shutting down rapidly. It was so dark when at last he got heavily upon
his feet that he was obliged to fumble about for his shabby hat and coat
in the shallow closet which held his scant wardrobe. He muttered to
himself as he did so a quotation from Octave Feuillet. He could hardly
have been an aspirant for literary honors, and not be crammed to the
throat with quotations.
"'_Ce n'est donc pas un vain mot, la faim!_'" he said aloud, with so
much bitterness that a hearer, had there been one, might have forgiven
his sentimentality. "'_Il y a donc vraiment une maladie de ce nom-là._'"
He went down the three flights of stairs which lay between his chamber
and the sordid street, taking his way to a cheap restaurant, which his
soul loathed, but to which the narrowness of his purse constrained him.
The waiter-girls, gossiping together, knew his shabby figure too well to
hasten to serve him with any alacrity born of expectation of tips; but
one of them came to stand, leaning by one hand upon the table, while he
studied the bill of fare in a vain attempt to discover some dish which
would be alike satisfactory to his appetite and his finances. There were
stains of coffee and of soup upon the card, which gave him a feeling
of disgust, as if his food had been served in an unwashed dish; but he
repressed his feelings and made out his meagre order. The damsel filled
him the usual glass of ice-water, tossed an evening paper before him,
and betook herself to cry the supper he had called for into the mouth of
a rubber tube, which hung flabbily out of the wall. West could hear
the voice of somebody under ground repeating the order, like a surly
subterranean echo, and he was peevishly half inclined to fling a plate
at the head of a man at the next table, on the supposition that that
individual might have been listening to this double disclosure of the
straitness of diet to which his poverty constrained him.
He tried to interest himself in the paper which had been given him. He
picked out the smallest paragraphs with a feeling of being so much at
variance with the world in general that nothing could possibly interest
him which was not held to be of no especial moment to the majority.
Suddenly he felt that little thrill with which a man always comes upon
his name in print. Among a lot of brief jottings was the statement that
a man in Chicago had left two hundred thousand dollars to Barum West.
For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, but instantly his common
sense reasserted itself, and he smiled with the bitter but fleeting
cynicism of youth at the impossibility that a fortune should come to
him by any lucky throw of Fortune's dice. The name was sufficiently
uncommon, however, to make the coincidence striking, and what artistic
youth, so placed that his wits were more or less disconcerted by the
unevenness of life, could fail to make the paragraph the starting-point
for a thousand dreams.
All that night, when he should have been sleeping, and when he really
was half under the influence of slumber, Barum West's thoughts, which
should have been devising stage situations, droll dialogue, and popular
allusions, occupied themselves with that illusive fortune. He considered
what he would do did he really have it; how he would enjoy it; what
delights he would purchase, and what miseries escape. In dreams his
fancy wove a gorgeous tissue of enchantment, at which he smiled when he
waked, although in reality it was little more extravagant than the airy
fabric of his waking fancies. When once an imaginative youth gives
rein to his fancy, especially if hope and need prick the tricksy steed
forward, there is no telling to what lengths the race it runs may not
stretch. West certainly did not believe that the legacy of which he had
seen mention was really intended for his pocket, and yet the coincidence
of the name seemed to him so good proof that it went far toward
persuading him that he was, in truth, the legatee. For the rest, he,
perhaps not unconsciously, humored a little a dream which at least
amused for the time being a life all too little lightened by frivolity
of any sort.
It was not until the following evening that it occurred to West that,
having a fortune in hand, it would be necessary for him to invest it.
He was once more at the eating-house, which to-night he regarded with
less bitterness than hitherto, so strong was the effect of his dream in
putting him in better temper toward life and the world. As he scanned
the paper, in the hope that he might come upon some further information
in regard to Barum West's fortune, his eye lighted on the stock
reports, and, with a sudden sense of importance he reflected that with
two hundred thousand dollars to take care of it behooved him to furbish
up whatever knowledge he possessed of stocks. The unintelligibility of
the stock reports was sufficient proof that he had little knowledge
to furbish, but this only aroused his combativeness, and made him
determined to learn.
