Many an honest penny was turned, with the assistance of the romantic
Temple Barholm case, by writers of paragraphs for newspapers published
in the United States. It was not merely a romance which belonged to
England but was excitingly linked to America by the fact that its
hero regarded himself as an American, and had passed through all the
picturesque episodes of a most desirably struggling youth in the very
streets of New York itself, and had “worked his way up” to the proud
position of society reporter “on” a huge Sunday paper. It was generally
considered to redound largely to his credit that refusing “in spite
of all temptations to belong to other nations,” he had been born in
Brooklyn, that he had worn ragged clothes and shoes with holes in
them, that he had blacked other people's shoes, run errands, and
sold newspapers there. If he had been a mere English young man, one
recounting of his romance would have disposed of him; but as he was
presented to the newspaper public every characteristic lent itself to
elaboration. He was, in fact, flaringly anecdotal. As a newly elected
President who has made boots or driven a canal-boat in his unconsidered
youth endears himself indescribably to both paragraph reader and
paragraph purveyor, so did T. Tembarom endear himself. For weeks, he
was a perennial fount. What quite credible story cannot be related of
a hungry lad who is wildly flung by chance into immense fortune and the
laps of dukes, so to speak? The feeblest imagination must be stirred
by the high color of such an episode, and stimulated to superb effort.
Until the public had become sated with reading anecdotes depicting the
extent of his early privations, and dwelling on illustrations which
presented lumber-yards in which he had slept, and the facades of
tumble-down tenements in which he had first beheld the light of day,
he was a modest source of income. Any lumber-yard or any tenement
sufficiently dilapidated would serve as a model; and the fact that in
the shifting architectural life of New York the actual original
scenes of the incidents had been demolished and built upon by
new apartment-houses, or new railroad stations, or new factories
seventy-five stories high, was an unobstructing triviality. Accounts
of his manner of conducting himself in European courts to which he had
supposedly been bidden, of his immense popularity in glittering circles,
of his finely democratic bearing when confronted by emperors surrounded
by their guilty splendors, were the joy of remote villages and towns. A
thrifty and young minor novelist hastily incorporated him in a serial,
and syndicated it upon the spot under the title of “Living or Dead.”
Among its especial public it was a success of such a nature as betrayed
its author into as hastily writing a second romance, which not being
rendered stimulating by a foundation of fact failed to repeat his
triumph.
T. Tembarom, reading in the library at Temple Barholm the first
newspapers sent from New York, smiled widely.
“You see they've got to say something, Jem,” he explained. “It's too big
a scoop to be passed over. Something's got to be turned in. And it means
money to the fellows, too. It's good copy.”
“Suppose,” suggested Jem, watching him with interest, “you were to write
the facts yourself and pass them on to some decent chap who'd be glad to
get them.”
“Glad!” Tembarom flushed with delight. “Any chap would be'way up in the
air at the chance. It's the best kind of stuff. Wouldn't you mind? Are
you sure you wouldn't?” He was the warhorse snuffing battle from afar.
Jem Temple Barholm laughed outright at the gleam in his eyes.
“No, I shouldn't care a hang, dear fellow. And the fact that I objected
would not stop the story.”
“No, it wouldn't, by gee! Say, I'll get Ann to help me, and we'll send
it to the man who took my place on the Earth. It'll mean board and boots
to him for a month if he works it right. And it'll be doing a good turn
to Galton, too. I shall be glad to see old Galton when I go back.”
“You are quite sure you want to go back?” inquired Jem. A certain glow
of feeling was always in his eyes when he turned them on T. Tembarom.
“Go back! I should smile! Of course I shall go back. I've got to
get busy for Hutchinson and I've got to get busy for myself. I guess
there'll be work to do that'll take me half over the world; but I'm
going back first. Ann's going with me.”
But there was no reference to a return to New York when the Sunday
Earth and other widely circulated weekly sheets gave prominence to the
marriage of Mr. Temple Temple Barholm and Miss Hutchinson, only child
and heiress of Mr. Joseph Hutchinson, the celebrated inventor. From a
newspaper point of view, the wedding had been rather unfairly quiet,
and it was necessary to fill space with a revival of the renowned story,
with pictures of bride and bridegroom, and of Temple Barholm surrounded
by ancestral oaks. A thriving business would have been done by the
reporters if an ocean greyhound had landed the pair at the dock some
morning, and snap-shots could have been taken as they crossed the
gangway, and wearing apparel described. But hope of such fortune was
swept away by the closing paragraph, which stated that Mr. and Mrs.
