrodden brother.

“Punch him one, Jack,” he called hoarsely to Dawe. “W’at’s he come

makin’ a noise like a penny arcade for amongst gen’lemen that comes in

the square to set and think?”

Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of leisure.

“Tell me,” asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, “what especial faults in

‘The Alarum of the Soul’ caused you to throw it down?”

“When Gabriel Murray,” said Westbrook, “goes to his telephone and is

told that his fiancée has been shot by a burglar, he says—I do not

recall the exact words, but—”

“I do,” said Dawe. “He says: ‘Damn Central; she always cuts me off.’

(And then to his friend) ‘Say, Tommy, does a thirty-two bullet make a

big hole? It’s kind of hard luck, ain’t it? Could you get me a drink

from the sideboard, Tommy? No; straight; nothing on the side.’”

“And again,” continued the editor, without pausing for argument, “when

Berenice opens the letter from her husband informing her that he has

fled with the manicure girl, her words are—let me see—”

“She says,” interposed the author: “‘Well, what do you think of that!’”

“Absurdly inappropriate words,” said Westbrook, “presenting an

anti-climax—plunging the story into hopeless bathos. Worse yet; they

mirror life falsely. No human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms

when confronted by sudden tragedy.”

“Wrong,” said Dawe, closing his unshaven jaws doggedly. “I say no man

or woman ever spouts ‘high-falutin’ talk when they go up against a real

climax. They talk naturally and a little worse.”

The editor rose from the bench with his air of indulgence and inside

information.

“Say, Westbrook,” said Dawe, pinning him by the lapel, “would you have

accepted ‘The Alarum of the Soul’ if you had believed that the actions

and words of the characters were true to life in the parts of the story

that we discussed?”

“It is very likely that I would, if I believed that way,” said the

editor. “But I have explained to you that I do not.”

“If I could prove to you that I am right?”

“I’m sorry, Shack, but I’m afraid I haven’t time to argue any further

just now.”

“I don’t want to argue,” said Dawe. “I want to demonstrate to you from

life itself that my view is the correct one.”

“How could you do that?” asked Westbrook, in a surprised tone.

“Listen,” said the writer, seriously. “I have thought of a way. It is

important to me that my theory of true-to-life fiction be recognized as

correct by the magazines. I’ve fought for it for three years, and I’m

down to my last dollar, with two months’ rent due.”

“I have applied the opposite of your theory,” said the editor, “in

selecting the fiction for the _Minerva Magazine_. The circulation has

gone up from ninety thousand to—”

“Four hundred thousand,” said Dawe. “Whereas it should have been

boosted to a million.”

“You said something to me just now about demonstrating your pet

theory.”

“I will. If you’ll give me about half an hour of your time I’ll prove

to you that I am right. I’ll prove it by Louise.”

“Your wife!” exclaimed Westbrook. “How?”

“Well, not exactly by her, but _with_ her,” said Dawe. “Now, you know

how devoted and loving Louise has always been. She thinks I’m the only

genuine preparation on the market that bears the old doctor’s

signature. She’s been fonder and more faithful than ever, since I’ve

been cast for the neglected genius part.”

“Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion,” agreed the

editor. “I remember what inseparable friends she and Mrs. Westbrook

once were. We are both lucky chaps, Shack, to have such wives. You must

bring Mrs. Dawe up some evening soon, and we’ll have one of those

informal chafing-dish suppers that we used to enjoy so much.”

“Later,” said Dawe. “When I get another shirt. And now I’ll tell you my

scheme. When I was about to leave home after breakfast—if you can call

tea and oatmeal breakfast—Louise told me she was going to visit her

aunt in Eighty-ninth Street. She said she would return at three

o’clock. She is always on time to a minute. It is now—”

Dawe glanced toward the editor’s watch pocket.

“Twenty-seven minutes to three,” said Westbrook, scanning his

time-piece.

“We have just enough time,” said Dawe. “We will go to my flat at once.

I will write a note, address it to her and leave it on the table where

she will see it as she enters the door. You and I will be in the

dining-room concealed by the portières. In that note I’ll say that I

have fled from her forever with an affinity who understands the needs

of my artistic soul as she never did. When she reads it we will observe

her actions and hear her words. Then we will know which theory is the

correct one—yours or mine.”

“Oh, never!” exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. “That would be

inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have Mrs. Dawe’s feelings

played upon in such a manner.”

“Brace up,” said the writer. “I guess I think as much of her as you do.

It’s for her benefit as well as mine. I’ve got to get a market for my

stories in some way. It won’t hurt Louise. She’s healthy and sound. Her

heart goes as strong as a ninety-eight-cent watch. It’ll last for only

a minute, and then I’ll step out and explain to her. You really owe it

to me to give me the chance, Westbrook.”

Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half willingly. And in

the half of him that consented lurked the vivisectionist that is in all

of us. Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his

place. Pity ’tis that there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs to

go around.

The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried eastward and

then to the south until they arrived in the Gramercy neighborhood.

Within its high iron railings the little park had put on its smart coat

of vernal green, and was admiring itself in its fountain mirror.

Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling houses, shells of a

bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the forgotten doings

of the vanished quality. _Sic transit gloria urbis_.

A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor again

eastward, then, after covering a short distance, into a lofty but

narrow flathouse burdened with a floridly over-decorated façade. To the

fifth story they toiled, and Dawe, panting, pushed his latch-key into

the door of one of the front flats.

When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feelings of pity, how

meanly and meagerly the rooms were furnished.

“Get a chair, if you can find one,” said Dawe, “while I hunt up pen and

ink. Hello, what’s this? Here’s a note from Louise. She must have left

it there when she went out this morning.”

He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre-table and tore it open.

He began to read the letter that he drew out of it; and once having

begun it aloud he so read it through to the end. These are the words

that Editor Westbrook heard:

“DEAR SHACKLEFORD:

By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles away and

still a-going. I’ve got a place in the chorus of the Occidental

Opera Co., and we start on the road to-day at twelve o’clock. I

didn’t want to starve to death, and so I decided to make my own

living. I’m not coming back. Mrs. Westbrook is going with me. She

said she was tired of living with a combination phonograph, iceberg

and dictionary, and she’s not coming back, either. We’ve been

practising the songs and dances for two months on the quiet. I hope

you will be successful, and get along all right! Good-bye.

“LOUISE.”

Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his trembling hands, and

cried out in a deep, vibrating voice:

_“My God, why hast thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is false,

then let Thy Heaven’s fairest gifts, faith and love, become the jesting

by-words of traitors and fiends!”_

Editor Westbrook’s glasses fell to the floor. The fingers of one hand

fumbled with a button on his coat as he blurted between his pale lips:

_“Say, Shack, ain’t that a hell of a note? Wouldn’t that knock you off

your perch, Shack? Ain’t it hell, now, Shack—ain’t it?”_

XX

PAST ONE AT ROONEY’S

Only on the lower East Side of New York do the houses of Capulet and

Montagu survive. There they do not fight by the book of arithmetic. If

you but bite your thumb at an upholder of your opposing house you have

work cut out for your steel. On Broadway you may drag your man along a

dozen blocks by his nose, and he will only bawl for the watch; but in

the domain of the East Side Tybalts and Mercutios you must observe the

niceties of deportment to the wink of any eyelash and to an inch of

elbow room at the bar when its patrons include foes of your house and

kin.

