sparkless, applied a match, and casually set forth his opinion. “Well, I
guess that was about as poor a way of spendin’ eighty dollars as I ever
saw, but it all goes to show there’s truth in the old motto that
anything at all can happen in any poker game! That was a mighty nice
hundred dollar bill you had on you, Collie; but it’s like what Smithie
said: a piece o’ money goes hoppin’ around from one person to
another--it don’t care!--and yours has gone and hopped to Charlie. The
question is: Who’s it goin’ to hop to next?” He paused to laugh, glanced
over the cards that had been dealt him, and concluded: “My guess is ’t
some good-lookin’ woman’ll prob’ly get a pretty fair chunk o’ that
hundred dollar bill out o’ Charlie. Well, let’s settle down to the ole
army game.”
They settled down to it, and by twelve o’clock (the invariable closing
hour of these pastimes in the old shack) Collinson had lost four dollars
and thirty cents more. He was commiserated by his fellow gamesters as
they put on their coats and overcoats, preparing to leave the hot little
rooms. They shook their heads, laughed ruefully in sympathy, and told
him he oughtn’t to carry hundred dollar bills upon his person when he
went out among friends. Old Bill made what is sometimes called an
unfortunate remark.
“Don’t worry about Collie,” he said, jocosely. “That hundred dollar bill
prob’ly belonged to some rich client of his.”
“What!” Collinson said, staring.
“Never mind, Collie; I wasn’t in earnest,” the joker explained. “Of
course I didn’t mean it.”
“Well, you oughtn’t to say it,” Collinson protested. “People say a thing
like that about a man in a joking way, but other people hear it
sometimes and don’t know they’re joking, and a story gets started.”
“My goodness, but you’re serious!” Old Bill exclaimed. “You look like
you had a misery in your chest, as the rubes say; and I don’t blame you!
Get on out in the fresh night air and you’ll feel better.”
He was mistaken, however; the night air failed to improve Collinson’s
spirits as he walked home alone through the dark and chilly streets.
There was, indeed, a misery in his chest, where stirred a sensation
vaguely nauseating; his hands were tremulous and his knees infirm as he
walked. In his mind was a confusion of pictures and sounds, echoes from
Charlie Loomis’s shack: he could not clear his mind’s eye of the one
hundred dollar bill; and its likeness, as it lay crumpled on the green
cloth under the drop light, haunted and hurt him as a face in a coffin
haunts and hurts the new mourner.
It seemed to Collinson then that money was the root of all evil and the
root of all good, the root and branch of all life, indeed. With money,
his wife would have been amiable, not needing gay bachelors to take her
to vaudevilles. Her need of money was the true foundation of the
jealousy that had sent him out morose and reckless to-night; of the
jealousy that had made it seem, when he gambled with Charlie Loomis for
the luck dollar, as though they really gambled for luck with her.
It still seemed to him that they had gambled for luck with her, and
Charlie had won it. But as Collinson plodded homeward in the chilly
midnight, his shoulders sagging and his head drooping, he began to
wonder how he could have risked money that belonged to another man. What
on earth had made him do what he had done? Was it the mood his wife had
set him in as he went out that evening? No; he had gone out feeling like
that often enough, and nothing had happened.
Something had brought this trouble on him, he thought; for it appeared
to Collinson that he had been an automaton, having nothing to do with
his own actions. He must bear the responsibility for them; but he had
not willed them. If the one hundred dollar bill had not happened to be
in his pocket---- That was it! And at the thought he mumbled desolately
to himself: “I’d been all right if it hadn’t been for that.” If the one
hundred dollar bill had not happened to be in his pocket, he’d have been
“all right.” The one hundred dollar bill had done this to him. And
Smithie’s romancing again came back to him: “In one person’s hands
money’ll do good, likely; in another’s it’ll do harm.” It was the money
that did harm or good, not the person; and the money in his hands had
done this harm to himself.
He had to deliver a hundred dollars at the office in the morning,
somehow; for he dared not take the risk of the client’s meeting the
debtor.
There was a balance of seventeen dollars in his bank, and he could pawn
his watch for twenty-five, as he knew well enough, by experience. That
would leave fifty-eight dollars to be paid, and there was only one way
to get it. His wife would have to let him pawn her ring. She’d _have_
to!