Temple Barholm would “spend the next two months in motoring through
Italy and Spain in their 90 h.p. Panhard.”
It was T. Tembarom who sent this last item privately to Galton.
“It's not true,” his letter added, “but what I'm going to do is nobody's
business but mine and my wife's, and this will suit people just as
well.” And then he confided to Galton the thing which was the truth.
The St. Francesca apartment-house was a very new one, situated on a
corner of an as yet sparsely built but rapidly spreading avenue above
the “100th Streets”--many numbers above them. There was a frankly
unfinished air about the neighborhood, but here and there a “store”
had broken forth and valiantly displayed necessities, and even articles
verging upon the economically ornamental. It was plainly imperative
that the idea should be suggested that there were on the spot sources
of supply not requiring the immediate employment of the services of
the elevated railroad in the achievement of purchase, and also that
enterprise rightly encouraged might develop into being equal to all
demands. Here and there an exceedingly fresh and clean “market store,”
brilliant with the highly colored labels adorning tinned soups and meats
and edibles in glass jars, alluringly presented itself to the passer-by.
The elevated railroad perched upon iron supports, and with iron
stairways so tall that they looked almost perilous, was a prominent
feature of the landscape. There were stretches of waste ground, and high
backgrounds of bits of country and woodland to be seen. The rush of New
York traffic had not yet reached the streets, and the avenue was of
an agreeable suburban cleanliness and calm. People who lived in upper
stories could pride themselves on having “views of the river.” These
they laid stress upon when it was hinted that they “lived a long way
uptown.”
The St. Francesca was built of light-brown stone and decorated with
much ornate molding. It was fourteen stories high, and was supplied with
ornamental fire-escapes. It was “no slouch of a building.” Everything
decorative which could be done for it had been done. The entrance was
almost imposing, and a generous lavishness in the way of cement mosaic
flooring and new and thick red carpet struck the eye at once. The
grill-work of the elevator was of fresh, bright blackness, picked out
with gold, and the colored elevator-boy wore a blue livery with brass
buttons. Persons of limited means who were willing to discard the
excitements of “downtown” got a good deal for their money, and
frequently found themselves secretly surprised and uplifted by the
atmosphere of luxury which greeted them when they entered their
red-carpeted hall. It was wonderful, they said, congratulating one
another privately, how much comfort and style you got in a New York
apartment-house after you passed the “150ths.”
On a certain afternoon T. Tembarom, with his hat on the back of his head
and his arms full of parcels, having leaped off the “L” when it stopped
at the nearest station, darted up and down the iron stairways until
he reached the ground, and then hurried across the avenue to the St.
Francesca. He made long strides, and two or three times grinned as if
thinking of something highly amusing; and once or twice he began to
whistle and checked himself. He looked approvingly at the tall building
and its solidly balustraded entrance-steps as he approached it, and when
he entered the red-carpeted hall he gave greeting to a small mulatto boy
in livery.
“Hello, Tom! How's everything?” he inquired, hilariously. “You taking
good care of this building? Let any more eight-room apartments? You've
got to keep right on the job, you know. Can't have you loafing because
you've got those brass buttons.”
The small page showed his teeth in gleeful appreciation of their
friendly intimacy.
“Yassir. That's so,” he answered. “Mis' Barom she's waitin' for you.
Them carpets is come, sir. Tracy's wagon brought 'em 'bout an hour ago.
I told her I'd help her lay 'em if she wanted me to, but she said you
was comin' with the hammer an' tacks. 'Twarn't that she thought I was
too little. It was jest that there wasn't no tacks. I tol' her jest call
me in any time to do anythin' she want done, an' she said she would.”
“She'll do it,” said T. Tembarom. “You just keep on tap. I'm just
counting on you and Light here,” taking in the elevator-boy as he
stepped into the elevator, “to look after her when I'm out.”
The elevator-boy grinned also, and the elevator shot up the shaft, the
numbers of the floors passing almost too rapidly to be distinguished.
The elevator was new and so was the boy, and it was the pride of his
soul to land each passenger at his own particular floor, as if he had
been propelled upward from a catapult. But he did not go too rapidly for
this passenger, at least, though a paper parcel or so was dropped in the
transit and had to be picked up when he stopped at floor fourteen.
The red carpets were on the corridor there also, and fresh paint and
paper were on the walls. A few yards from the elevator he stopped at a
door and opened it with a latch-key, beaming with inordinate delight.