So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork McManus, drifted

into Dutch Mike’s for a stein of beer, and came upon a bunch of

Montagus making merry with the suds, he began to observe the strictest

parliamentary rules. Courtesy forbade his leaving the saloon with his

thirst unslaked; caution steered him to a place at the bar where the

mirror supplied the cognizance of the enemy’s movements that his

indifferent gaze seemed to disdain; experience whispered to him that

the finger of trouble would be busy among the chattering steins at

Dutch Mike’s that night. Close by his side drew Brick Cleary, his

Mercutio, companion of his perambulations. Thus they stood, four of the

Mulberry Hill Gang and two of the Dry Dock Gang, minding their P’s and

Q’s so solicitously that Dutch Mike kept one eye on his customers and

the other on an open space beneath his bar in which it was his custom

to seek safety whenever the ominous politeness of the rival

associations congealed into the shapes of bullets and cold steel.

But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry Hills and the Dry

Docks. We must to Rooney’s, where, on the most blighted dead branch of

the tree of life, a little pale orchid shall bloom.

Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known who first

overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the consequences were

immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a Dewey-like

swiftness, got an eight-inch gun swung round from his hurricane deck.

But McManus’s simile must be the torpedo. He glided in under the guns

and slipped a scant three inches of knife blade between the ribs of the

Mulberry Hill cruiser. Meanwhile Brick Cleary, a devotee to strategy,

had skimmed across the lunch counter and thrown the switch of the

electrics, leaving the combat to be waged by the light of gunfire

alone. Dutch Mike crawled from his haven and ran into the street crying

for the watch instead of for a Shakespeare to immortalize the Cimmerian

shindy.

The cop came, and found a prostrate, bleeding Montagu supported by

three distrait and reticent followers of the House. Faithful to the

ethics of the gangs, no one knew whence the hurt came. There was no

Capulet to be seen.

“Raus mit der interrogatories,” said Buck Malone to the officer. “Sure

I know who done it. I always manages to get a bird’s eye view of any

guy that comes up an’ makes a show case for a hardware store out of me.

No. I’m not telling you his name. I’ll settle with um meself. Wow—ouch!

Easy, boys! Yes, I’ll attend to his case meself. I’m not making any

complaint.”

At midnight McManus strolled around a pile of lumber near an East Side

dock, and lingered in the vicinity of a certain water plug. Brick

Cleary drifted casually to the trysting place ten minutes later. “He’ll

maybe not croak,” said Brick; “and he won’t tell, of course. But Dutch

Mike did. He told the police he was tired of having his place shot up.

It’s unhandy just now, because Tim Corrigan’s in Europe for a week’s

end with Kings. He’ll be back on the _Kaiser Williams_ next Friday.

You’ll have to duck out of sight till then. Tim’ll fix it up all right

for us when he comes back.”

This goes to explain why Cork McManus went into Rooney’s one night and

there looked upon the bright, stranger face of Romance for the first

time in his precarious career.

Until Tim Corrigan should return from his jaunt among Kings and Princes

and hold up his big white finger in private offices, it was unsafe for

Cork in any of the old haunts of his gang. So he lay, perdu, in the

high rear room of a Capulet, reading pink sporting sheets and cursing

the slow paddle wheels of the _Kaiser Wilhelm_.

It was on Thursday evening that Cork’s seclusion became intolerable to

him. Never a hart panted for water fountain as he did for the cool

touch of a drifting stein, for the firm security of a foot-rail in the

hollow of his shoe and the quiet, hearty challenges of friendship and

repartee along and across the shining bars. But he must avoid the

district where he was known. The cops were looking for him everywhere,

for news was scarce, and the newspapers were harping again on the

failure of the police to suppress the gangs. If they got him before

Corrigan came back, the big white finger could not be uplifted; it

would be too late then. But Corrigan would be home the next day, so he

felt sure there would be small danger in a little excursion that night

among the crass pleasures that represented life to him.

At half-past twelve McManus stood in a darkish cross-town street

looking up at the name “Rooney’s,” picked out by incandescent lights

against a signboard over a second-story window. He had heard of the

place as a tough “hang-out”; with its frequenters and its locality he

was unfamiliar. Guided by certain unerring indications common to all

such resorts, he ascended the stairs and entered the large room over

the café.

Here were some twenty or thirty tables, at this time about half-filled

with Rooney’s guests. Waiters served drinks. At one end a human pianola

with drugged eyes hammered the keys with automatic and furious

unprecision. At merciful intervals a waiter would roar or squeak a

song—songs full of “Mr. Johnsons” and “babes” and “coons”—historical

word guaranties of the genuineness of African melodies composed by red

waistcoated young gentlemen, natives of the cotton fields and rice

swamps of West Twenty-eighth Street.

For one brief moment you must admire Rooney with me as he receives,

seats, manipulates, and chaffs his guests. He is twenty-nine. He has

Wellington’s nose, Dante’s chin, the cheek-bones of an Iroquois, the

smile of Talleyrand, Corbett’s foot work, and the poise of an

eleven-year-old East Side Central Park Queen of the May. He is assisted

by a lieutenant known as Frank, a pudgy, easy chap, swell-dressed, who

goes among the tables seeing that dull care does not intrude. Now, what

is there about Rooney’s to inspire all this pother? It is more

respectable by daylight; stout ladies with children and mittens and

bundles and unpedigreed dogs drop up of afternoons for a stein and a

chat. Even by gaslight the diversions are melancholy i’ the mouth—drink

and rag-time, and an occasional surprise when the waiter swabs the suds

from under your sticky glass. There is an answer. Transmigration! The

soul of Sir Walter Raleigh has traveled from beneath his slashed

doublet to a kindred home under Rooney’s visible plaid waistcoat.

Rooney’s is twenty years ahead of the times. Rooney has removed the

embargo. Rooney has spread his cloak upon the soggy crossing of public

opinion, and any Elizabeth who treads upon it is as much a queen as

another. Attend to the revelation of the secret. In Rooney’s ladies may

smoke!

McManus sat down at a vacant table. He paid for the glass of beer that

he ordered, tilted his narrow-brimmed derby to the back of his

brick-dust head, twined his feet among the rungs of his chair, and

heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost

soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste. The sham

gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious,

joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the

hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence

of well-clothed and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney’s removal of the

restrictions laid upon the weed, the familiar blended odors of soaked

lemon peel, flat beer, and _peau d’Espagne_—all these were manna to

Cork McManus, hungry for his week in the desert of the Capulet’s high

rear room.

A girl, alone, entered Rooney’s, glanced around with leisurely

swiftness, and sat opposite McManus at his table. Her eyes rested upon

him for two seconds in the look with which woman reconnoitres all men

whom she for the first time confronts. In that space of time she will

decide upon one of two things—either to scream for the police, or that

she may marry him later on.

Her brief inspection concluded, the girl laid on the table a worn red

morocco shopping bag with the inevitable top-gallant sail of frayed

lace handkerchief flying from a corner of it. After she had ordered a

small beer from the immediate waiter she took from her bag a box of

cigarettes and lighted one with slightly exaggerated ease of manner.

Then she looked again in the eyes of Cork McManus and smiled.

Instantly the doom of each was sealed.

The unqualified desire of a man to buy clothes and build fires for a

woman for a whole lifetime at first sight of her is not uncommon among

that humble portion of humanity that does not care for Bradstreet or

coats-of-arms or Shaw’s plays. Love at first sight has occurred a time

or two in high life; but, as a rule, the extempore mania is to be found

among unsophisticated creatures such as the dove, the blue-tailed

dingbat, and the ten-dollar-a-week clerk. Poets, subscribers to all

fiction magazines, and schatchens, take notice.

