best house in the little county seat, was surprised to see from his
chair in the big bay window an antiquated carriage drawn by a
retired farm horse draw up before his cast-iron negro hitching post.
In the carriage were Aunt Sarah and Uncle John.
Judge Thompson was on the porch in time to receive his guests.
"We've come to get a divorce," said Aunt Sarah, with a direct gaze;
then she added, with the _sang froid_ of one who is wise, "What'll
it cost?"
The judge motioned them to seats in the wicker chairs on the porch,
and then replied:
"But you must have grounds----"
"Everybody knows it. Incompatibility of temperament."
And the judge, smiling, humoured Aunt Sarah, for he knew her and the
community in which she lived. "It will cost you just ten dollars,"
he said.
"Make out the paper," Aunt Sarah replied.
One hour later Uncle John and Aunt Sarah left the judge's house
together, separated for life.
Moses, their horse, looked at them out of the corner of his good eye
as they approached the carriage.
Uncle John paused, but Aunt Sarah stepped firmly into the vehicle.
Uncle John followed her and took up the reins.
Moses knew the way home by a clairvoyant sense, and he took that way
at his own pace of prophet-like dignity.
At the door of the old homestead Uncle John handed Aunt Sarah down
from her seat in silence. Then he put Moses into his stall. And when
he returned to the house he found Aunt Sarah beaming upon him
through her gold-rimmed spectacles from her place at the table,
which was loaded with a supper such as she alone could cook.
Aunt Sarah was jubilant. She was living at last with a man to whom
she was not married; no longer was there a blot on the scutcheon of
her intellectual progress; no longer did a black beetle mar the
pellucid amber of her simple life of Advanced Ideas; no longer could
the acolytes, in off moments when they were not engaged in trundling
the spheres through the macrocosm, gaze sternly down upon her
through interstellar space and say:
"Aunt Sarah is nearly, but not quite, an intellectual."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
THE HORSE HEAVER
By Lyman Bryson
"For why should you be tired?" demanded his wife, splashing her arms
viciously in the suds as she finished the day's rinsing. "You've
nothing to do but shovel dirt all day and rest when your boss ain't
looking."
"Gwan, I'm a hard-working man," said Kallaher. "And, what's more, I
can kick about it whenever I want to without any remarks from
yourself. I'm tired. When's supper?"
"Supper is any time when I can get my arms dry and get a good
breath." Mrs. Kallaher began belligerently to get his supper.
Kallaher stretched his short legs out in front of him and leaned
back in his chair. "It was a hard day," he said gently. "As if it
wasn't enough to have me breaking my back with the shovel and all, a
fool drove his horse too close to the ditch, and the dumb beast fell
in on top of me."
"That's likely--now, ain't it?--and you being here to tell about
it!"
"Believe it or not, it happened." Kallaher folded his hands across
the place where he didn't wear a belt and sighed. "But I put him out
again and went on with my work without taking a rest or nothing."
Mrs. Kallaher might have tried again to express her incredulity, but
just then old Mother Coogan, next-door neighbour, thrust a red
excited face through the kitchen door.
"Mary Kallaher, is your man home?"
"Why shouldn't he be?"
Mrs. Coogan entered and stood, one hand clutching a newspaper, the
other pointing dramatically at Kallaher. "It may be so, but he don't
look it," she said.
Before they could question her she began reading from the paper:
"Mike Kallaher, a ditch digger on the new Twelfth Street sewer, is a
small man but a mighty. A horse, driven too near the ditch to-day,
fell in. 'Begorra,' said Mike, 'can't a man work in peace?' He laid
down his shovel, spat on his hands, and heaved the horse back into
the street. The foreman thought he had been hurt when the horse fell
in, but he wasn't, and he was not in the least bothered by having to
throw him back out again. He went back to his digging."
"Let me see that paper." Kallaher rose and took it from her hand.
Slowly he went over the story--which the reporter who wrote it had
thought exceeding clever. "Yeh," he said finally, "that's me, all
right."
Mrs. Coogan looked upon him with respect. "I never thought much of
you before, Mike Kallaher, but you're the only man I know that could
pick up a horse." She turned to his wife. "It's no wonder you're a
meek woman, Mary, but you ought to be proud of a man like that,
sure."
"Are you coming on with supper now?" asked Kallaher in a mighty
voice of the speechless Mrs. Kallaher. "Be quick now, or I'll give
you what's needing."
