_Concerning the Young Man in the Ditch and His Attempts to Get Out of It_
Although he was not vindictive, he did not care to owe anything to
anybody who might be inclined to give him a hearing on account of former
obligations or his social position. Everybody knew he had gone to smash;
everybody, he very soon discovered, was naturally afraid of being
bothered by him. The dread of the overfed that an underfed member of the
community may request a seat at the table he now understood perfectly. He
was learning.
So he solicited aid from nobody whom he had known in former days; neither
from those who had aided him when he needed no aid, nor those who owed
their comfortable position to the generosity of his father--a gentleman
notorious for making fortunes for his friends.
Therefore he wrote to strangers on a purely business basis--to amazing
types lately emerged from the submerged, bulging with coal money, steel
money, copper money, wheat money, stockyard money--types that galloped
for Fifth Avenue to build town houses; that shook their long cars and
frisked into the country and built "cottages." And this was how he put
it:
"_Madam:_ In case you desire to entertain guests with the professional
services of a magician it would give me pleasure to place my very unusual
accomplishments at your disposal."
And signed his name.
It was a dreadful drain on his bank account to send several thousand
engraved cards about town and fashionable resorts. No replies came. Day
after day, exhausted with the practice drill of his profession, he walked
to the Park and took his seat on the bench by the bridle path. Sometimes
he saw her cantering past; she always acknowledged his salute, but never
drew bridle. At times, too, he passed her in the hall; her colorless
"Good morning" never varied except when she said "Good evening." And all
this time he never inquired her name from the hall servant; he was that
sort of man--decent through instinct; for even breeding sometimes permits
sentiment to snoop.
For a week he had been airily dispensing with more than one meal a day;
to keep clothing and boots immaculate required a sacrifice of breakfast
and luncheon--besides, he had various small pensioners to feed, white
rabbits with foolish pink eyes, canary birds, cats, albino mice,
goldfish, and other collaborateurs in his profession. He was obliged to
bribe the janitor, too, because the laws of the house permitted neither
animals nor babies within its precincts. This extra honorarium deprived
him of tobacco, and he became a pessimist.
Besides, doubts as to his own ability arose within him; it was all very
well to practice his magic there alone, but he had not yet tried it on
anybody except the janitor; and when he had begun by discovering several
red-eyed rabbits in the janitor's pockets that intemperate functionary
fled with a despondent yell that brought a policeman to the area gate
with a threat to pull the place.
At length, however, a letter came engaging him for one evening. He was
quite incredulous at first, then modestly scared, perplexed, exultant and
depressed by turns. Here was an opening--the first. And because it was
the first its success or failure meant future engagements or consignments
to the street, perhaps as a white-wing. There must be no faltering now,
no bungling, no mistakes, no amateurish hesitation. It is the empty-
headed who most strenuously demand intelligence in others. One yawn from
such an audience meant his professional damnation--he knew that; every
second must break like froth in a wine glass; an instant's perplexity, a
slackening of the tension, and those flaccid intellects would relax into
native inertia. Incapable of self-amusement, depending utterly upon
superior minds for a respite from ennui, their caprice controlled his
fate; and he knew it.
Sitting there by the sunny window with a pair of magnificent white
Persian cats purring on either knee, he read and reread the letter
summoning him on the morrow to Seabright. He knew who his hostess was--a
large lady lately emerged from a corner in lard, dragging with her some
assorted relatives of atrophied intellects and a husband whose only
mental pleasure depended upon the speed attained by his racing car--the
most exacting audience he could dare to confront.
Like the White Knight he had had plenty of practice, but he feared that
warrior's fate; and as he sat there he picked up a bunch of silver hoops,
tossed them up separately so that they descended linked in a glittering
chain, looped them and unlooped them, and, tiring, thoughtfully tossed
them toward the ceiling again, where they vanished one by one in mid-air.
The cats purred; he picked up one, molded her carefully in his handsome
hands; and presently, under the agreeable massage, her purring increased
while she dwindled and dwindled to the size of a small, fluffy kitten,
then vanished entirely, leaving in his hand a tiny white mouse. This
mouse he tossed into the air, where it became no mouse at all but a white
butterfly that fluttered 'round and 'round, alighting at last on the
window curtain and hung there, opening and closing its snowy wings.
"That's all very well," he reflected, gloomily, as, at a pass of his
hand, the air was filled with canary birds; "that's all very well, but
suppose I should slip up? What I need is to rehearse to somebody before I
face two or three hundred people."
He thought he heard a knocking on his door, and listened a moment. But as
there was an electric bell there he concluded he had been mistaken; and
picking up the other white cat, he began a gentle massage that stimulated
her purring, apparently at the expense of her color and size, for in a
few moments she also dwindled until she became a very small, coal-black
kitten, changing in a twinkling to a blackbird, when he cast her
carelessly toward the ceiling. It was well done; in all India no magician
could have done it more cleverly, more casually.
Leaning forward in his chair he reproduced the two white cats from behind
him, put the kittens back in their box, caught the blackbird and caged
it, and was carefully winding up the hairspring in the white butterfly,
when again he fancied that somebody was knocking.
[Illustration]