With the exchange of the mysterious magnetic current came to each of

them the instant desire to lie, pretend, dazzle and deceive, which is

the worst thing about the hypocritical disorder known as love.

“Have another beer?” suggested Cork. In his circle the phrase was

considered to be a card, accompanied by a letter of introduction and

references.

“No, thanks,” said the girl, raising her eyebrows and choosing her

conventional words carefully. “I—merely dropped in for—a slight

refreshment.” The cigarette between her fingers seemed to require

explanation. “My aunt is a Russian lady,” she concluded, “and we often

have a post perannual cigarette after dinner at home.”

“Cheese it!” said Cork, whom society airs oppressed. “Your fingers are

as yellow as mine.”

“Say,” said the girl, blazing upon him with low-voiced indignation,

“what do you think I am? Say, who do you think you are talking to?

What?”

She was pretty to look at. Her eyes were big, brown, intrepid and

bright. Under her flat sailor hat, planted jauntily on one side, her

crinkly, tawny hair parted and was drawn back, low and massy, in a

thick, pendant knot behind. The roundness of girlhood still lingered in

her chin and neck, but her cheeks and fingers were thinning slightly.

She looked upon the world with defiance, suspicion, and sullen wonder.

Her smart, short tan coat was soiled and expensive. Two inches below

her black dress dropped the lowest flounce of a heliotrope silk

underskirt.

“Beg your pardon,” said Cork, looking at her admiringly. “I didn’t mean

anything. Sure, it’s no harm to smoke, Maudy.”

“Rooney’s,” said the girl, softened at once by his amends, “is the only

place I know where a lady can smoke. Maybe it ain’t a nice habit, but

aunty lets us at home. And my name ain’t Maudy, if you please; it’s

Ruby Delamere.”

“That’s a swell handle,” said Cork approvingly. “Mine’s

McManus—Cor—er—Eddie McManus.”

“Oh, you can’t help that,” laughed Ruby. “Don’t apologize.”

Cork looked seriously at the big clock on Rooney’s wall. The girl’s

ubiquitous eyes took in the movement.

“I know it’s late,” she said, reaching for her bag; “but you know how

you want a smoke when you want one. Ain’t Rooney’s all right? I never

saw anything wrong here. This is twice I’ve been in. I work in a

bookbindery on Third Avenue. A lot of us girls have been working

overtime three nights a week. They won’t let you smoke there, of

course. I just dropped in here on my way home for a puff. Ain’t it all

right in here? If it ain’t, I won’t come any more.”

“It’s a little bit late for you to be out alone anywhere,” said Cork.

“I’m not wise to this particular joint; but anyhow you don’t want to

have your picture taken in it for a present to your Sunday School

teacher. Have one more beer, and then say I take you home.”

“But I don’t know you,” said the girl, with fine scrupulosity. “I don’t

accept the company of gentlemen I ain’t acquainted with. My aunt never

would allow that.”

“Why,” said Cork McManus, pulling his ear, “I’m the latest thing in

suitings with side vents and bell skirt when it comes to escortin’ a

lady. You bet you’ll find me all right, Ruby. And I’ll give you a tip

as to who I am. My governor is one of the hottest cross-buns of the

Wall Street push. Morgan’s cab horse casts a shoe every time the old

man sticks his head out the window. Me! Well, I’m in trainin’ down the

Street. The old man’s goin’ to put a seat on the Stock Exchange in my

stockin’ my next birthday. But it all sounds like a lemon to me. What I

like is golf and yachtin’ and—er—well, say a corkin’ fast ten-round

bout between welter-weights with walkin’ gloves.”

“I guess you can walk to the door with me,” said the girl hesitatingly,

but with a certain pleased flutter. “Still I never heard anything extra

good about Wall Street brokers, or sports who go to prize fights,

either. Ain’t you got any other recommendations?”

“I think you’re the swellest looker I’ve had my lamps on in little old

New York,” said Cork impressively.

“That’ll be about enough of that, now. Ain’t you the kidder!” She

modified her chiding words by a deep, long, beaming, smile-embellished

look at her cavalier. “We’ll drink our beer before we go, ha?”

A waiter sang. The tobacco smoke grew denser, drifting and rising in

spirals, waves, tilted layers, cumulus clouds, cataracts and suspended

fogs like some fifth element created from the ribs of the ancient four.

Laughter and chat grew louder, stimulated by Rooney’s liquids and

Rooney’s gallant hospitality to Lady Nicotine.

One o’clock struck. Down-stairs there was a sound of closing and

locking doors. Frank pulled down the green shades of the front windows

carefully. Rooney went below in the dark hall and stood at the front

door, his cigarette cached in the hollow of his hand. Thenceforth

whoever might seek admittance must present a countenance familiar to

Rooney’s hawk’s eye—the countenance of a true sport.

Cork McManus and the bookbindery girl conversed absorbedly, with their

elbows on the table. Their glasses of beer were pushed to one side,

scarcely touched, with the foam on them sunken to a thin white scum.

Since the stroke of one the stale pleasures of Rooney’s had become

renovated and spiced; not by any addition to the list of distractions,

but because from that moment the sweets became stolen ones. The

flattest glass of beer acquired the tang of illegality; the mildest

claret punch struck a knockout blow at law and order; the harmless and

genial company became outlaws, defying authority and rule. For after

the stroke of one in such places as Rooney’s, where neither bed nor

board is to be had, drink may not be set before the thirsty of the city

of the four million. It is the law.

“Say,” said Cork McManus, almost covering the table with his eloquent

chest and elbows, “was that dead straight about you workin’ in the

bookbindery and livin’ at home—and just happenin’ in here—and—and all

that spiel you gave me?”

“Sure it was,” answered the girl with spirit. “Why, what do you think?

Do you suppose I’d lie to you? Go down to the shop and ask ’em. I

handed it to you on the level.”

“On the dead level?” said Cork. “That’s the way I want it; because—”

“Because what?”

“I throw up my hands,” said Cork. “You’ve got me goin’. You’re the girl

I’ve been lookin’ for. Will you keep company with me, Ruby?”

“Would you like me to—Eddie?”

“Surest thing. But I wanted a straight story about—about yourself, you

know. When a fellow had a girl—a steady girl—she’s got to be all right,

you know. She’s got to be straight goods.”

“You’ll find I’ll be straight goods, Eddie.”

“Of course you will. I believe what you told me. But you can’t blame me

for wantin’ to find out. You don’t see many girls smokin’ cigarettes in

places like Rooney’s after midnight that are like you.”

The girl flushed a little and lowered her eyes. “I see that now,” she

said meekly. “I didn’t know how bad it looked. But I won’t do it any

more. And I’ll go straight home every night and stay there. And I’ll

give up cigarettes if you say so, Eddie—I’ll cut ’em out from this

minute on.”

Cork’s air became judicial, proprietary, condemnatory, yet sympathetic.

“A lady can smoke,” he decided, slowly, “at times and places. Why?

Because it’s bein’ a lady that helps her pull it off.”

“I’m going to quit. There’s nothing to it,” said the girl. She flicked

the stub of her cigarette to the floor.

“At times and places,” repeated Cork. “When I call round for you of

evenin’s we’ll hunt out a dark bench in Stuyvesant Square and have a

puff or two. But no more Rooney’s at one o’clock—see?”

“Eddie, do you really like me?” The girl searched his hard but frank

features eagerly with anxious eyes.

“On the dead level.”

“When are you coming to see me—where I live?”

