I
_First Meeting between a citizen in Spectacles and the Great
Pleasure-Dog Behemoth; also of Charles Gardiner West, a Personage
at Thirty._
It was five of a November afternoon, crisp and sharp, and already
running into dusk. Down the street came a girl and a dog, rather a small
girl and quite a behemothian dog. If she had been a shade smaller, or he
a shade more behemothian, the thing would have approached a parody on
one's settled idea of a girl and a dog. She had enough height to save
that, but it was the narrowest sort of squeak.
The dog was of the breed which are said to come trotting into Alpine
monasteries of a winter's night with fat American travelers in their
mouths, frozen stiff. He was extremely large for his age, whatever that
was. On the other hand, the girl was small for her age, which was
twenty-four next month; not so much short, you understand, for she was
of a reasonable height, as of a dainty slimness, a certain exquisite
reticence of the flesh. She had cares and duties and even sober-sided
responsibilities in this world, beyond the usual run of girls. Yet her
hat was decidedly of the mode that year; her suit was smartly and
engagingly cut; her furs were glossy and black and big. Her face, it may
be said here as well as later, had in its time given pleasure to the
male sex, and some food for critical conversation to the female. A good
many of the young men whom she met along the way this afternoon appeared
distinctly pleased to speak to her.
The girl was Sharlee Weyland, and Sharlee was the short for Charlotte
Lee, as invented by herself some score of years before. One baby-name in
a hundred sticks through a lifetime, and hers was the one in that
particular hundred. Of the young men along the way, one was so lucky as
to catch her eye through a large plate-glass window. It was Semple and
West's window, the ground-floor one in the great new Commonwealth
Building, of which the town is rightly so proud, and the young man was
no other than West, Charles Gardiner himself. A smile warmed his
good-looking face when he met the eye of the girl and the dog; he waved
a hand at them. That done, he immediately vanished from the window and
reached for his hat and coat; gave hurried directions to a clerk and a
stenographer; and sallying forth, overtook the pair before they had
reached the next corner.
"Everything's topsy-turvy," said he, coming alongside. "Here you are
frivolously walking downtown with a dog. Usually at this time you are
most earnestly walking uptown, and not a sign of a dog as far as the eye
can see. What on earth's happened?"
"Oh, how do you do?" said she, apparently not displeased to find herself
thus surprised from the rear. "I too have a mad kind of feeling, as
though the world had gone upside down. Don't be amazed if I suddenly
clutch out at you to keep from falling. But the name of it--of this
feeling--is having a holiday. Mr. Dayne went to New York at 12.20."
"Ah, I see. When the cat's away?"
"Not at all. I am taking this richly earned vacation by his express
command."
"In that case, why mightn't we turn about and go a real walk--cease
picking our way through the noisome hum of commerce and set brisk
evening faces toward the open road--and all that? You and I and the dog.
What is his name? Rollo, I suppose?"
"Rollo! No! Or Tray or Fido, either! His name is Bee, short for
Behemoth--and I think that a very captivating little name, don't you?
His old name, the one I bought him by, was Fred--_Fred_!--but already he
answers to the pretty name of Bee as though he were born to it. Watch."
She pursed her lips and gave a whistle, unexpectedly loud and clear.
"Here, Bee, here! Here, sir! Look, look. He turned around _right away_!"
West laughed. "Wonderfully gifted dog. But I believe you mentioned
taking a walk in the November air. I can only say that physicians
strongly recommend it, valetudinarians swear by it--"
"Oh--if I only could!--but I simply cannot think of it. Do you know, I
never have a holiday without wondering how on earth I could have gotten
on another day without it. You can't imagine what loads of things I've
done since two o'clock, and loads remain. The very worst job of them all
still hangs by a hair over my head. I must cross here."
West said that evidently her conception of a holiday was badly mixed. As
they walked he paid for her society by incessantly taking off his hat;
nearly everybody they met spoke to them, many more to him than to her.
Though both of them had been born in that city and grown up with it, the
girl had only lately come to know West well, and she did not know him
very well now. All the years hitherto she had joined in the general
admiration of him shyly and from a distance, the pretty waiting-lady's
attitude toward the dazzling young crown prince. She was observant, and
so she could not fail to observe now the cordiality with which people of
all sorts saluted him, the touch of deference in the greeting of not a
few. He was scarcely thirty, but it would have been clear to a duller
eye that he was already something of a personage. Yet he held no public
office, nor were his daily walks the walks of philanthropic labor for
the common good. In fact Semple & West's was merely a brokerage
establishment, which was understood to be cleaning up a tolerable lot of
money per annum.