Without any difficulty he could guess what she would say and do when he
told her of his necessity: and he knew that never in her life would she
forego the advantage over him she would gain from it. He knew, too, what
stipulations she would make, and he had to face the fact that he was in
no position to reject them. The one hundred dollar bill had cost him the
last vestiges of mastery in his own house; and Charlie Loomis had really
won not only the bill and the luck, but the privilege of taking
Collinson’s wife to vaudevilles. And it all came back to the same
conclusion: The one hundred dollar bill had done it to him. “What kind
of a thing _is_ this life?” Collinson mumbled to himself, finding
matters wholly perplexing in a world made into tragedy at the caprice of
a little oblong slip of paper.
Then, as he went on his way to wake his wife and face her with the
soothing proposal to pawn her ring early the next morning, something
happened to Collinson. Of itself the thing that happened was nothing,
but he was aware of his folly as if it stood upon a mountain top against
the sun--and so he gathered knowledge of himself and a little of the
wisdom that is called better than happiness.
His way was now the same as upon the latter stretch of his walk home
from the office that evening. The smoke fog had cleared, and the air was
clean with a night wind that moved briskly from the west; in all the
long street there was only one window lighted, but it was sharply
outlined now, and fell as a bright rhomboid upon the pavement before
Collinson. When he came to it he paused, at the hint of an inward
impulse he did not think to trace; and, frowning, he perceived that this
was the same shop window that had detained him on his homeward way, when
he had thought of buying a toy for the baby.
The toy was still there in the bright window: the gay little acrobatic
monkey that would climb up or down a red string as the string slacked or
straightened; but Collinson’s eye fixed itself upon the card marked with
the price: “35 cents.”
He stared and stared. “Thirty-five cents!” he said to himself.
“Thirty-five cents!”
Then suddenly he burst into loud and prolonged laughter.
The sound was startling in the quiet night, and roused the interest of a
meditative policeman who stood in the darkened doorway of the next shop.
He stepped out, not unfriendly.
“What _you_ havin’ such a good time over, this hour o’ the night?” he
inquired. “What’s all the joke?”
Collinson pointed to the window. “It’s that monkey on the string,” he
said. “Something about it struck me as mighty funny!”
So, with a better spirit, he turned away, still laughing, and went home
to face his wife.
NICE NEIGHBOURS
BY MARY S. WATTS
From _Harper’s_
Guiding the possible tenant about the house, Miss Wilcox pointed out its
desirable features in a dry little monotone that gave no hint, she
hoped, of her inward taut anxiety. She could not have achieved the
persuasive enthusiasm of the young man from the real-estate office even
if she had thought it becoming to a gentlewoman. Apparently he could see
no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil; there was something abnormal about
his incapacities; he was magnificent, but at moments Miss Martha feared
that he was not strictly conscientious. And besides, to what end
shutting his eyes and thereby perhaps influencing others to shut theirs
against unhappy facts? Truth will out. The house _was_ old; the floors
_did_ need refinishing: the front-parlour fireplace _did_ smoke----
“Them ceilings sure are high!” ejaculated the possible tenant, cocking a
measuring eye heavenward.
“Y-yes, they _are_ high,” Miss Martha admitted helplessly. At this
familiar--and perfectly just--criticism the agent always burst into
flaming eulogies of high ceilings. Just the thing for our summer
climate, our super-heated furnaces in winter! Tell you, the old-timers
knew how to build for comfort! Miss Martha shrank from conjecturing what
he said when ceilings were low. This whole experience illuminated
depressingly the practice current in what it was the modern shibboleth
to call “big business,” she thought.
“Well, eight-five per is a whole lotta money,” said the possible tenant.
She gazed round indifferently as they stepped out on the little side
porch; then all at once her expression altered with surprise and
interest. She clutched Miss Wilcox’s arm, holding her back with an
energetic whisper of warning. “Sh-h! See that bird? See him? Washing
himself in that old pedestal washstand somebody’s left out there? If
that ain’t the cutest thing! He’s just sloshin’ right in like a person,
you ’r I ’r anybody. Like it was put there just on purpose for him!”
“Why, it was. It’s a birds’ bath, you know,” said Miss Martha, somewhat
startled, fumbling for her eyeglasses; the pretty spectacle was no
novelty to her, yet it never lost its charm. “Oh, that’s one of the
thrushes. They must have a nest somewhere near----”
“Sh-h!” the other interrupted peremptorily. “There’s another one goin’
in!” She tiptoed to the edge of the porch and stood there entranced,
following the movements of the birds, a vague smile irradiating her
worn, sharpened, insignificant features. The shoving and spattering and
small outcry finally subsided, the last robin hopped out, spinning the
moisture from his feathers with quick wings; and she turned away
reluctantly, drawing a long breath in childishly frank delight. “What
d’you know about that, huh? I wouldn’ta believed they’d do that, take a
bath that way. You couldn’ta _made_ me believe it? I don’t know much
about ’em, but I always _have_ liked ’em. Birds, I mean, and--well, dogs
and all kinds of regular pets, you know. I always did like ’em. Say, you
got your grounds fixed up real nice, ain’t you? I like flowers, too.”