“Thursday—day after to-morrow evenin’. That suit you?”

“Fine. I’ll be ready for you. Come about seven. Walk to the door with

me to-night and I’ll show you where I live. Don’t forget, now. And

don’t you go to see any other girls before then, mister! I bet you

will, though.”

“On the dead level,” said Cork, “you make ’em all look like rag-dolls

to me. Honest, you do. I know when I’m suited. On the dead level, I

do.”

Against the front door down-stairs repeated heavy blows were delivered.

The loud crashes resounded in the room above. Only a trip-hammer or a

policeman’s foot could have been the author of those sounds. Rooney

jumped like a bullfrog to a corner of the room, turned off the electric

lights and hurried swiftly below. The room was left utterly dark except

for the winking red glow of cigars and cigarettes. A second volley of

crashes came up from the assaulted door. A little, rustling, murmuring

panic moved among the besieged guests. Frank, cool, smooth, reassuring,

could be seen in the rosy glow of the burning tobacco, going from table

to table.

“All keep still!” was his caution. “Don’t talk or make any noise!

Everything will be all right. Now, don’t feel the slightest alarm.

We’ll take care of you all.”

Ruby felt across the table until Cork’s firm hand closed upon hers.

“Are you afraid, Eddie?” she whispered. “Are you afraid you’ll get a

free ride?”

“Nothin’ doin’ in the teeth-chatterin’ line,” said Cork. “I guess

Rooney’s been slow with his envelope. Don’t you worry, girly; I’ll look

out for you all right.”

Yet Mr. McManus’s ease was only skin- and muscle-deep. With the police

looking everywhere for Buck Malone’s assailant, and with Corrigan still

on the ocean wave, he felt that to be caught in a police raid would

mean an ended career for him. He wished he had remained in the high

rear room of the true Capulet reading the pink extras.

Rooney seemed to have opened the front door below and engaged the

police in conference in the dark hall. The wordless low growl of their

voices came up the stairway. Frank made a wireless news station of

himself at the upper door. Suddenly he closed the door, hurried to the

extreme rear of the room and lighted a dim gas jet.

“This way, everybody!” he called sharply. “In a hurry; but no noise,

please!”

The guests crowded in confusion to the rear. Rooney’s lieutenant swung

open a panel in the wall, overlooking the back yard, revealing a ladder

already placed for the escape.

“Down and out, everybody!” he commanded. “Ladies first! Less talking,

please! Don’t crowd! There’s no danger.”

Among the last, Cork and Ruby waited their turn at the open panel.

Suddenly she swept him aside and clung to his arm fiercely.

“Before we go out,” she whispered in his ear—“before anything happens,

tell me again, Eddie, do you l—do you really like me?”

“On the dead level,” said Cork, holding her close with one arm, “when

it comes to you, I’m all in.”

When they turned they found they were lost and in darkness. The last of

the fleeing customers had descended. Half way across the yard they bore

the ladder, stumbling, giggling, hurrying to place it against an

adjoining low building over the roof of which their only route to

safety.

“We may as well sit down,” said Cork grimly. “Maybe Rooney will stand

the cops off, anyhow.”

They sat at a table; and their hands came together again.

A number of men then entered the dark room, feeling their way about.

One of them, Rooney himself, found the switch and turned on the

electric light. The other man was a cop of the old régime—a big cop, a

thick cop, a fuming, abrupt cop—not a pretty cop. He went up to the

pair at the table and sneered familiarly at the girl.

“What are youse doin’ in here?” he asked.

“Dropped in for a smoke,” said Cork mildly.

“Had any drinks?”

“Not later than one o’clock.”

“Get out—quick!” ordered the cop. Then, “Sit down!” he countermanded.

He took off Cork’s hat roughly and scrutinized him shrewdly. “Your

name’s McManus.”

“Bad guess,” said Cork. “It’s Peterson.”

“Cork McManus, or something like that,” said the cop. “You put a knife

into a man in Dutch Mike’s saloon a week ago.”

“Aw, forget it!” said Cork, who perceived a shade of doubt in the

officer’s tones. “You’ve got my mug mixed with somebody else’s.”

“Have I? Well, you’ll come to the station with me, anyhow, and be

looked over. The description fits you all right.” The cop twisted his

fingers under Cork’s collar. “Come on!” he ordered roughly.

Cork glanced at Ruby. She was pale, and her thin nostrils quivered. Her

quick eye danced from one man’s face to the other as they spoke or

moved. What hard luck! Cork was thinking—Corrigan on the briny; and

Ruby met and lost almost within an hour! Somebody at the police station

would recognize him, without a doubt. Hard luck!

But suddenly the girl sprang up and hurled herself with both arms

extended against the cop. His hold on Cork’s collar was loosened and he

stumbled back two or three paces.

“Don’t go so fast, Maguire!” she cried in shrill fury. “Keep your hands

off my man! You know me, and you know I’m givin’ you good advice. Don’t

you touch him again! He’s not the guy you are lookin’ for—I’ll stand

for that.”

“See here, Fanny,” said the Cop, red and angry, “I’ll take you, too, if

you don’t look out! How do you know this ain’t the man I want? What are

you doing in here with him?”

“How do I know?” said the girl, flaming red and white by turns.

“Because I’ve known him a year. He’s mine. Oughtn’t I to know? And what

am I doin’ here with him? That’s easy.”

She stooped low and reached down somewhere into a swirl of flirted

draperies, heliotrope and black. An elastic snapped, she threw on the

table toward Cork a folded wad of bills. The money slowly straightened

itself with little leisurely jerks.

“Take that, Jimmy, and let’s go,” said the girl. “I’m declarin’ the

usual dividends, Maguire,” she said to the officer. “You had your usual

five-dollar graft at the usual corner at ten.”

“A lie!” said the cop, turning purple. “You go on my beat again and

I’ll arrest you every time I see you.”

“No, you won’t,” said the girl. “And I’ll tell you why. Witnesses saw

me give you the money to-night, and last week, too. I’ve been getting

fixed for you.”

Cork put the wad of money carefully into his pocket, and said: “Come

on, Fanny; let’s have some chop suey before we go home.”

“Clear out, quick, both of you, or I’ll—”

The cop’s bluster trailed away into inconsequentiality.

At the corner of the street the two halted. Cork handed back the money

without a word. The girl took it and slipped it slowly into her

hand-bag. Her expression was the same she had worn when she entered

Rooney’s that night—she looked upon the world with defiance, suspicion

and sullen wonder.

“I guess I might as well say good-bye here,” she said dully. “You won’t

want to see me again, of course. Will you—shake hands—Mr. McManus.”

“I mightn’t have got wise if you hadn’t give the snap away,” said Cork.

“Why did you do it?”

“You’d have been pinched if I hadn’t. That’s why. Ain’t that reason

enough?” Then she began to cry. “Honest, Eddie, I was goin’ to be the

best girl in the world. I hated to be what I am; I hated men; I was

ready almost to die when I saw you. And you seemed different from

everybody else. And when I found you liked me, too, why, I thought I’d

make you believe I was good, and I was goin’ to be good. When you asked

to come to my house and see me, why, I’d have died rather than do

anything wrong after that. But what’s the use of talking about it? I’ll

say good-by, if you will, Mr. McManus.”

Cork was pulling at his ear. “I knifed Malone,” said he. “I was the one

the cop wanted.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said the girl listlessly. “It didn’t make any

difference about that.”

“That was all hot air about Wall Street. I don’t do nothin’ but hang

out with a tough gang on the East Side.”