Never before had he dared make a threat as if he meant it. His wife
was struck with sudden awe. She gasped and hurried silently with the
setting on of supper. She trembled and dropped a dish.
"You poor clumsy dub!" roared her husband, towering to the height of
five-feet-two. "Are you so weak you can't hold a pot, now?"
"Excuse me, Michael," she murmured. "Excuse me, man. I was excited."
Mrs. Coogan saw with approval that Kallaher was bullying his wife,
and went down the street to tell the neighbourhood.
In Mike Kallaher's kitchen--for it had suddenly become his own,
after belonging for fifteen years to his wife--a poor, meek,
unhappy-looking Irishwoman was obeying orders. She jumped when he
yelled at her, which he did every two minutes to see her jump,
begged his pardon, brought his pipe, and looked on in silence when
he deliberately knocked out the ashes on the newly scrubbed floor. A
man who could throw a horse out of a ditch would stop at nothing.
As the new monarch sat in his chair looking contemptuously away from
his slave, who was tentatively watching him, there was a knock at
the door. Mike's chest had begun to get tired from being swelled out
so far, and he let out his breath with a sigh.
A suave young man was admitted. After ascertaining that Mike
Kallaher really lived in this place he asked Mike how he was
feeling.
"Good," was the truculent answer.
"No injuries from your little adventure this afternoon?"
"Injured, is it? Not a bit--not a bit."
"I'm glad to hear that. I'm assistant manager of the Burke
Construction Company. We heard one of our horses fell on you to-day,
so I came down to help out if you were hurt. We thought we could
afford to pay a few hundred dollars on doctor bills." The young man
smiled pleasantly. "But since you're not hurt and are so willing to
admit it, we won't have that pleasure. Good-bye." He got up and
went.
Kallaher had forgotten to swell out his chest again. He sat drooping
in his chair. His wife was no longer tentative.
"Horse heaver, is it?" She advanced, menacing. "Horse heaver? You
poor mick! There goes your chance to be a cripple for life and die
rich."
She pulled his face up by the front hair and slapped him like a
mother.
"Horse heaver, is it? Take that, now!"
And Kallaher took it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
THE EGO OF THE METROPOLIS
By Thomas T. Hoyne
"You couldn't get her picture?" sneered the city editor
contemptuously. "Come, Johnson, get into the game. You're not in
Chicago or St. Louis now. This is New York."
Johnson was eating his bread in the sweat of his brow, but he wanted
to continue eating. Therefore he said nothing, but lounged off into
the local room, empty during the dead afternoon hours.
He was lucky to be working at all. During the couple of weeks he had
been wearing out shoe leather chasing pictures for the greatest of
all metropolitan morning newspapers he had been told his good
fortune a hundred times. He, a perfect stranger in New York, had
walked right into a job.
The job should have been tempting only to the rawest cub, but
Johnson, a crackerjack reporter, snapped at it. He knew that some of
the best newspaper men in New York, crackerjack reporters, were
carrying the banner along Park Row.
The afternoon newspapers were boiling over with editions, black type
and red crying out that one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars
had disappeared from a vault of the soundest bank in Wall Street and
that the cashier was missing. To be assigned to this bank story, to
get the chance to show what he really could do, Johnson would have
given a finger from his right hand.
He sat on a corner of a typewriter desk, swinging one leg, while he
raged inwardly at the insolent city editor. Bread or no bread, he
could not work himself into spasms of enthusiasm over a near society
woman's photograph for a cheap story. He was too old in the game for
such child's play.
The noisy opening of the door between the managing editor's room and
the office of the city editor roused him. He heard the managing
editor's voice.
"Got any line on that bank cashier?"
"Not yet, sir," replied the city editor, "but every live man on the
staff is out on the story."
Johnson flushed as if he had been insulted publicly. How would the
old guard in Chicago or Cincinnati retort to such an insinuation
against a man who had campaigned up and down the country and had
learned the newspaper game as a soldier learns war--in action? He
recalled winning out in California, notwithstanding "Native Sons."
But to win against the esoteric self-sufficiency of New Yorkers
demanded higher fortitude.
"Where can I find the owner of this newspaper?"
Johnson came out of his dream abruptly to answer the insignificant
little man who had rambled into the local room.
"He isn't in the building just now," said he patiently.