She went down the steps, and Miss Wilcox trailed after, resigned to
seeing the garden butchered to make a possible tenant’s holiday; but the
visitor moved about carefully, without offering to pluck or mishandle,
and paused at last in the middle of the tidy plot, surveying its beds
and borders with full appreciation. Then she wheeled to appraise again
the mid-Victorian house whose stark tastelessness and characterlessness
no garden setting could relieve; and Miss Martha’s heart sank.
“The neighbourhood’s very nice,” she murmured desperately; this ladylike
insinuation went to the limits of propriety in salesmanship according to
Miss Martha’s code. “So--so _permanent_. The church on the corner and
the parsonage next door. It will always be nice. Everybody likes it so
much on that account--that is----” She could get no farther, overcome
by a hideous sense of disloyalty to this same neighbourhood whose select
character she was exploiting. For, looking upon her, the conviction
would not down that Mrs. Shields, if a possible tenant, was abysmally
impossible otherwise. She must be near Miss Martha’s own age, yet was
dressed, tinted, bedizened as if sixteen; there was a kind of withered
pertness about her; she had a trick of glancing sidewise with her large,
shadowed eyes in a style of roguish challenge and invitation combined;
and her disturbingly frequent and facile smile suggested somehow a mere
embellishment, obvious and inexpressive as her rouge. Such a figure in
the rarefied atmosphere of Saint Luke’s was unthinkable; but here she
was, Martha Wilcox, making capital out of that proximity with all its
implications. Contact with “big business” had done its debasing work!
“Of course, the music might be an objection,” she faltered,
conscience-struck. “And sometimes one can hear Doctor Gowdy quite
distinctly on Sundays in warm weather when the windows are open.”
“Music? Oh, you mean hymns?” queried Mrs. Shields. “Doctor Gowdy’s the
preacher, huh? I went to Billy Sunday once. Tell you, the rev’rend’d
have to go some to beat _him_! Well, I don’ know--eighty-five--” She
hesitated, looking around the genteel landscape; then faced Miss Martha
with the air of giving up argument, not without wonder and some
amusement at herself. “Well, I guess them birds has got me going. I
guess you’ve rented a house!”
Miss Wilcox, comprehending her expression rather than the words, stood
dumb for an instant in half-incredulous relief. The thing was almost too
good to be true, coming to pass with this uncanny suddenness.
Eighty-five dollars a month and the hopeless old place off her hands at
last! All the dreams which even in the act of dreaming she had
stigmatized as rank folly, revisited her in flashing procession: having
her hair “permanented,” going to Atlantic City, buying a fur coat--how
often had she spent that rainbow gold! This time it was real. There
would be only the pleasing care of letting it accumulate for a while.
She awoke to new apprehensions. “I--I suppose there will be things to
do? Changes? I mean you will want----?”
Mrs. Shields applied the decorative smile to her face. “Oh, my, no, I
don’t want nothin’. The house is just swell, and anyways I never was one
to keep running to people for new wallpaper, and ever’ little thing that
needs fixing. I like to keep things up my own self. I’m awful easy to
get along with,” she assured her prospective landlady eagerly. Miss
Martha, who had been recalling terrifying tales she had had from more
than one earnest friend about the misdemeanours and the tyrannous
exactions of the average tenant, breathed freely again. It began to seem
a leisurely, congenial, and singularly profitable occupation to rent
houses as the patient waiting and many disappointments of the last six
months retired to the background of her memories. Mrs. Shields,
meanwhile, fluttered up and down the garden, already assuming innocent
airs of proprietorship.
“You gotta tell me where at you get a bird bath like that, ’cause that’s
what I’m gonna have the first thing!” she proclaimed with enthusiasm.
“Never you mind! It’ll all be took good care of, and I won’t change a
thing. It’s so nice the way it is, all clean and quiet and kinda
restful. I got the same old-style notions as you. I’m crazy about having
a real refined home.”
Miss Wilcox, not for the first time, wished that the questionably
adaptable young man from the real-estate office were there; he would
know what to say. “You’re a stranger here?” she ventured at length.
“Oh, I’ve lived lotsa places,” said the other, smiling blankly. “Is that
as far as the yard goes to, that fence, with the vines on? My, they grow
thick, don’t they?”