“That was all right, too,” repeated the girl. “It didn’t make any

difference.”

Cork straightened himself, and pulled his hat down low. “I could get a

job at O’Brien’s,” he said aloud, but to himself.

“Good-by,” said the girl.

“Come on,” said Cork, taking her arm. “I know a place.”

Two blocks away he turned with her up the steps of a red brick house

facing a little park.

“What house is this?” she asked, drawing back. “Why are you going in

there?”

A street lamp shone brightly in front. There was a brass nameplate at

one side of the closed front doors. Cork drew her firmly up the steps.

“Read that,” said he.

She looked at the name on the plate, and gave a cry between a moan and

a scream. “No, no, no, Eddie! Oh, my God, no! I won’t let you do

that—not now! Let me go! You shan’t do that! You can’t—you mus’n’t! Not

after you know! No, no! Come away quick! Oh, my God! Please, Eddie,

come!”

Half fainting, she reeled, and was caught in the bend of his arm.

Cork’s right hand felt for the electric button and pressed it long.

Another cop—how quickly they scent trouble when trouble is on the

wing!—came along, saw them, and ran up the steps. “Here! What are you

doing with that girl?” he called gruffly.

“She’ll be all right in a minute,” said Cork. “It’s a straight deal.”

“Reverend Jeremiah Jones,” read the cop from the door-plate with true

detective cunning.

“Correct,” said Cork. “On the dead level, we’re goin’ to get married.”

XXI

THE VENTURERS

Let the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the _Non Sequitur_

Limited, if it will; first you must take your seat in the observation

car “_Raison d’être_” for one moment. It is for no longer than to

consider a brief essay on the subject—let us call it: “What’s Around

the Corner.”

_Omne mundus in duas partes divisum est_—men who wear rubbers and pay

poll-taxes, and men who discover new continents. There are no more

continents to discover; but by the time overshoes are out of date and

the poll has developed into an income tax, the other half will be

paralleling the canals of Mars with radium railways.

Fortune, Chance, and Adventure are given as synonymous in the

dictionaries. To the knowing each has a different meaning. Fortune is a

prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk

in the shadows at the roadside. The face of Fortune is radiant and

alluring; that of Adventure is flushed and heroic. The face of Chance

is the beautiful countenance—perfect because vague and dream-born—that

we see in our tea-cups at breakfast while we growl over our chops and

toast.

The VENTURER is one who keeps his eye on the hedgerows and wayside

groves and meadows while he travels the road to Fortune. That is the

difference between him and the Adventurer. Eating the forbidden fruit

was the best record ever made by a Venturer. Trying to prove that it

happened is the highest work of the Adventuresome. To be either is

disturbing to the cosmogony of creation. So, as bracket-sawed and

city-directoried citizens, let us light our pipes, chide the children

and the cat, arrange ourselves in the willow rocker under the

flickering gas jet at the coolest window and scan this little tale of

two modern followers of Chance.

“Did you ever hear that story about the man from the West?” asked

Billinger, in the little dark-oak room to your left as you penetrate

the interior of the Powhatan Club.

“Doubtless,” said John Reginald Forster, rising and leaving the room.

Forster got his straw hat (straws will be in and maybe out again long

before this is printed) from the checkroom boy, and walked out of the

air (as Hamlet says). Billinger was used to having his stories insulted

and would not mind. Forster was in his favorite mood and wanted to go

away from anywhere. A man, in order to get on good terms with himself,

must have his opinions corroborated and his moods matched by some one

else. (I had written that “somebody”; but an A. D. T. boy who once took

a telegram for me pointed out that I could save money by using the

compound word. This is a vice versa case.)

Forster’s favorite mood was that of greatly desiring to be a follower

of Chance. He was a Venturer by nature, but convention, birth,

tradition and the narrowing influences of the tribe of Manhattan had

denied him full privilege. He had trodden all the main-traveled

thoroughfares and many of the side roads that are supposed to relieve

the tedium of life. But none had sufficed. The reason was that he knew

what was to be found at the end of every street. He knew from

experience and logic almost precisely to what end each digression from

routine must lead. He found a depressing monotony in all the variations

that the music of his sphere had grafted upon the tune of life. He had

not learned that, although the world was made round, the circle has

been squared, and that it’s true interest is to be in “What’s Around

the Corner.”

Forster walked abroad aimlessly from the Powhatan, trying not to tax

either his judgment or his desire as to what streets he traveled. He

would have been glad to lose his way if it were possible; but he had no

hope of that. Adventure and Fortune move at your beck and call in the

Greater City; but Chance is oriental. She is a veiled lady in a sedan

chair, protected by a special traffic squad of dragonians. Crosstown,

uptown, and downtown you may move without seeing her.

At the end of an hour’s stroll, Forster stood on a corner of a broad,

smooth avenue, looking disconsolately across it at a picturesque old

hotel softly but brilliantly lit. Disconsolately, because he knew that

he must dine; and dining in that hotel was no venture. It was one of

his favorite caravansaries, and so silent and swift would be the

service and so delicately choice the food, that he regretted the hunger

that must be appeased by the “dead perfection” of the place’s cuisine.

Even the music there seemed to be always playing _da capo_.

Fancy came to him that he would dine at some cheap, even dubious,

restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from all

countries of the world spread their national cookery for the omnivorous

American. Something might happen there out of the routine—he might come

upon a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question

without an answer, a cause without an effect, a gulf stream in life’s

salt ocean. He had not dressed for evening; he wore a dark business

suit that would not be questioned even where the waiters served the

spaghetti in their shirt sleeves.

So John Reginald Forster began to search his clothes for money; because

the more cheaply you dine, the more surely must you pay. All of the

thirteen pockets, large and small, of his business suit he explored

carefully and found not a penny. His bank book showed a balance of five

figures to his credit in the Old Ironsides Trust Company, but—

Forster became aware of a man nearby at his left hand who was really

regarding him with some amusement. He looked like any business man of

thirty or so, neatly dressed and standing in the attitude of one

waiting for a street car. But there was no car line on that avenue. So

his proximity and unconcealed curiosity seemed to Forster to partake of

the nature of a personal intrusion. But, as he was a consistent seeker

after “What’s Around the Corner,” instead of manifesting resentment he

only turned a half-embarrassed smile upon the other’s grin of

amusement.

“All in?” asked the intruder, drawing nearer.

“Seems so,” said Forster. “Now, I thought there was a dollar in—”

“Oh, I know,” said the other man, with a laugh. “But there wasn’t. I’ve

just been through the same process myself, as I was coming around the

corner. I found in an upper vest pocket—I don’t know how they got

there—exactly two pennies. You know what kind of a dinner exactly two

pennies will buy!”

“You haven’t dined, then?” asked Forster.

“I have not. But I would like to. Now, I’ll make you a proposition. You

look like a man who would take up one. Your clothes look neat and

respectable. Excuse personalities. I think mine will pass the scrutiny

of a head waiter, also. Suppose we go over to that hotel and dine

together. We will choose from the menu like millionaires—or, if you

prefer, like gentlemen in moderate circumstances dining extravagantly

for once. When we have finished we will match with my two pennies to

see which of us will stand the brunt of the house’s displeasure and

vengeance. My name is Ives. I think we have lived in the same station

of life—before our money took wings.”

“You’re on,” said Forster, joyfully.

Here was a venture at least within the borders of the mysterious

country of Chance—anyhow, it promised something better than the stale

infestivity of a table d’hôte.

The two were soon seated at a corner table in the hotel dining room.

