“Do you really want it?” I asked. She raised her eyes eagerly. “If you
don’t mind,” she said.
I dropped the chain into her hand, but as I turned toward the fire, I
could not help a little sigh. She heard me, and leaned forward. I could
just see her sweet, troubled face in the firelight. “But I mean to
return it you, Royal,” she said, “some day, when--when you go out again
to fight wind-mills.”
“That’s safe!” I returned, roughly. “You know that time will never
come. The three of you together have fixed that. I’m no longer a
knight-errant. I’m a business-man now. I’m not to remember I ever was a
knight-errant. I must even give up my Order of the Golden Chain, because
it’s too romantic, because it might remind me that somewhere in this
world there is romance, and adventure, and fighting. And it wouldn’t do.
You can’t have romance around a business office. Some day, when I was
trying to add up my sums, I might see it on my wrist, and forget where
I was. I might remember the days when it shone in the light of a
camp-fire, when I used to sleep on the ground with my arm under my head,
and it was the last thing I saw, when it seemed like your fingers on my
wrist holding me back, or urging me forward. Business circles would not
allow that. They’d put up a sign, ‘Canvassers, pedlers, and Romance not
admitted.’”
The first time I applied for a job I was unsuccessful. The man I went to
see had been an instructor at Harvard when my uncle was professor there,
and Aunt Mary said he had been a great friend of Professor Endicott’s.
One day in the laboratory the man discovered something, and had it
patented. It brought him a fortune, and he was now president of a
company which manufactured it, and with branches all over the world.
Aunt Mary wrote him a personal letter about me, in the hope that he
might put me in charge of the foreign correspondence.
He kept me waiting outside his office-door for one full hour. During
the first half-hour I was angry, but the second half-hour I enjoyed
exceedingly. By that time the situation appealed to my sense of humor.
When the great man finally said he would see me, I found him tilting
back in a swivel-chair in front of a mahogany table. He picked out Aunt
Mary’s letter from a heap in front of him, and said: “Are you the Mr.
Macklin mentioned in this letter? What can I do for you?”
I said very deliberately: “You can do nothing for me. I have waited one
hour to tell you so. When my aunt, Mrs. Endicott, does anyone the honor
to write him a letter, there is no other business in New York City
more important than attending promptly to that letter. I _had_ intended
becoming a partner in your firm; now, I shall not. You are a rude, fat,
and absurd, little person. Good-morning.”
I crossed over to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and told Lowell and the other
watch-officers in the ward-room of my first attempt to obtain a job.
They laughed until I hoped they would strangle.
“Who the devil do you think you are, anyway,” they cried, “going around,
insulting millionnaires like that?”
After leaving the cruiser that afternoon, I was so miserable that I
could have jumped into the East River. It was the sight of the
big, brown guns did it, and the cutlasses in their racks, and the
clean-limbed, bare-throated Jackies, and the watch-officer stamping the
deck just as though he were at sea, with his glass and side-arms. And
when the marine at the gate of the yard shifted his gun and challenged
me, it was so like old times that I could have fallen on his neck and
hugged him.
Over the wharves, all along my way to the ferry, the names of strange
and beautiful ports mocked at me from the sheds of the steam-ship lines;
“Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and the River Plata,” “Guayaquil, Callao, and
Santiago,” “Cape Town, Durban, and Lorenzo Marquez.” It was past six
o’clock and very dark. The ice was pushing and grinding against the
pier-heads, and through the falling snow the tall buildings in New York
twinkled with thousands of electric lights, like great Christmas-trees.
At one wharf a steamer of the Red D line, just in from La Guayra, was
making fast, and I guiltily crept on board. Without, she was coated in
a shearing of ice, but within she reeked of Spanish-America--of coffee,
rubber, and raw sugar. Pineapples were still swinging in a net from
the awning-rail, a two-necked water-bottle hung at the hot mouth of the
engine-room. I found her captain and told him I only wanted to smell a
ship again, and to find out, if where he came from, the bands were still
playing in the plazas. He seemed to understand, and gave me a drink
of Jamaica rum with fresh limes in it, and a black cigar; and when his
steward brought them, I talked to him in Spanish just for the sound of
it. For half an hour I was under the Southern Cross, and New York was
3,000 miles astern.
When I left him, the captain gave me a bag of alligator-pears to take
home with me, and I promised to come the next day, and bring him a new
library of old, paper novels.
But, as it turned out, I sent them instead, for that night when I
reached the New York side, I saw how weakly and meanly I was acting, and
I threw the alligator-pears over the rail of the ferry-boat and watched
them fall into the dirty, grinding ice. I saw that I had been in rank
mutiny. My bed had been made for me and I must lie in it. I was to be a
business-man. I was to “settle down,” and it is only slaves who rebel.
The next day, humble and chastened in spirit, I kissed the rod, and
went into the city to search for a situation. I determined to start at
Forty-second Street, and work my way down town until I found a place
that looked as though it could afford a foreign correspondent. But I had
reached Twenty-eighth Street, without seeing any place that appealed to
me, when a little groom, in a warm fur collar and chilly white breeches,
ran up beside me and touched his hat. I was so surprised that I saluted
him in return, and then felt uneasily conscious that that was not the
proper thing to do, and that forever I had lost his respect.
“Miss Fiske would like to speak with you, sir,” he said. He ran back to
a brougham that was drawn up beside the curb behind me, and opened the
door. When I reached it, Miss Fiske leaned from it, smiling.