They stood on the corner, waiting for a convenient chance to cross, and
West looked at her as at one whom it was pleasant to rest one's eyes
upon. She drew his attention to their humming environment. For a city of
that size the life and bustle here were, indeed, such as to take the
eye. Trolley cars clanged by in a tireless procession; trucks were
rounding up for stable and for bed; delivery wagons whizzed corners and
bumped on among them; now and then a chauffeur honked by, grim eyes
roving for the unwary pedestrian. On both sides of the street the
homeward march of tired humans was already forming and quickening.
"Heigho! We're living in an interesting time, you and I," said West. "It
isn't every generation that can watch its old town change into a
metropolis right under its eyes."
"I remember," said she, "when it was an exciting thing to see anybody on
the street you didn't know. You went home and told the family about it,
and very likely counted the spoons next morning. The city seemed to
belong to _us_ then. And now--look. Everywhere new kings that know not
Joseph. Bee!"
"It's the law of life; the old order changeth." He turned and looked
along the street, into the many faces of the homeward bound. "The
eternal mystery of the people.... Don't you like to look at their faces
and wonder what they're all doing and thinking and hoping and dreaming
to make out of their lives?"
"Don't you think they're all hoping and dreaming just one thing?--how to
make more money than they're making at present? All over the world,"
said Miss Weyland, "bright young men lie awake at night, thinking up
odd, ingenious ways to take other people's money away from them. These
young men are the spirit of America. We're having an irruption of them
here now ... the Goths sacking the sacred city."
"Clever rascals they are too. I," said West, "belong to the other group.
I sleep of nights and wake up in the morning to have your bright young
Goths take my money away from me."
He laughed and continued: "Little Bobby Smythe, who used to live here,
was in my office the other day. I was complimenting him on the
prosperity of the plumbers' supply manufacture--for such is his mundane
occupation, in Schenectady, N.Y. Bobby said that plumbers' supplies were
all well enough, but he made his real money from an interesting device
of his own. There is a lot of building going on in his neighborhood, it
seems, and it occurred to him to send around to the various owners and
offer his private watchman to guard the loose building materials at
night. This for the very reasonable price of $3.50 a week. It went like
hot cakes. 'But,' said I, 'surely your one watchman can't look after
thirty-seven different places.' 'No,' said Bobby, 'but they think he
does.' I laughed and commended his ingenuity. 'But the best part of the
joke,' said he, 'is that _I haven't got any watchman at all_.'"
Sharlee Weyland laughed gayly. "Bobby could stand for the portrait of
young America."
"You've been sitting at the feet of a staunch old Tory Gamaliel named
Colonel Cowles. I can see that. Ah, me! My garrulity has cost us a
splendid chance to cross. What are all these dreadful things you have
still left to do on your so-called holiday?"
"Well," said she, "first I'm going to Saltman's to buy stationery. Boxes
and boxes of it, for the Department. Bee! Come here, sir! Look how fat
this purse is. I'm going to spend all of that. Bee! I wish I had put him
to leash. He's going to hurt himself in a minute--you see!--"
"Don't you think he's much more likely to hurt somebody else? For a
guess, that queer-looking little citizen in spectacles over the way, who
so evidently doesn't know where he is at."
"Oh, do you think so?--Bee!... Then, after stationery, comes the
disagreeable thing, and yet interesting too. I have to go to my Aunt
Jennie's, dunning."
"You are compelled to dun your Aunt Jennie?"
She laughed. "No--dun for her, because she's too tender-hearted to do
it herself. There's a man there who won't pay his board. Bee!
Bee!--BEE!-O heavens--It's happened!"
And, too quick for West, she was gone into the mêlée, which immediately
closed in behind her, barricading him away.