Owners of newspapers do not receive callers casually. When cranks
get through the outer doors now and again it is the duty of some
employee to act as buffer.
The visitor lifted a trembling hand to his forehead, shook his head
uncertainly, and began to mumble a meandering, inconsequent tale.
Amid the aimless words one sentence unexpectedly shaped itself that
set the reporter's nerves atingle.
Johnson glanced fearfully toward the city editor's office.
"You want to see the owner of the paper?" he asked softly, the
sudden thumping of his heart sounding in his voice. "Come with me."
He grasped the visitor's arm and hurried him out of the local room
into the hall, and thence into an elevator.
"This way," he coaxed, when they reached the street level. He led
the man out into the crowded thoroughfare, cleverly sheering away
from points of danger, as a battleship might convoy a treasure bark.
In the empty local room time dragged. The city editor busied himself
in his little office, glaring at his assignment book, studying
clippings from afternoon newspapers, and answering calls on his
telephone. Once he was interrupted by a woman who laid two tickets
for a church fair on his desk and asked to have a paragraph about
the entertainment published.
"Johnson!" shouted the city editor arrogantly. His voice merely lost
itself in the hollow local room. He rose from his chair irritably
and peered through the door of his office, but there was no Johnson
on whom to break his wrath.
As evening came on reporters and copy readers straggled in. No one
brought startling news in the bank story. The cashier was still
missing and there was no trace of him.
The local room burst into nervous life, emphasized by erratic
volleys from pounding typewriters and hoarse yells for copy-boys.
More than once as the night wore away the city editor stepped from
his office to look toward the corner where Johnson usually sat. Each
time a vacant chair aggravated his anger.
It was nearly eleven o'clock when the ringing telephone bell called
his attention from the proof before him. He jerked the receiver from
its hook.
"Johnson, eh? I wanted you half a dozen times this afternoon and
evening, but now you needn't come in at all. You're through."
He jammed the receiver back with a glow of satisfaction in having
good reason to discharge an incompetent.
The telephone bell rang again. This time the city editor listened.
"You've got the cashier locked up in your room!" he fairly yelled.
"All right! All right!"
Shaking with excitement he wheeled from the telephone.
"Brail! Jack! Fredericks!"
He roared the names into the local room in sharp succession.
Like soldiers at a bugle call men sprang from desks where they were
working or idling.
"You, Jack, get on the 'phone and take a story from Johnson! He's
got the biggest beat that ever was pulled off in the city of New
York."
The rewrite man settled himself at the wire.
At the other end of it Johnson, in his room at the cheap hotel where
he lived, struggled to be calm in this moment of triumph. He began
to dictate.
Near him, well within range of vision, sat his willing prisoner. Not
once since they left the newspaper office together had the cashier
been out of Johnson's sight. Helpless, hopeless, but with a
conscience no longer heavily burdened, the unfortunate man listened
now just as he had listened while the reporter, without betraying
his source of information, craftily verified by telephone the
wandering confession.
Clear and without interruption the stream of dictation poured over
the wire. The story was written as a newspaper story should be
written, and when it was told it ended.
"That's all," sighed Johnson proudly. "I'll hold him here till two
o'clock to make the beat an absolute cinch. Then I'll 'phone the
police."
In the newspaper office the rewrite man had hardly drummed out the
last line of copy before the sheet of paper was snatched from his
typewriter and rushed in the wake of former scudding sheets to the
composing room, just in time for the first edition.
"There never was a beat like it," cried the exultant city editor. "I
don't see how he landed it."
"It's a great piece of newspaper work," agreed the managing editor.
"No man in the country could have done better. Who is Johnson?"
"A new man, but I've taught him the game already. He didn't wait for
any assignment--just went right out and dug that cashier up." The
city editor's voice cracked with enthusiasm. "That's the kind of
newspaper men we turn out in little old New York."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GAY DECEIVER
By Howard P. Stephenson
The only other passenger thumbed his tobacco into a melancholy
pipe-bowl.
"What's your line?" he asked.
"Soap and Christmas candles," I said, and held out my cigar for his
light.
"Married?"
"Yes, you?"
"Um-m-m-m." And he stretched his legs, drew up his elbows and looked
worried.
"When I was making this territory about this time last year," he
began, "I met a pretty, wifely little girl, and we were married
before I left town. Tarascon wasn't on my regular trip then, but now
I have to strike home once a month.