They did indeed, forming a broad, tangled breastwork of honeysuckle and
rambler roses valued by Miss Martha for being comely to the view in
blooming time and all the year round an impregnable defence against boys
and other animals. Mrs. Shields, craning slightly to peer over it,
inspected the adjoining territory with her naïvely open curiosity; she
gave an exclamation. “For Pete’s sake! Didn’t you tell me that’s where
the preacher lives?”
“Doctor Gowdy. Yes,” said Miss Martha, a little uncomfortable.
“Keeps it lovely, don’t he? Just like this side!”
Miss Martha perceived that this was to be taken in an ironic sense;
making every allowance for the other’s idiosyncrasies of speech and
manner, it was impossible that she could be in earnest. Even the most
stalwart members of his congregation had been overheard to express
themselves unfavourably about Doctor Gowdy’s yard. “Well--a clergyman,
you know--he’s so busy. Besides, one really ought not to expect him----
And Mrs. Gowdy---- They have quite a family. It’s almost impossible for
her to keep a servant. Even coloured----”
“They got a coon in the kitchen now. I can see her,” said Mrs. Shields.
“Er--yes--but often there isn’t anybody. It makes a great deal of work
for poor Mrs. Gowdy. She can’t see to everything outside as well as in,”
said Miss Wilcox, nervously, conscious that her explanations amounted to
an apology; it annoyed her. And now the coon in the kitchen unwittingly
added to the embarrassments of the situation by shoving up the
window-screen and flinging an over-ripe tomato in the general direction
of the ministerial garbage can; it fell short, spattering seeds and
pulp; the coon--she was a strapping, coffee-coloured slattern--regarded
it absently a moment while she wrung out a leprous-looking rag, sent a
sharp glance toward the audience on the other side of the fence, and
slammed down the screen, slouching back to her labours at a sink full of
dishes.
“Mrs. Gowdy simply can’t see to everything,” Miss Martha repeated
feebly. She awaited the other’s further comment in something of a panic;
but Mrs. Shields had none to make. Her gaze, as it roved round the
unkempt enclosure, was one of complete detachment. She was turning away
when melodious, preluding chords on the piano sounded from within the
parsonage, and Mrs. Gowdy’s pleasant soprano uplifted in “Angels ever
bright and fair.” She sang with taste and feeling, but Miss Martha
uneasily wished that she had not begun just at this moment; it was
inopportune, somehow.
“That’s some of that music you was scairt I wouldn’t like, huh? Why, it
ain’t so bad!” said Mrs. Shields tolerantly. “Anyway, I never let
nothing the neighbours does worry me much,” she added, glancing again,
perhaps involuntarily, at the Gowdy premises. “Live and let live, I
always say. Oh, say, look what’s coming!”
It was a little procession of the Gowdy children round the corner of the
house, Thomas junior in the lead, shouldering a spade and issuing bluff
words of command; Florence came next, with a black silk petticoat,
evidently borrowed from some much more mature wardrobe than her own,
solemnly draped upon her; the twins were hauling the catafalque, that
is, their Irish-Mail wagon, a shoe-box disposed upon it and covered with
an unbelievably dirty towel; and Wilbur, straddling his kiddie-car,
theoretically brought up the rear. In reality, he tooled along to suit
himself, with erratic swoops and circles, carrying on an inarticulate,
one-sided conversation the while. They halted, after some shrill
disagreements, at one of the bare, hard-trodden spots occurring
sporadically among the weeds of the parsonage back yard, and Tommie was
about to attack it with the spade when all hands simultaneously became
aware of the uninvited witnesses. There was an interval of silent
staring broken by Wilbur, who, as has been seen, was a sociable soul,
without sufficient field for the exercise of his gift.
“‘O,’ady!” said he, steering up to the fence.
“My, my, ain’t you little folks busy, though!” said Mrs. Shields
genially. “Watch out, buddy, you’ll get a sticker in your eye. What’s he
say?”
“‘O,’ady!” cried Wilbur with vehemence.
Tom authoritatively advised him to shut up. “‘Hello, lady!’ that’s what
he’s trying to say. He can’t talk plain yet, he’s only two and a half.
We’ve got to be after him the whole time. It’s fierce!” he explained
gloomily.
“Well, now, _I_ think that’s real nice, taking care of your little
brother----”
“Icky eye!” interrupted Wilbur urgently. “Icky _eye_!”
Florence undertook the translation. “He’s saying the kitty died.”
“Oh, ain’t that too bad! Poor kitty! What was the matter with her?”
“I don’t know. She just died,” said Florence indifferently. “We’re
having a funeral with her.”
“You _are_? Well, I declare! And I s’pose Mommer’s singing that lovely
hymn for you.”