Ives chucked one of his pennies across the table to Forster.

“Match for which of us gives the order,” he said.

Forster lost.

Ives laughed and began to name liquids and viands to the waiter with

the absorbed but calm deliberation of one who was to the menu born.

Forster, listening, gave his admiring approval of the order.

“I am a man,” said Ives, during the oysters, “Who has made a lifetime

search after the to-be-continued-in-our-next. I am not like the

ordinary adventurer who strikes for a coveted prize. Nor yet am I like

a gambler who knows he is either to win or lose a certain set stake.

What I want is to encounter an adventure to which I can predict no

conclusion. It is the breath of existence to me to dare Fate in its

blindest manifestations. The world has come to run so much by rote and

gravitation that you can enter upon hardly any footpath of chance in

which you do not find signboards informing you of what you may expect

at its end. I am like the clerk in the Circumlocution Office who always

complained bitterly when any one came in to ask information. ‘He wanted

to _know_, you know!’ was the kick he made to his fellow-clerks. Well,

I don’t want to know, I don’t want to reason, I don’t want to guess—I

want to bet my hand without seeing it.”

“I understand,” said Forster delightedly. “I’ve often wanted the way I

feel put into words. You’ve done it. I want to take chances on what’s

coming. Suppose we have a bottle of Moselle with the next course.”

“Agreed,” said Ives. “I’m glad you catch my idea. It will increase the

animosity of the house toward the loser. If it does not weary you, we

will pursue the theme. Only a few times have I met a true venturer—one

who does not ask a schedule and map from Fate when he begins a journey.

But, as the world becomes more civilized and wiser, the more difficult

it is to come upon an adventure the end of which you cannot foresee. In

the Elizabethan days you could assault the watch, wring knockers from

doors and have a jolly set-to with the blades in any convenient angle

of a wall and ‘get away with it.’ Nowadays, if you speak

disrespectfully to a policeman, all that is left to the most romantic

fancy is to conjecture in what particular police station he will land

you.”

“I know—I know,” said Forster, nodding approval.

“I returned to New York to-day,” continued Ives, “from a three years’

ramble around the globe. Things are not much better abroad than they

are at home. The whole world seems to be overrun by conclusions. The

only thing that interests me greatly is a premise. I’ve tried shooting

big game in Africa. I know what an express rifle will do at so many

yards; and when an elephant or a rhinoceros falls to the bullet, I

enjoy it about as much as I did when I was kept in after school to do a

sum in long division on the blackboard.”

“I know—I know,” said Forster.

“There might be something in aeroplanes,” went on Ives, reflectively.

“I’ve tried ballooning; but it seems to be merely a cut-and-dried

affair of wind and ballast.”

“Women,” suggested Forster, with a smile.

“Three months ago,” said Ives. “I was pottering around in one of the

bazaars in Constantinople. I noticed a lady, veiled, of course, but

with a pair of especially fine eyes visible, who was examining some

amber and pearl ornaments at one of the booths. With her was an

attendant—a big Nubian, as black as coal. After a while the attendant

drew nearer to me by degrees and slipped a scrap of paper into my hand.

I looked at it when I got a chance. On it was scrawled hastily in

pencil: ‘The arched gate of the Nightingale Garden at nine to-night.’

Does that appear to you to be an interesting premise, Mr. Forster?”

“I made inquiries and learned that the Nightingale Garden was the

property of an old Turk—a grand vizier, or something of the sort. Of

course I prospected for the arched gate and was there at nine. The same

Nubian attendant opened the gate promptly on time, and I went inside

and sat on a bench by a perfumed fountain with the veiled lady. We had

quite an extended chat. She was Myrtle Thompson, a lady journalist, who

was writing up the Turkish harems for a Chicago newspaper. She said she

noticed the New York cut of my clothes in the bazaar and wondered if I

couldn’t work something into the metropolitan papers about it.”

“I see,” said Forster. “I see.”

“I’ve canoed through Canada,” said Ives, “down many rapids and over

many falls. But I didn’t seem to get what I wanted out of it because I

knew there were only two possible outcomes—I would either go to the

bottom or arrive at the sea level. I’ve played all games at cards; but

the mathematicians have spoiled that sport by computing the

percentages. I’ve made acquaintances on trains, I’ve answered

advertisements, I’ve rung strange door-bells, I’ve taken every chance

that presented itself; but there has always been the conventional

ending—the logical conclusion to the premise.”

“I know,” repeated Forster. “I’ve felt it all. But I’ve had few chances

to take my chance at chances. Is there any life so devoid of

impossibilities as life in this city? There seems to be a myriad of

opportunities for testing the undeterminable; but not one in a thousand

fails to land you where you expected it to stop. I wish the subways and

street cars disappointed one as seldom.”

“The sun has risen,” said Ives, “on the Arabian nights. There are no

more caliphs. The fisherman’s vase is turned to a vacuum bottle,

warranted to keep any genie boiling or frozen for forty-eight hours.

Life moves by rote. Science has killed adventure. There are no more

opportunities such as Columbus and the man who ate the first oyster

had. The only certain thing is that there is nothing uncertain.”

“Well,” said Forster, “my experience has been the limited one of a city

man. I haven’t seen the world as you have; but it seems that we view it

with the same opinion. But, I tell you I am grateful for even this

little venture of ours into the borders of the haphazard. There may be

at least one breathless moment when the bill for the dinner is

presented. Perhaps, after all, the pilgrims who traveled without scrip

or purse found a keener taste to life than did the knights of the Round

Table who rode abroad with a retinue and King Arthur’s certified checks

in the lining of their helmets. And now, if you’ve finished your

coffee, suppose we match one of your insufficient coins for the

impending blow of Fate. What have I up?”

“Heads,” called Ives.

“Heads it is,” said Forster, lifting his hand. “I lose. We forgot to

agree upon a plan for the winner to escape. I suggest that when the

waiter comes you make a remark about telephoning to a friend. I will

hold the fort and the dinner check long enough for you to get your hat

and be off. I thank you for an evening out of the ordinary, Mr. Ives,

and wish we might have others.”

“If my memory is not at fault,” said Ives, laughing, “the nearest

police station is in MacDougal Street. I have enjoyed the dinner, too,

let me assure you.”

Forster crooked his finger for the waiter. Victor, with a locomotive

effort that seemed to owe more to pneumatics than to pedestrianism,

glided to the table and laid the card, face downward, by the loser’s

cup. Forster took it up and added the figures with deliberate care.

Ives leaned back comfortably in his chair.

“Excuse me,” said Forster; “but I thought you were going to ring Grimes

about that theatre party for Thursday night. Had you forgotten about

it?”

“Oh,” said Ives, settling himself more comfortably, “I can do that

later on. Get me a glass of water, waiter.”

“Want to be in at the death, do you?” asked Forster.

“I hope you don’t object,” said Ives, pleadingly. “Never in my life

have I seen a gentleman arrested in a public restaurant for swindling

it out of a dinner.”

“All right,” said Forster, calmly. “You are entitled to see a Christian

die in the arena as your _pousse-café_.”

Victor came with the glass of water and remained, with the disengaged

air of an inexorable collector.

Forster hesitated for fifteen seconds, and then took a pencil from his

pocket and scribbled his name on the dinner check. The waiter bowed and

took it away.

“The fact is,” said Forster, with a little embarrassed laugh, “I doubt

whether I’m what they call a ‘game sport,’ which means the same as a

‘soldier of Fortune.’ I’ll have to make a confession. I’ve been dining

at this hotel two or three times a week for more than a year. I always

sign my checks.” And then, with a note of appreciation in his voice:

“It was first-rate of you to stay to see me through with it when you

knew I had no money, and that you might be scooped in, too.”