"You see, I was raised in a family of sisters--all older than I,
all unmarried. I could never bring myself to tell them about Edyth.
They don't know it yet. Live in Cranford, on the Vandalia. My wife
thinks I haven't any folks."
"Well?"
He blushed. "There--it--we--I'm going to be a father." Then he
did blush.
I laughed, sympathetic. "You can't bear not to let your sisters
know?" I ventured.
He nodded and gulped.
"Tarascon," called the brakeman. "Tarascon."
* * * * *
I was on the hot veranda of the Croxton House, at Croxton, some two
weeks later, when I felt a modest hand on my shoulder.
"Boy or girl?" were my first words, with a grin.
"Girl," announced the father with pride. "Sophronia Judith Rose.
Named for my sisters."
He seated himself, fished in his pocket for his pipe, and smiled
nervously.
"They knew it when I got home," he said. "I'd left Edyth's letter in
my room. I believe they had been suspecting all along. Well, they
never said a thing at supper, but when I went upstairs I saw a
string of baby ribbon sticking out of my sample case. The girls had
packed it full of things from their hope boxes. Baby things, they
were.
"I tried to bluff it out, but I--I couldn't do it, and I'd told
them all about it five minutes after I came downstairs.
"We all took the train for Tarascon the next day. Edyth was
tickled--said she'd suspected I had sisters. She hadn't, though, of
course.
"So I had to name the baby for them. Weighed eleven pounds, too.
"My, I've got to catch that 9:32 for Tarascon!"
He pulled out his watch, then turned the dial to me sheepishly.
Under the crystal was a tiny slip of narrow ribbon, baby blue.
"So long," he said. "Mayn't see you again. This is my last trip. The
firm's giving me a city job, where I can be with the family."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
IN COLD BLOOD
By Joseph Hall
With the door of her room locked Viola Perrin opened the letter
which she had taken from her husband's office table. It was not very
securely glued, and she succeeded in loosening the flap without
marring the envelope.
When she had read it she dropped the thing upon her dressing table
and stared with dry, unseeing eyes into the mirror. Her world had
crumbled. She did not burst into tears. She was one of those women
who cannot weep. The thing that had happened to her left her racked,
writhing, tearless.
Suddenly the horror of the thing struck her with full force. St.
John was untrue. He was intriguing with another woman even while he
was being the same courteous, attentive husband to her that he had
always been. She rose and clenched her hands fiercely. She caught
her lower lip cruelly between her teeth. For the first time in her
life she wanted to scream.
In an instant she was hot with anger and hurt pride. She rose
quickly and dressed for the street. She hurried. She must get away.
She had no right in this room, in this house, in the house of a man
who did not love her.
Outside she walked to the street car. She had no plan. She did not
intend to go to his office. She was simply getting away from his
home.
She went into a department store and idly looked at some things
without knowing what they were. It was a sale day, and the crowd in
the store was immense. She came to herself when a sharp cry sounded
at her right and the throng surged in that direction.
A woman had fainted, one of the saleswomen. She was a tall woman,
thin and not bad looking. She had been waiting on Viola the moment
before, and she had simply crumpled behind the counter without a
word. The cry had come from a cash-girl who happened to see her
fall. They lifted the woman and carried her limp and pitiful to the
elevator, a policeman keeping back the crowd.
She left the store and wandered again aimlessly about the streets.
The sidewalks were crowded, mostly with women. It was getting warm,
and the women all looked tired and wilted. Lines of them disappeared
into certain doors, and Viola, looking in, saw that these doors were
entrances to cheap restaurants. It was the lunch hour, and these
women were taking their short recess.
The display in the window of one of these places attracted her
attention. It contained meats in various stages of preparation and
dressing and a wild assortment of vegetables. Some flies had gotten
inside the glass and hovered about the viands. She turned away in
disgust.
She thought of her own lunch. When she was downtown St. John always
took her to lunch with him at one of the hotels. The white napery,
the soft lights, the stealthy-footed waiters, the music, the silver
sprang into her mind in vivid contrast to the cheap display she had
just turned from. She shuddered.
In the palm room of the Brinton with the cool, shadowed comfort
about her and an ice before her, the thought of her tragedy
returned. She had been evading it all day, putting it away from her,
shunning it. But it was always with her, reminding her that her
world, the life she had lived, was shattered.