The door opened into a narrow corridor leading into a small apartment,
the furniture of which was not yet set in order. A roll of carpet and
some mats stood in a corner, chairs and tables with burlaps round their
legs waited here and there, a cot with a mattress on it, evidently to be
transformed into a “couch,” held packages of bafflingly irregular shapes
and sizes. In the tiny kitchen new pots and pans and kettles, some still
wrapped in paper, tilted themselves at various angles on the gleaming
new range or on the closed lids of the doll-sized stationary wash-tubs.
Little Ann had been very busy, and some of the things were unpacked. She
had been sweeping and mopping floors and polishing up remote corners,
and she had on a big white pinafore-apron with long sleeves, which
transformed her into a sort of small female chorister. She came into the
narrow corridor with a broom in her hand, her periwinkle-blue gaze as
thrilled as an excited child's when it attacks the arrangement of its
first doll's house. Her hair was a little ruffled where it showed below
the white kerchief she had tied over her head. The warm, daisy pinkness
of her cheeks was amazing.
“Hello!” called out Tembarom at sight of her. “Are you there yet? I
don't believe it.”
“Yes, I'm here,” she answered, dimpling at him.
“Not you!” he said. “You couldn't be! You've melted away. Let's see.”
And he slid his parcels down on the cot and lifted her up in the air as
if she had been a baby. “How can I tell, anyhow?” he laughed out. “You
don't weigh anything, and when a fellow squeezes you he's got to look
out what he's doing.”
He did not seem to “look out” particularly when he caught her to him in
a hug into which she appeared charmingly to melt. She made herself part
of it, with soft arms which went at once round his neck and held him.
“Say!” he broke forth when he set her down. “Do you think I'm not glad
to get back?”
“No, I don't, Tem,” she answered, “I know how glad you are by the way
I'm glad myself.”
“You know just everything!” he ejaculated, looking her over, “just every
darned thing--God bless you! But don't you melt away, will you? That's
what I'm afraid of. I'll do any old thing on earth if you'll just stay.”
That was his great joke,--though she knew it was not so great a joke as
it seemed,--that he would not believe that she was real, and believed
that she might disappear at any moment. They had been married three
weeks, and she still knew when she saw him pause to look at her that he
would suddenly seize and hold her fast, trying to laugh, sometimes not
with entire success.
“Do you know how long it was? Do you know how far away that big place
was from everything in the world?” he had said once. “And me holding on
and gritting my teeth? And not a soul to open my mouth to! The old duke
was the only one who understood, anyhow. He'd been there.”
“I'll stay,” she answered now, standing before him as he sat down on the
end of the “couch.” She put a firm, warm-palmed little hand on each side
of his face, and held it between them as she looked deep into his eyes.
“You look at me, Tem--and see.”
“I believe it now,” he said, “but I shan't in fifteen minutes.”
“We're both right-down silly,” she said, her soft, cosy laugh breaking
out. “Look round this room and see what we've got to do. Let's begin
this minute. Did you get the groceries?”
He sprang up and began to go over his packages triumphantly.
“Tea, coffee, sugar, pepper, salt, beefsteak,” he called out.
“We can't have beefsteak often,” she said, soberly, “if we're going to
do it on fifteen a week.”
“Good Lord, no!” he gave back to her, hilariously. “But this is a Fifth
Avenue feed.”
“Let's take them into the kitchen and put them into the cupboard,
and untie the pots and pans.” She was suddenly quite absorbed and
businesslike. “We must make the room tidy and tack down the carpet, and
then cook the dinner.”
He followed her and obeyed her like an enraptured boy. The wonder of her
was that, despite its unarranged air, the tiny place was already cleared
and set for action. She had done it all before she had swept out the
undiscovered corners. Everything was near the spot to which it belonged.
There was nothing to move or drag out of the way.
“I got it all ready to put straight,” she said, “but I wanted you to
finish it with me. It wouldn't have seemed right if I'd done it without
you. It wouldn't have been as much OURS.”
Then came active service. She was like a small general commanding an
army of one. They put things on shelves; they hung things on hooks;
they found places in which things belonged; they set chairs and tables
straight; and then, after dusting and polishing them, set them at a more
imposing angle; they unrolled the little green carpet and tacked down
its corners; and transformed the cot into a “couch” by covering it
with what Tracy's knew as a “throw” and adorning one end of it with
cotton-stuffed cushions. They hung little photogravures on the walls and
strung up some curtains before the good-sized window, which looked down
from an enormous height at the top of four-storied houses, and took
in beyond them the river and the shore beyond. Because there was no
fireplace Tembarom knocked up a shelf, and, covering it with a scarf
(from Tracy's), set up some inoffensive ornaments on it and flanked them
with photographs of Jem Temple Barholm, Lady Joan in court dress, Miss
Alicia in her prettiest cap, and the great house with its huge terrace
and the griffins.