When he left the restaurant he bought a paper of his own, and taking it
to his room, he passed the evening in studying finance as represented
in the columns of the daily journal. There was something amusing, or
pathetic, as one might look at it, about the absorption with which he
gave himself to the occupation of deciding what he should do with
$200,000 if he had it. He reflected shrewdly that it were wise not to
invest his whole capital in a single stock, and he tried to recall
whatever he had heard of the relative safety of different classes of
security. He guessed at the amount of commission he would be obliged
to pay a broker, his guide being a confused remembrance that in a play
he had heard a certain rate mentioned. He carefully tabulated his
investments, and retired at length, the possessor of an income of
something over $11,000, all commissions having been paid.
It was perhaps not strange that Barum was in absolute ignorance of
the fact, since a knowledge of the vagaries of the stock market was
decidedly outside of his world, but the truth was that he had begun to
manage his fancied fortunes on a falling market when the bears were
raging in Wall Street. While he slept that night a combination was being
completed which was the next day to run down twenty-five per cent the
conservative railroad stock in which West had felt it safe to put half
his fairy gold. When Barum took up the paper at the restaurant on the
third evening he had lost about $40,000,--a fact which could hardly have
caused him more chagrin had he really possessed the money to lose.
The game he was playing interested him like a new novel. His quick
imagination had taken fire, and this defeat spurred him to a fresh
endeavor. He felt himself in honor bound to regain what he had lost; and
this evening went like the last, in complicated and decidedly amateurish
efforts to bring his imaginary finances into a satisfactory condition.
The writing of the play of which he was to read the skeleton to the
manager in a fortnight advanced not at all. He took his pen to write,
and laid it down to refresh his memory on the latest quotation on some
stock; he tried to think of his plot, and found himself reflecting
concerning debenture bonds and second mortgages, with the vaguest
possible notion of what either might be.
The strange possession which a vivid fancy may take of a lonely and
imaginative mind is a phenomenon not unfamiliar to those who have
studied the lives of men of fervid temperament; and the whim to which
West now gave himself up was no more extravagant than many another which
has had consequences far more serious. For days he went on, becoming
more and more completely engrossed by the folly he was following. His
writing-table was covered with papers upon which he had memoranda of
stocks, of sales, of investments, calculations of commissions, and all
the rest of it. He even thought of going down town to watch the bulletin
boards at some broker's, but he would hardly have been the fanciful
dreamer he was, had he not shrunk from actually coming in contact with
men and the reality of the business at which he played.
For a week this absurdity continued. Sometimes West gained a little in
his visionary speculations, and this inspired him with new courage,
although whether he won or lost he was still possessed with the fatal
gambling mania. His work meanwhile was not advancing. It is true that
he sat for hours at his table nominally at work upon his play, but he
interrupted himself constantly to consider whether there were not some
way of recovering the money he had lost.
When Saturday night came he looked back over his week with regret and
shame. The date fixed for his presenting his sketch to the manager was
now only eight days off, and he was practically no further advanced
in his preparation than on the day when his friend brought him the
delightful news that that elusive personage had consented to make the
appointment. He had wasted the past week in a foolish day-dream, as
profitless as it was absurd. Yet he smiled to himself at the reflection
that his day-dream had at least been amusing. It had been like creating
a story or the plot for a play; and with a characteristically bachelor
thought, he added to himself that it was at least less dangerous to play
with visions of fortune than of love, and quite as sensible.