They eyed her in the wary fashion of children suspicious of the false
interest of grown-ups. “No, she isn’t. She’s just singing.” Tom said
curtly. “I don’t b’lieve she knows about the kitty even.”
Here the auburn-haired twin precipitately entered the conversation with
the information that the bird died, too. “It was a canary. It sang and
sang, and then it stopped singing and died.”
“Oh, my, you musta felt bad!”
“Ho, that ain’t anything!” said the blue-eyed twin in a superior manner.
“We’ve had lots of things die. Just lots!” He launched into large
statements. “Everything we get dies! We had some white mice and _they_
died, and we had a dog and _it_ died, and we had----”
“Aw, shut up, we didn’t any such thing!”
“We did so! Don’t we, Flo, have everything die? Don’t we, Reddy?”
“Aw, you’re lying! Shut up, I tell you!”
Mrs. Shields intervened on the side of peace and propriety. “Now, now,
don’t you kids get to scrapping. You go ahead and have your funeral, and
play nice and pretty. First thing you know you’ll have Mommer out here,
scairt to death for fear some of you has got their neck broke, hollerin’
like that.”
“Aw, she won’t hear, she never does,” growled Thomas junior. And in
fact, the voice and piano, now sweetly rilling arpeggios throughout all
the keys in ardent practice, kept on undisturbed. Mrs. Shields
retreated, joining Miss Martha with confidences uttered in a voice of
polite caution.
“I expect them young ones are right nice-looking when they’re washed up.
They’re all right, only I don’t know as I’m keen for ’em to come over on
my side of the fence. Of course, Mrs. Rev’rend, she’s used to the racket
and muss.”
She asked whether she was to pay in advance, briskly announcing that she
would while Miss Martha was still hanging in timorous indecision. The
maiden lady moved in a haze of doubt and awe in what she considered the
business world; out-of-hand offers to pay rent in advance might be one
of its pitfalls for what Miss Martha knew. But in due time the check
arrived, and though intrinsically an unhandsome document executed in
weak, loosely flowing figures and handwriting with the signature “Tillie
Shields” sidling downhill into the corner, it was negotiable like any
other check. Eighty-five dollars! The dream had come true! Miss Martha
was thriftily resolved not to spend it this first time, but it gave her
a solid foundation on which to erect more dreams. Moreover, she took an
almost equally solid satisfaction in replying coolly and competently to
all inquirers, yes, the house was rented; yes, very advantageously,
thank you! Hitherto she had had to endure their discouraging sympathy;
and now detected, in spite of the felicitations, the great fundamental
truth that nobody is really glad when somebody else gets a house rented!
Eliza Seabury was the one exception; Eliza was too blunt-minded and
blunt-spoken for civil pretenses. She rushed up on the street one day,
and opened the subject, or in a manner of speaking, committed assault
and battery on it with: “Martha Wilcox, where on earth did you pick up
that weird woman you’ve got in your house?”
“I didn’t pick her up at all. She saw the advertisement,” said Miss
Martha, a trifle stiffly.
“Well, she’s positively _weird_. I saw her the other day, and when
somebody said she was in your house I nearly passed away. Her clothes!
And those eyes rolling around like two buckeyes in a pan of milk! It’s
simply _weird_! Who is she, anyhow, and where did she come from?”
“She’s a Mrs. Matilda Shields,” said Miss Martha, sagely correcting that
too informal “Tillie.” “I don’t know where her home was originally. I
understood she’d travelled about a good deal.”
“Mercy, Martha, I hope you didn’t take her without a reference. It would
be awful if she didn’t pay you.”
“The bank said she was all right,” said Miss Martha triumphantly. The
bank’s endorsement was her trump card; it left criticism without a leg
to stand on. She was prompted to testify to Mrs. Shields’s credit on
other grounds. “She’s been very nice about the house, not finding fault
and not asking for anything, you know.”
“What, not a thing?” Mrs. Seabury exclaimed on a high note of
astonishment. “That old rookery! Well, of course, I don’t mean it’s not
a lovely house,” she amended hastily. “Only naturally, you’ve never
spent any more on it than you could help, I suppose. It’s weird her not
wanting _some_ repairs. She can’t be much of a housekeeper. Maybe
that’s just as well, though. She won’t mind living next door to the
Gowdys. Has she ever said anything about them?”
“I haven’t inquired,” said Miss Martha, stiffening again.
“Oh, well, she probably will later on,” Mrs. Seabury prophesied
blithely; she was not a member of Saint Luke’s congregation. “Unless
she’s a saint, she’ll have trouble over the ashes or the garbage or the
children or something.”