“I couldn’t help calling you back, Captain Macklin,” she said, and held
out her hand.
When I took it she laughed again. “Isn’t this like our last meeting?”
she asked. “Don’t you remember my reaching out of the carriage, and
our shaking hands? Only now,” she went on, in a most frank and friendly
manner, “instead of a tropical thunder-storm, it’s a snow-storm, and
instead of my running away from your shells, I’m out shopping. At least,
mother’s out shopping,” she added. “She’s in there. I’m waiting for
her.” She seemed to think that the situation required a chaperon.
“You mustn’t say they were my shells, Miss Fiske,” I protested. “I
may insult a woman for protecting her brother’s life, but I never fire
shells at her.”
It did not surprise me to hear myself laughing at the words which, when
she spoke them, had seemed so terrible. It was as though none of it had
ever occurred. It was part of a romantic play, and we had seen the play
together. Who could believe that the young man, tramping the streets on
the lookout for a job, had ever signed his name, as vice-president of
Honduras, to a passport for Joseph Fiske; that the beautiful girl in
the sables, with her card-case in her hand, had ever heard the shriek of
shrapnel?
And she exclaimed, just as though we had both been thinking aloud: “No,
it’s not possible, is it?”
“It never happened,” I said.
“But I tell you what has happened,” she went on, eagerly, “or perhaps
you know. Have you heard what my father did?”
I said I had not. I refrained from adding that I believed her father
capable of doing almost anything.
“Then I’m the first to tell you the news,” she exclaimed. She nodded at
me energetically. “Well, he’s paid that money. He owed it all the time.’
“That’s not news,” I said.
She flushed a little, and laughed.
“But, indeed, father was not to blame,” she exclaimed. “They deceived
him dreadfully. But when we got home, he looked it up, and found you
were right about that money, and so he’s paid it back, not to that
odious Alvarez man, but in some way, I don’t quite understand how, but
so the poor people will get it.”
“Good!” I cried.
“And he’s discharged all that Isthmian crowd,” she went on.
“Better,” I said.
“And made my brother president of the new company,” she continued, and
then raised her eyebrows, and waited, smiling.
“Oh, well,” I said, “since he’s your brother--‘best.’”
“That’s right,” she cried. “That’s very nice of you. Here comes mother.
I want you to meet her.”
Mother came toward us, out of a French dress-maker’s. It was one of the
places I had decided against, when I had passed it a few minutes before.
It seemed one of the few business houses where a French linguist would
be superfluous.
I was presented as “Captain Macklin--who, you know, mother--who fought
the duel with Arthur--that is, who didn’t shoot at him.”
Mrs. Fiske looked somewhat startled. Even to a trained social leader it
must be trying to have a man presented to you on a sidewalk as the one
who did not shoot your son.
Mrs. Fiske had a toy dog under one arm, and was holding up her train,
but she slipped the dog to the groom, and gave me her hand.
“How do you do, Mr.--Captain Macklin,” she said. “My son has told me a
great deal about you. Have you asked Captain Macklin to come to see us,
Helen?” she said, and stepped into the brougham.
“Come in any day after five,” said Miss Fiske, “and we’ll have tortillas
and frijoles, and build a camp-fire in the library. What’s your
address?”
“Dobbs Ferry,” I said.
“Just Dobbs Ferry?” she asked. “But you’re such a well-known person,
Captain Macklin.”
“I’m Mr. Macklin now,” I answered, and I tried to shut the door on them,
but the groom seemed to think that was his privilege, and so I bowed,
and they drove away. Then I went at once to a drug-store and borrowed
the directory, to find out where they lived, and I walked all the way up
the avenue to have a look at their house. Somehow I felt that for that
day I could not go on asking for a job. I saw a picture of myself on
a high stool in the French dressmaker’s writing to the Paris house for
more sable cloaks for Mrs. Fiske.
The Fiske mansion overlooks Central Park, and it is as big as the
Academy of Music. I found that I knew it well by sight. I at once made
up my mind that I never would have the courage to ring that
door-bell, and I mounted a Fifth Avenue stage, and took up my work of
reconnoitering for a job where Miss Fiske had interrupted it.
The next day I got the job. I am to begin work on Monday. It is at
Schwartz & Carboy’s. They manufacture locks and hinges and agricultural
things. I saw a lot of their machetes in Honduras with their paper stamp
on the blade. They have almost a monopoly of the trade in South America.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, one of their Spanish clerks had left
them, and when I said I had been in Central America and could write
Spanish easily, Schwartz, or, it may have been Carboy--I didn’t ask him
which was his silly name--dictated a letter and I wrote it in Spanish.
One of the other clerks admitted it was faultless. So, I regret to say,
I got the job. I’m to begin with fifteen dollars, and Schwartz or Carboy
added, as though it were a sort of a perquisite: “If our young men act
gentlemanly, and are good dressers, we often send them to take our South
American customers to lunch. The house pays the expenses. And in the
evenings you can show them around the town. Our young men find that an
easy way of seeing the theatres for nothing.”
Knowing the tastes of South Americans visiting New York, I replied
severely that my connection with Schwartz & Carboy would end daily at
four in the afternoon, but that a cross-town car passed Koster &
Bial’s every hour. I half hoped he would take offence at that, and in
consequence my connection, with Schwartz & Carboy might end instantly
and forever; but whichever one he was, only laughed and said: “Yes,
those Brazilians are a queer lot. We eat up most of our profits bailing
them out of police courts the next morning. Well--you turn up Monday.”