He could not, on the whole, however, be satisfied with the result of
his week, and he determined to have no more of this folly. He must
set to work in earnest, and he resented the consciousness which
forced itself upon him that his lonely life and imaginative turn made
it possible for him to fall into vagaries which to the practical
common-sense of mankind in general would be held to indicate anything
but a sound mind. He started up suddenly and gathered all the papers
upon which were recorded his unlucky stock transactions, and began to
thrust them into the stove. He would make an end of the whole foolish
business. And yet, so far from entirely burning his ships, he at least
left for himself a little boat in which to continue his explorations
into the delusive regions of financial fairy-land, since he saved the
one slip which contained the statement of the present condition of his
much-diminished fortune. He condescended to the weak, but eminently
human trick of attempting to humbug himself in regard to his reasons
for doing so. He said to himself, exactly as if he were explaining to
another person, that the bit of paper would serve as a warning to him,
should he ever be tempted to indulge in so idiotic a diversion again;
and he added, as if to quiet the least suspicion that he meant to use
the memorandum, that the morrow being Sunday there would be no market
with which he could play.
And yet, so weak is human resolution, such a rope of sand is it to
fetter the resistless progress of character,--which is destiny,--that
the next evening found West with the Sunday paper spread before him,
carefully studying the financial article, and elaborating his plans for
a grand _coup_, by which he should regain all the thousands he had lost.
He had become very canny during the week's study of the market reports,
and he felt this Sunday evening all the pleasant satisfaction of one
who, out of sight, cunningly devises the overthrow of clever enemies. On
Monday morning he would--in imagination, of course--go into the field
with a shrewdly devised scheme of buying and selling, which should
result in the triumphant re-establishment of his financial standing.
When one is dealing with life in imagination merely there is of course
no limit to the extent to which one may make himself master of events;
and partly from a keen fancy, partly from pure _naïveté_, West's plan
involved nothing less than bulling the market himself upon his visionary
capital, now shrunken to some $70,000.
All day Monday West was in a state of excitement which was amazingly
absurd when one considers that the cause was wholly fancy. When a
drunkard returns to his cups he is notoriously more intemperate
than before, and in delivering himself up for a second time to the
intoxication of his vagaries Barum plunged more recklessly than ever
into its extravagances. On Tuesday he was once more to be rich, and then
he would speculate no more. Safe mortgages and government bonds should
suffice him as investments, even though the rate of interest they paid
was low. He would not again expose himself to the chances of such
feverish excitement as that in which he had spent the past week.
So real had the whole business become to him that, while he smiled at
his own folly as he took up the Tuesday evening paper, he actually felt
a pang of disappointment to discover that his imaginary operations had
produced no effect on the stock market. So far from rising, stocks had
that day gone almost out of sight, so great had been the fall in the
price of securities of all sorts.
A feeling almost of despair came over the young man as he read. He had
gone out into the street to buy the earliest edition which would contain
the account of the sales that day, and as he walked toward his attic
he experienced almost as sharp a pang as if the absolute wreck which
he found had overtaken his imaginary fortune had befallen a genuine
bank-account. That unreasonable youthful disappointment which arises
from a sense of failure _per se_, with little reference to the real
importance of the stake, stung him keenly; and he was one of those men
who cannot but confound real and æsthetic grievances.
He returned to his attic and figured it out. He was absolutely and
hopelessly ruined. He had not only lost every dollar of his imaginary
fortune, but he was, on paper, some seven or eight hundred dollars in
debt to his brokers for commissions. He was so overwhelmed by this
catastrophe that he sat brooding over it in the darkness of the February
twilight and gathering night, until it was far past the hour when he
usually took his apology for a dinner. He was not without a sense of
humor sufficiently vivid to make him laugh at himself, and mentally mock
at the vexation which the result of his airy speculations caused him;
but this did not prevent his being vexed, or take his thoughts from
laborious calculations how a different result might have been reached.
He went off to dinner at last with a sober and abstracted mien,
ordering a repast even more economical than usual, as befitted one who
had just lost his whole fortune in ill-starred speculation.
It was his custom to time his visit to the restaurant so as to dine
before the crowd of customers came for their evening meal. To-night,
however, he was behind them. The place was no fuller than he usually
found it, but it bore signs of the recent crush. The cloth of the table
was crumpled and soiled, the glass in which the inevitable ice-water
was poured was yet warm from being washed, while the evening paper the
waiter gave him was adorned with an irregular stain of coffee. In the
midst of the brown blotch of this stain was a patch undiscolored; and by
one of those odd and improbable coincidences of which life is full, in
the midst of this spot of dingy white Barum West once more caught sight
of his own name. The whimsical fate which had started the fantastic
train of thought in his mind ten days before now finished its work by a
paragraph stating that the will by which $200,000 had been bequeathed to
Barum West by Richard Granger, of Chicago, was now found to antedate a
second testament by which the money was left to Harvard College.