“I guess I’ll confess, too,” said Ives, with a grin. “I own the hotel.

I don’t run it, of course, but I always keep a suite on the third floor

for my use when I happen to stray into town.”

He called a waiter and said: “Is Mr. Gilmore still behind the desk? All

right. Tell him that Mr. Ives is here, and ask him to have my rooms

made ready and aired.”

“Another venture cut short by the inevitable,” said Forster. “Is there

a conundrum without an answer in the next number? But let’s hold to our

subject just for a minute or two, if you will. It isn’t often that I

meet a man who understands the flaws I pick in existence. I am engaged

to be married a month from to-day.”

“I reserve comment,” said Ives.

“Right; I am going to add to the assertion. I am devotedly fond of the

lady; but I can’t decide whether to show up at the church or make a

sneak for Alaska. It’s the same idea, you know, that we were

discussing—it does for a fellow as far as possibilities are concerned.

Everybody knows the routine—you get a kiss flavored with Ceylon tea

after breakfast; you go to the office; you come back home and dress for

dinner—theatre twice a week—bills—moping around most evenings trying to

make conversation—a little quarrel occasionally—maybe sometimes a big

one, and a separation—or else a settling down into a middle-aged

contentment, which is worst of all.”

“I know,” said Ives, nodding wisely.

“It’s the dead certainty of the thing,” went on Forster, “that keeps me

in doubt. There’ll nevermore be anything around the corner.”

“Nothing after the ‘Little Church,’” said Ives. “I know.”

“Understand,” said Forster, “that I am in no doubt as to my feelings

toward the lady. I may say that I love her truly and deeply. But there

is something in the current that runs through my veins that cries out

against any form of the calculable. I do not know what I want; but I

know that I want it. I’m talking like an idiot, I suppose, but I’m sure

of what I mean.”

“I understand you,” said Ives, with a slow smile. “Well, I think I will

be going up to my rooms now. If you would dine with me here one evening

soon, Mr. Forster, I’d be glad.”

“Thursday?” suggested Forster.

“At seven, if it’s convenient,” answered Ives.

“Seven goes,” assented Forster.

At half-past eight Ives got into a cab and was driven to a number in

one of the correct West Seventies. His card admitted him to the

reception room of an old-fashioned house into which the spirits of

Fortune, Chance and Adventure had never dared to enter. On the walls

were the Whistler etchings, the steel engravings by

Oh-what’s-his-name?, the still-life paintings of the grapes and garden

truck with the watermelon seeds spilled on the table as natural as

life, and the Greuze head. It was a household. There were even brass

andirons. On a table was an album, half-morocco, with oxidized-silver

protections on the corners of the lids. A clock on the mantel ticked

loudly, with a warning click at five minutes to nine. Ives looked at it

curiously, remembering a time-piece in his grandmother’s home that gave

such a warning.

And then down the stairs and into the room came Mary Marsden. She was

twenty-four, and I leave her to your imagination. But I must say this

much—youth and health and simplicity and courage and greenish-violet

eyes are beautiful, and she had all these. She gave Ives her hand with

the sweet cordiality of an old friendship.

“You can’t think what a pleasure it is,” she said, “to have you drop in

once every three years or so.”

For half an hour they talked. I confess that I cannot repeat the

conversation. You will find it in books in the circulating library.

When that part of it was over, Mary said:

“And did you find what you wanted while you were abroad?”

“What I wanted?” said Ives.

“Yes. You know you were always queer. Even as a boy you wouldn’t play

marbles or baseball or any game with rules. You wanted to dive in water

where you didn’t know whether it was ten inches or ten feet deep. And

when you grew up you were just the same. We’ve often talked about your

peculiar ways.”

“I suppose I am an incorrigible,” said Ives. “I am opposed to the

doctrine of predestination, to the rule of three, gravitation,

taxation, and everything of the kind. Life has always seemed to me

something like a serial story would be if they printed above each

instalment a synopsis of _succeeding_ chapters.”

Mary laughed merrily.

“Bob Ames told us once,” she said, “of a funny thing you did. It was

when you and he were on a train in the South, and you got off at a town

where you hadn’t intended to stop just because the brakeman hung up a

sign in the end of the car with the name of the next station on it.”

“I remember,” said Ives. “That ‘next station’ has been the thing I’ve

always tried to get away from.”

“I know it,” said Mary. “And you’ve been very foolish. I hope you

didn’t find what you wanted not to find, or get off at the station

where there wasn’t any, or whatever it was you expected wouldn’t happen

to you during the three years you’ve been away.”

“There was something I wanted before I went away,” said Ives.

Mary looked in his eyes clearly, with a slight, but perfectly sweet

smile.

“There was,” she said. “You wanted me. And you could have had me, as

you very well know.”

Without replying, Ives let his gaze wander slowly about the room. There

had been no change in it since last he had been in it, three years

before. He vividly recalled the thoughts that had been in his mind

then. The contents of that room were as fixed, in their way, as the

everlasting hills. No change would ever come there except the

inevitable ones wrought by time and decay. That silver-mounted album

would occupy that corner of that table, those pictures would hang on

the walls, those chairs be found in their same places every morn and

noon and night while the household hung together. The brass andirons

were monuments to order and stability. Here and there were relics of a

hundred years ago which were still living mementos and would be for

many years to come. One going from and coming back to that house would

never need to forecast or doubt. He would find what he left, and leave

what he found. The veiled lady, Chance, would never lift her hand to

the knocker on the outer door.

And before him sat the lady who belonged in the room. Cool and sweet

and unchangeable she was. She offered no surprises. If one should pass

his life with her, though she might grow white-haired and wrinkled, he

would never perceive the change. Three years he had been away from her,

and she was still waiting for him as established and constant as the

house itself. He was sure that she had once cared for him. It was the

knowledge that she would always do so that had driven him away. Thus

his thoughts ran.

“I am going to be married soon,” said Mary.

On the next Thursday afternoon Forster came hurriedly to Ive’s hotel.

“Old man,” said he, “we’ll have to put that dinner off for a year or

so; I’m going abroad. The steamer sails at four. That was a great talk

we had the other night, and it decided me. I’m going to knock around

the world and get rid of that incubus that has been weighing on both

you and me—the terrible dread of knowing what’s going to happen. I’ve

done one thing that hurts my conscience a little; but I know it’s best

for both of us. I’ve written to the lady to whom I was engaged and

explained everything—told her plainly why I was leaving—that the

monotony of matrimony would never do for me. Don’t you think I was

right?”

“It is not for me to say,” answered Ives. “Go ahead and shoot elephants

if you think it will bring the element of chance into your life. We’ve

got to decide these things for ourselves. But I tell you one thing,

Forster, I’ve found the way. I’ve found out the biggest hazard in the

world—a game of chance that never is concluded, a venture that may end

in the highest heaven or the blackest pit. It will keep a man on edge

until the clods fall on his coffin, because he will never know—not

until his last day, and not then will he know. It is a voyage without a

rudder or compass, and you must be captain and crew and keep watch,

every day and night, yourself, with no one to relieve you. I have found

the VENTURE. Don’t bother yourself about leaving Mary Marsden, Forster.

I married her yesterday at noon.”