“Ain't she a looker?” Tembarom said of Lady Joan. “And ain't Jem a
looker, too? Gee! they're a pair. Jem thinks this honeymoon stunt of
ours is the best thing he ever heard of--us fixing ourselves up here
just like we would have done if nothing had ever happened, and we'd
HAD to do it on fifteen per. Say,” throwing an arm about her, “are you
getting as much fun out of it as if we HAD to, as if I might lose my job
any minute, and we might get fired out of here because we couldn't pay
the rent? I believe you'd rather like to think I might ring you into
some sort of trouble, so that you could help me to get you out of it.”
“That's nonsense,” she answered, with a sweet, untruthful little face. “I
shouldn't be very sensible if I wasn't glad you COULDN'T lose your job.
Father and I are your job now.”
He laughed aloud. This was the innocent, fantastic truth of it. They had
chosen to do this thing--to spend their honey-moon in this particular
way, and there was no reason why they should not. The little dream which
had been of such unattainable proportions in the days of Mrs. Bowse's
boarding-house could be realized to its fullest. No one in the
St. Francesca apartments knew that the young honey-mooners in the
five-roomed apartment were other than Mr. and Mrs. T. Barholm, as
recorded on the tablet of names in the entrance. Hutchinson knew, and
Miss Alicia knew, and Jem Temple Barholm, and Lady Joan. The Duke of
Stone knew, and thought the old-fashionedness of the idea quite the last
touch of modernity.
“Did you see any one who knew you when you were out?” Little Ann asked.
“No, and if I had they wouldn't have believed they'd seen me, because
the papers told them that Mr. and Mrs. Temple Barholm are spending their
honeymoon motoring through Spain in their ninety-horse-power Panhard.”
“Let's go and get dinner,” said Little Ann.
They went into the doll's-house kitchen and cooked the dinner. Little
Ann broiled steak and fried potato chips, and T. Tembarom produced a
wonderful custard pie he had bought at a confectioner's. He set the
table, and put a bunch of yellow daisies in the middle of it.
“We couldn't do it every day on fifteen per week,” he said. “If we
wanted flowers we should have to grow them in old tomato-cans.”
Little Ann took off her chorister's-gown apron and her kerchief, and
patted and touched up her hair. She was pink to her ears, and had
several new dimples; and when she sat down opposite him, as she had sat
that first night at Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house supper, Tembarom stared
at her and caught his breath.
“You ARE there?” he said, “ain't you?”
“Yes, I am,” she answered.
When they had cleared the table and washed the dishes, and had left
the toy kitchen spick and span, the ten million lights in New York were
lighted and casting their glow above the city. Tembarom sat down on the
Adams chair before the window and took Little Ann on his knee. She was
of the build which settles comfortably and with ease into soft curves
whose nearness is a caress. Looked down at from the fourteenth story of
the St. Francesca apartments, the lights strung themselves along lines
of streets, crossing and recrossing one another; they glowed and blazed
against masses of buildings, and they hung at enormous heights in
mid-air here and there, apparently without any support. Everywhere was
the glow and dazzle of their brilliancy of light, with the distant bee
hum of a nearing elevated train, at intervals gradually deepening into a
roar. The river looked miles below them, and craft with sparks or blaze
of light went slowly or swiftly to and fro.
“It's like a dream,” said Little Ann, after a long silence. “And we are
up here like birds in a nest.”
He gave her a closer grip.
“Miss Alicia once said that when I was almost down and out,” he said.
“It gave me a jolt. She said a place like this would be like a nest.
Wherever we go,--and we'll have to go to lots of places and live in lots
of different ways,--we'll keep this place, and some time we'll bring her
here and let her try it. I've just got to show her New York.”
“Yes, let us keep it,” said Little Ann, drowsily, “just for a nest.”
There was another silence, and the lights on the river far below still
twinkled or blazed as they drifted to and fro.
“You are there, ain't you?” said Tembarom in a half-whisper.
“Yes--I am,” murmured Little Ann.
But she had had a busy day, and when he looked down at her, she hung
softly against his shoulder, fast asleep.