Barum West went home with the light step of a boy. A great
responsibility seemed suddenly lifted from his shoulders. The capricious
fancy which had insisted that he should be depressed because he had lost
an imaginary fortune had apparently been willing to accept the fact that
even in hypothesis the possession of the money had been a mistake, and
the unlucky speculator was formally acquitted at the bar of his inner
consciousness. He lit his lamp and his pipe, seated himself in his
chintz-covered rocking-chair, with his heels on the top of the coal
stove, and ruminated. He reflected upon the fact that it was only five
days before he was to meet the manager, and nothing was done in the way
of a play which he could for an instant regard as at all satisfactory.
"Instead of writing an extravaganza," he thought, with mingled amusement
and self-reproach, "I have been living one."
The form of the thought struck him instantly. His feet came down to the
floor with a crash, and in his excitement his pipe went smashing down
beside them.
"By Jove!" he cried aloud, "I have it!"
And the plot of the extravaganza, which everybody will remember as being
so successful the following winter, "A Speculator in Air," and which
set Barum West on his feet financially, was only a properly modified
version of the vagaries in which the author had indulged in the handling
and the losing of his imaginary fortune.
Interlude Sixth.
A BUSINESS MEETING.
A BUSINESS MEETING.
[_Certain absurd, not to say malicious, reports having been circulated
in regard to the meeting held by the Rosedale Sewing-Circle to decide
upon the time, place, and other details of their annual spring fair, it
is deemed but simple justice to the estimable ladies who compose that
body to give an accurate and unvarnished account of the proceedings on
that occasion; and the writer feels that not only will such a narration
sufficiently silence all slanders, but that it will as well go far
toward a triumphant refutation of the often-repeated falsehood that
women have no aptitude for business._]
The meeting, being appointed for 2.30 P. M., was called to order by
the president, Mrs. Gilflora Smithe, at 3.30 P. M., the hour preceding
having been spent in an animated and pleasant discussion of the
important question whether the pastor's wife, who was detained at home
by illness, was really so extravagant as to use granulated sugar in her
sweet pickles, as was positively asserted by Miss Araminta Sharp. The
secretary read the report of the last meeting, as follows:--
"Monday, April 7.--Meeting called to order by the president. The records
read and approved. There being no quorum present, it was unanimously
voted to hold the next meeting on Thursday, as that day is more
convenient for the ladies. On motion of Mrs. Percy Browne, voted to
appoint a committee of one to take charge of the Art Department of the
fair. Mrs. Browne kindly volunteered to serve as that committee.
Adjourned."
The records having been approved, the president remarked that there was
so much business to come before the meeting that she really could not
tell where to begin, and she should be glad if some one would make a
motion, just to start things.
"A motion to put things in motion," murmured Miss Keene, looking around
with the smile which everybody knew meant that she had made a joke.
Everybody smiled also, although nobody saw the point until the president
echoed, with a pleased air of discovery, "Motion,--motion! Very good,
Miss Keene."
Then they all smiled once again, and Miss Gray told of an excellent jest
made by a cousin in Boston:--
"My cousin in Boston--that is, she isn't my real cousin, but a
step-cousin by marriage--was at a concert once, and she made an awfully
good joke. I don't remember exactly now what it was, but it was awfully
funny. It was something about music, and we all laughed."
"It doesn't seem to me," spoke up Miss Sharp, acidly, "that Boston jokes
will help the fair much; and I move you, Mrs. President,--if I don't
make a motion, I'm sure I don't know who ever will,--that the fair be
held on the 20th of April."
"I second the motion," promptly spoke up Miss Snob, who always seconded
everything.