What had happened was a small tragedy in its way. The little citizen in
spectacles, who had been standing on the opposite corner vacantly eating
an apple out of a paper bag, had unwisely chosen his moment to try the
crossing. He was evidently an indoors sort of man and no shakes at
crossing streets, owing to the introspective nature of his mind. A
grocery wagon shaved him by an inch. It was doing things to the
speed-limit, this wagon, because a dashing police patrol was close
behind, treading on its tail and indignantly clanging it to turn out,
which it could not possibly do. To avoid erasing the little citizen, the
patrol man had to pull sharply out; and this manoeuvre, as Fate had
written it, brought him full upon the great dog Behemoth, who, having
slipped across the tracks, stood gravely waiting for the flying wagon to
pass. Thus it became a clear case of _sauve qui peut_, and the devil
take the hindermost. There was nothing in the world for Behemoth to do
but wildly leap under the hoofs for his life. This he did successfully.
But on the other side he met the spectacled citizen full and fair, and
down they went together with a thud.
The little man came promptly to a sitting posture and took stock of the
wreck. His hat he could not see anywhere, the reason being that he was
sitting on it. The paper bag, of course, had burst; some of the apples
had rolled to amazing distances, and newsboys, entire strangers to the
fallen gentleman, were eating them with cries of pleasure. This he saw
in one pained glance. But on the very heels of the dog, it seemed, came
hurrying a girl with marks of great anxiety on her face.
"Can you possibly forgive him? That fire-alarm thing scared him
crazy--he's usually so good! You aren't hurt, are you? I do hope so much
that you aren't?"
The young man, sitting calmly in the street, glanced up at Miss Weyland
with no sign of interest.
"I have no complaint to make," he answered, precisely; "though the loss
of my fruit seems unfortunate, to say the least of it."
"I know! The way they fell on them," she answered, as self-unconscious
as he--"quite as though you had offered to treat! I'm very much
mortified--But--_are_ you hurt? I thought for a minute that the coal
cart was going right over you."
A crowd had sprung up in a wink; a circle of interested faces watching
the unembarrassed girl apologizing to the studious-looking little man
who sat so calmly upon his hat in the middle of the street. Meantime all
traffic on that side was hopelessly blocked. Swearing truck drivers
stood up on their seats from a block away to see what had halted the
procession.
"But what is the object of a dog like that?" inquired the man
ruminatively. "What good is he? What is he for?"
"Why--why--why," said she, looking ready to laugh--"he's not a
utilitarian dog at all, you see! He's a pleasure-dog, you know--just a
big, beautiful dog to give pleasure!--"
"The pleasure he has given me," said the man, gravely producing his
derby from beneath him and methodically undenting it, "is negligible. I
may say non-existent."
From somewhere rose a hoarse titter. The girl glanced up, and for the
first time became aware that her position was somewhat unconventional. A
very faint color sprang into her cheeks, but she was not the kind to
retreat in disorder. West dodged through the blockade in time to hear
her say with a final, smiling bow:
"I'm so glad you aren't hurt, believe me ... And if my dog has given you
no pleasure, you may like to think that you have given him a great
deal."
A little flushed but not defeated, her gloved hand knotted in Behemoth's
gigantic scruff, she moved away, resigning the situation to West. West
handled it in his best manner, civilly assisting the little man to rise,
and bowing himself off with the most graceful expressions of regret for
the mishap.
Miss Weyland was walking slowly, waiting for him, and he fell in beside
her on the sidewalk.
"Don't speak to me suddenly," said she, in rather a muffled voice. "I
don't want to scream on a public street."
"Scratch a professor and you find a Tartar," said West, laughing too.
"When I finally caught you, laggard that I was, you looked as if he were
being rude."
Miss Weyland questioned the rudeness; she said that the man was only
superbly natural. "Thoughts came to him and he blabbed them out
artlessly. The only things that he seemed in the least interested in
were his apples and Bee. Don't you think from this that he must be a
floral and faunal naturalist?"
"No Goth, at any rate. Did you happen to notice the tome sticking out of
his coat pocket? It was _The Religion of Humanity_, unless my old eyes
deceived me. Who under heaven reads Comte nowadays?"
"Not me," said Miss Weyland.
"There's nothing to it. As a wealthy old friend of mine once remarked,
people who read that sort of books never make over eighteen hundred a
year."
On that they turned into Saltman's. There much stationery and collateral
stuff was bought for cash paid down, and all for the use of the
Department. Next, at a harness-store, a leash was bargained for and
obtained, and Behemoth bowled over no more young men that day.