What then? She must go away. It would be better to go quietly,
without giving any reason, simply leave. Of course St. John would
understand, as would Myrtle Weiss, but their guilt would seal their
tongues.
Disappear? And then what? How would she live? What could she do? She
was incompetent to teach. She knew nothing about office work. Of
course, she could clerk in a store.
Suddenly a vision of what that life would mean to her passed
deadeningly before her. She remembered the thin, tall woman who had
fainted behind the counter without a word. The lines of wilted
workers, hastening in their worn clothes to their cheap lunches,
rose before her. She shivered.
For seven years she had lived in the lap of luxury. Nothing had been
denied her. She had the best of clothes, the best of service, the
choicest of food, the promptest of attention of every kind. Her home
was one of the handsomest houses in the most restricted and stylish
residence district of the city.
Another thought came to her. No one knew that she had found the
letter.
The clock in the palm room showed the time to be one-thirty. St.
John, she knew, was out of town.
She rose quickly and left the room. At the office Miss Johnson, the
stenographer, had just returned from the dairy lunch across the
street. She was powdering her rather unattractive nose. Mrs. Perin
smiled at her as she entered her husband's room. Vaguely she envied
this homely creature.
The table was undisturbed, exactly as she had left it.
She sealed the letter carefully and replaced it on the top of the
little pile of mail upon the blotter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
HOUSEWORK--AND THE MAN
By Freeman Tilden
"And you live here--all alone?" she said.
"It looks it, doesn't it?" replied Archer, with a little embarrassed
grin. "I have a woman come in once a week to clean up. I do the
rest--when it gets done. I suppose it looks pretty bad--to you."
She ran her finger appraisingly along the table and held it up. It
was covered with dust. She laughed. "Men can't keep house," she
said.
She rummaged around until she found a rag that would serve as a
duster.
"Now, please don't bother, Miss----" he began.
"I'm married," she corrected soberly. "_Mrs._ Kincaid."
"Well, Mrs. Kincaid, please don't bother to do that. Really, I'm
afraid I enjoy dirt."
"Nobody enjoys dirt," was her severe reply. "Not if they can be
clean."
He sat and watched her. He couldn't help laughing. With deft hands
she seemed to fathom every hiding-place of dust. And he noticed that
her cheeks, which had been pale enough when she came in, were
becoming radiant.
Pretty soon she turned her attention to the bed. "Well, of all the
messes I ever saw!" she exclaimed. "Who ever showed you how to make
up a bed?"
"You just watch me," she told him. "Like this--and then like
this--then you smooth it out--see?"
"It sure does look better," he admitted. "But please don't poke
around in the kitchen. At least spare me that mortification."
She didn't heed his plea. "I thought so!" she exclaimed. "Not a dish
washed!"
"I was going to wash them this afternoon," said Archer humbly.
"Huh! don't you know it's twice as hard after you let them stand?
Where's the dishcloth?"
"Oh, come now, really, I won't have you----"
She paid no attention to him. "What pretty dishes!" she said, as the
hot water began to run.
"Five-and-ten cent store," Archer laughed.
"Really? And they look much prettier than mine. Do you know, I think
this is a dear little place."
"Dishwashing is the worst part of it," said the young man.
"Listen," she told him. "Whenever the dishes have egg on them, don't
put the hot water on first. Watch me...."
She even insisted on rearranging his little closet of dishes. She
cleaned the top of the gas range. Archer vainly tried to prevent
her. She was singing now, as she worked. She straightened the
pictures on the wall. She averred that she couldn't be happy till
she had swept the place from end to end.
After it was all over they sat down facing each other. There was a
pink flush of satisfaction on her cheeks.
"And I never knew who lived up here," she began. "I must say you're
quiet. These apartment houses are just like a lot of cigar boxes.
You know our flat is right underneath."
"It's so decent of you," began Arthur.
"Listen," she interrupted. "I've had a perfectly splendid time. I
suppose I must be going now. It's five o'clock, isn't it?"
He nodded.
At the door she stopped and said, "I've often seen you down at the
street door, and wondered whether you'd speak some time. You don't
think--because I came in here----"
"I think nothing," he said.
"I _knew_ you were that kind of a fellow," she whispered, and fled
downstairs.
* * * * *
Kincaid came in at 6:10.
"Supper ready?" he asked.