"It is moved and seconded," said the president, "that the fair be held
on the 20th of April; but I'm sure the 23d would suit me a great deal
better."
"Why not have it the 17th?" asked Miss Keene; "that seems to me quite
late enough."
"Oh, dear, no," interrupted Mrs. Percy Browne, "I never could get half
the things done for my department by that time. I move we have it the
30th."
"Second the motion," promptly responded Miss Snob.
"It is moved and seconded," propounded Mrs. Smithe from the chair, "that
the fair be held on the 30th. That seems to me an excellent time. If it
be your minds, you will please to signify it. It is a vote."
"I still stick to the 20th," declared Miss Sharp, viciously. "I shall
open my candy-table then, whether the rest of the fair is ready or not."
"Sweets to the sweet," murmured Miss Keene, looking around with her
jest-announcing smile.
"The 20th is Sunday, any way," observed the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt, in
tones of great condescension.
"I don't care," persisted the contumacious Sharp. "I'll have my part of
the fair then, any way."
"Suppose we compromise," suggested the president, pacifically, "and say
the 25th."
There was considerable discussion, more or less acrimonious, at this
proposition, but it was finally adopted without the formality of a vote,
the secretary being instructed to set the date April 25th down as the
final decision of the meeting.
"There will have to be a general committee of arrangements," the
president observed, this important preliminary having been settled. "I
suppose it is customary for the chair to appoint them; but I am ready
to receive nominations."
"I nominate Miss Keene," said Mrs. Browne, who wished to keep in that
lady's good graces.
"Second the motion," Miss Snob exclaimed, with enthusiasm.
"Miss Keene will have enough to do at the cake-table," Mrs. Smithe
replied. "I think I'll appoint Mrs. Hoyt, Mrs. Crowler, Mrs. Henderson,
and Mrs. Lowell."
"There's never but three on that committee," snapped Miss Sharp. "You'll
have to take off one."
"Dear me!" responded Mrs. Smithe, in dismay; "I think you must be
mistaken."
But Miss Sharp persisted, and the president, driven into a corner, was
forced to propose that one of the ladies named should resign. Nobody
seemed willing to do this, however, and it was at length decided that
some one of the four should regard herself as a substitute, to act
in case one of the others could not serve. The president could not,
however, bring herself to specify which should be the substitute, and
was greatly relieved when the conversation was turned by Mrs.
Henderson's remarking,--
"Speaking of substitutes reminds me. Did you know that you could make
mince-pies without meat? My niece from Bangor--"
[_The talk of the next fifteen minutes is omitted, as being irrelevant,
relating exclusively to cooking. At the expiration of that time, the
business of the occasion was accidentally reintroduced by an allusion on
the part of Mrs. Crowler to some delicious chocolate macaroons which she
had eaten at a fair in East Machias._]
"We really must have some more committees," the president said,
recovering herself with a start. "Will somebody make a motion?"
"I don't think Friday is a good day for a fair, any way," Mrs. Lowell
now remarked, reflectively. "The 25th is Friday."
"Oh, I never thought of that," exclaimed half a dozen ladies, in dismay.
"We should be all tired out for baking-day."
"I don't know what we can do," the president said, in despairing
accents,--"there seem to be so many days, and only one fair; and we've
had so many dates proposed. We shall have to unvote something."
It was at this crisis that the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt rose to the
heights of the parliamentary opportunity.
"I move the previous question," she said, distinctly and firmly.
There fell a hush of awe over the sewing-circle, and even Miss Snob was
a moment in bringing out her second.
"I don't think!" Mrs. President Smithe ventured, a little falteringly,
"that I quite understood the motion."
"I moved," the Hon. Mrs. Hoyt replied, with the air of one conscious
that her husband had once been almost nominated to the State
Legislature, and had been addressed as Honorable ever after, "I moved
the previous question."
"Yes?" Mrs. Smithe said, inquiringly and pleadingly.
"That takes everything back to the beginning," Mrs. Hoyt condescended
to explain, "and we can then change the date of our fair in a strictly
legal way."