Thereafter, the two set their faces westerly till they came to the
girl's home, where the dog was delivered to the cook, and Miss Weyland
went upstairs to kiss her mother. Still later they set out northward
through the lamp-lit night for the older part of town, where resided the
aunt on whose behalf there was dunning to be done that night.
Charles Gardiner West asserted that he had not a thing in all this world
to do, and that erranding was only another way of taking a walk, when
you came to think of it. She was frankly glad of his company; to be
otherwise was to be fantastic; and now as they strolled she led him to
talk of his work, which was never difficult. For West, despite his
rising prosperity, was dissatisfied with his calling, the reason being,
as he himself sometimes put it, that his heart did not abide with the
money changers.
"Sometimes at night," he said seriously, "I look back over the busy day
and ask myself what it has all amounted to. Suppose I did all the
world's stock-jobbing, what would I really have accomplished? You may
say that I could take all the money I made and spend it for free
hospitals, but would I do it? No. The more I made, the more I'd want for
myself, the more all my interest and ambition would twine themselves
around the counting-room. You can't serve two masters, can you, Miss
Weyland? Uplifting those who need uplifting is a separate business, all
by itself."
"You could make the money," laughed she, "and let me spend it for you. I
know this minute where I could put a million to glorious advantage."
"I'm going to get out of it," said West. "I've told Semple so--though
perhaps it ought not to go further just yet. I'd enjoy," said he, "just
such work as yours. There's none finer. You'd like me immensely as your
royal master, I suppose? Want nothing better than to curtsy and kowtow
when I flung out a gracious order?--as, for instance, to shut up shop
and go and take a holiday?"
"Delicious! Though I doubt if anybody in the world could improve on Mr.
Dayne." Suddenly a new thought struck her, and she made a faint grimace.
"There's nothing so very fine about my present work--oh me! I'll give
you that if you want it."
"I see I must look this gift horse over very closely. What is it?"
"They call it dunning."
"I forgot. You started to tell me, and then your dog ran amuck and
began butting perfect strangers all over the place."
"Oh," said she, "it's the commonest little story in the world. All
landladies can tell them to you by the hour. This man has been at Aunt
Jennie's nearly a month, and what's the color of his money she hasn't
the faintest idea. Such is the way our bright young men carve out their
fortunes--the true Gothic architecture! Possibly Aunt Jennie has thrown
out one or two delicate hints, carefully insulated to avoid hurting his
feelings. You know the way our ladies of the old school do--the worst
collectors the world has ever seen. So she telephoned me this
morning--I'm her business woman, you see--asking me to come and advise
her, and I'm coming, and after supper--"
"Well, what'll you do?"
"I'm going to talk with him, with the man. I'm simply going to _collect
that money_. Or if I can't--"
"What's the horrid alternative?"
"I'm going to _fire_ him!"
West laughed merrily. His face always looked most charming when he
smiled. "Upon my word I believe you can do it."
"I _have_ done it, lots of times."
"Ah! And is the ceremony ever attended by scenes of storm and violence?"
"Never. They march like little lambs when I say the word.
Hay-foot--straw-foot!"
"But then your aunt loses their arrears of board, I suppose."
"Yes, and for that reason I never fire except as a last desperate
resort. Signs of penitence, earnest resolves to lead a better life, are
always noted and carefully considered."
"If you _should_ need help with this customer to-night--not that I think
you will, oh no!--telephone me. I'm amazingly good at handling bright
young men. This is your aunt's, isn't it?"
"No, no--next to the corner over there. O heavens! Look--_look!_"
West looked. Up the front steps of Miss Weyland's Aunt Jennie's a man
was going, a smallish man in a suit of dusty clothes, who limped
as he walked. The electric light at the corner illumined him
perfectly--glinted upon the spectacles, touched up the stout volume in
the coat-pocket, beat full upon the swaybacked derby, whereon its owner
had sat what time Charlotte Lee Weyland apologized for the gaucherie of
Behemoth. And as they watched, this man pushed open Aunt Jennie's front
door, with never so much as a glance at the door-bell, and stepped as of
right inside.
Involuntarily West and Miss Weyland had halted; and now they stared at
each other with a kind of wild surmise which rapidly yielded to
ludicrous certainty. West broke into a laugh.
"Well, do you think you'll have the nerve to fire _him_?"