XXII

THE DUEL

The gods, lying beside their nectar on ’Lympus and peeping over the

edge of the cliff, perceive a difference in cities. Although it would

seem that to their vision towns must appear as large or small ant-hills

without special characteristics, yet it is not so. Studying the habits

of ants from so great a height should be but a mild diversion when

coupled with the soft drink that mythology tells us is their only

solace. But doubtless they have amused themselves by the comparison of

villages and towns; and it will be no news to them (nor, perhaps, to

many mortals), that in one particularity New York stands unique among

the cities of the world. This shall be the theme of a little story

addressed to the man who sits smoking with his Sabbath-slippered feet

on another chair, and to the woman who snatches the paper for a moment

while boiling greens or a narcotized baby leaves her free. With these I

love to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.

New York City is inhabited by 4,000,000 mysterious strangers; thus

beating Bird Centre by three millions and half a dozen nine’s. They

came here in various ways and for many reasons—Hendrik Hudson, the art

schools, green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers’ convention,

the Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage, cheap excursion

rates, brains, personal column ads., heavy walking shoes, ambition,

freight trains—all these have had a hand in making up the population.

But every man Jack when he first sets foot on the stones of Manhattan

has got to fight. He has got to fight at once until either he or his

adversary wins. There is no resting between rounds, for there are no

rounds. It is slugging from the first. It is a fight to a finish.

Your opponent is the City. You must do battle with it from the time the

ferry-boat lands you on the island until either it is yours or it has

conquered you. It is the same whether you have a million in your pocket

or only the price of a week’s lodging.

The battle is to decide whether you shall become a New Yorker or turn

the rankest outlander and Philistine. You must be one or the other. You

cannot remain neutral. You must be for or against—lover or enemy—bosom

friend or outcast. And, oh, the city is a general in the ring. Not only

by blows does it seek to subdue you. It woos you to its heart with the

subtlety of a siren. It is a combination of Delilah, green Chartreuse,

Beethoven, chloral and John L. in his best days.

In other cities you may wander and abide as a stranger man as long as

you please. You may live in Chicago until your hair whitens, and be a

citizen and still prate of beans if Boston mothered you, and without

rebuke. You may become a civic pillar in any other town but

Knickerbocker’s, and all the time publicly sneering at its buildings,

comparing them with the architecture of Colonel Telfair’s residence in

Jackson, Miss., whence you hail, and you will not be set upon. But in

New York you must be either a New Yorker or an invader of a modern

Troy, concealed in the wooden horse of your conceited provincialism.

And this dreary preamble is only to introduce to you the unimportant

figures of William and Jack.

They came out of the West together, where they had been friends. They

came to dig their fortunes out of the big city.

Father Knickerbocker met them at the ferry, giving one a right-hander

on the nose and the other an upper-cut with his left, just to let them

know that the fight was on.

William was for business; Jack was for Art. Both were young and

ambitious; so they countered and clinched. I think they were from

Nebraska or possibly Missouri or Minnesota. Anyhow, they were out for

success and scraps and scads, and they tackled the city like two

Lochinvars with brass knucks and a pull at the City Hall.

Four years afterward William and Jack met at luncheon. The business man

blew in like a March wind, hurled his silk hat at a waiter, dropped

into the chair that was pushed under him, seized the bill of fare, and

had ordered as far as cheese before the artist had time to do more than

nod. After the nod a humorous smile came into his eyes.

“Billy,” he said, “you’re done for. The city has gobbled you up. It has

taken you and cut you to its pattern and stamped you with its brand.

You are so nearly like ten thousand men I have seen to-day that you

couldn’t be picked out from them if it weren’t for your laundry marks.”

“Camembert,” finished William. “What’s that? Oh, you’ve still got your

hammer out for New York, have you? Well, little old

Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me. It’s giving me mine.

And, say, I used to think the West was the whole round world—only

slightly flattened at the poles whenever Bryan ran. I used to yell

myself hoarse about the free expense, and hang my hat on the horizon,

and say cutting things in the grocery to little soap drummers from the

East. But I’d never seen New York, then, Jack. Me for it from the

rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West to me now. Have you heard

this fellow Crusoe sing? The desert isle for him, I say, but my wife

made me go. Give me May Irwin or E. S. Willard any time.”

“Poor Billy,” said the artist, delicately fingering a cigarette. “You

remember, when we were on our way to the East how we talked about this

great, wonderful city, and how we meant to conquer it and never let it

get the best of us? We were going to be just the same fellows we had

always been, and never let it master us. It has downed you, old man.

You have changed from a maverick into a butterick.”

“Don’t see exactly what you are driving at,” said William. “I don’t

wear an alpaca coat with blue trousers and a seersucker vest on dress

occasions, like I used to do at home. You talk about being cut to a

pattern—well, ain’t the pattern all right? When you’re in Rome you’ve

got to do as the Dagoes do. This town seems to me to have other alleged

metropolises skinned to flag stations. According to the railroad

schedule I’ve got in mind, Chicago and Saint Jo and Paris, France, are

asterisk stops—which means you wave a red flag and get on every other

Tuesday. I like this little suburb of Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. There’s

something or somebody doing all the time. I’m clearing $8,000 a year

selling automatic pumps, and I’m living like kings-up. Why, yesterday,

I was introduced to John W. Gates. I took an auto ride with a wine

agent’s sister. I saw two men run over by a street car, and I seen Edna

May play in the evening. Talk about the West, why, the other night I

woke everybody up in the hotel hollering. I dreamed I was walking on a

board sidewalk in Oshkosh. What have you got against this town, Jack?

There’s only one thing in it that I don’t care for, and that’s a

ferryboat.”

The artist gazed dreamily at the cartridge paper on the wall. “This

town,” said he, “is a leech. It drains the blood of the country.

Whoever comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel. Abandoning the

figure of the leech, it is a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which

the innocence, the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay tribute.

Hand to hand every newcomer must struggle with the leviathan. You’ve

lost, Billy. It shall never conquer me. I hate it as one hates sin or

pestilence or—the color work in a ten-cent magazine. I despise its very

vastness and power. It has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great

men, the lowest skyscrapers, the dolefulest pleasures of any town I

ever saw. It has caught you, old man, but I will never run beside its

chariot wheels. It glosses itself as the Chinaman glosses his collars.

Give me the domestic finish. I could stand a town ruled by wealth or

one ruled by an aristocracy; but this is one controlled by its lowest

ingredients. Claiming culture, it is the crudest; asseverating its

pre-eminence, it is the basest; denying all outside values and virtue,

it is the narrowest. Give me the pure and the open heart of the West

country. I would go back there to-morrow if I could.”

“Don’t you like this _filet mignon_?” said William. “Shucks, now,

what’s the use to knock the town! It’s the greatest ever. I couldn’t

sell one automatic pump between Harrisburg and Tommy O’Keefe’s saloon,

in Sacramento, where I sell twenty here. And have you seen Sara

Bernhardt in ‘Andrew Mack’ yet?”

“The town’s got you, Billy,” said Jack.

“All right,” said William. “I’m going to buy a cottage on Lake

Ronkonkoma next summer.”

At midnight Jack raised his window and sat close to it. He caught his

breath at what he saw, though he had seen and felt it a hundred times.

Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The

irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep

gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in long,

desert cañons. Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel,

enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this background

were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles and squares

through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the violet and

purple depths ascended like the city’s soul sounds and odors and

thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety

unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know.

There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from

the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill, enrich,

despoil, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of it

came up to him and went into his blood.

There was a knock on his door. A telegram had come for him. It came

from the West, and these were its words:

“Come back and the answer will be yes.