"'Last month,' says Mr. Vaucross, 'my expenditure for lunches to
reporters was $124.80.'
"'Get anything out of that?' I asks.
"'That reminds me,' says he; 'add $8.50 for pepsin. Yes, I got
indigestion.'
"'How am I supposed to push along your scramble for prominence?' I
inquires. 'Contrast?'
"'Something of that sort to-night,' says Vaucross. 'It grieves me; but
I am forced to resort to eccentricity.' And here he drops his napkin in
his soup and rises up and bows to a gent who is devastating a potato
under a palm across the room.
"'The Police Commissioner,' says my climber, gratified. 'Friend', says
I, in a hurry, 'have ambitions but don't kick a rung out of your ladder.
When you use me as a stepping stone to salute the police you spoil my
appetite on the grounds that I may be degraded and incriminated. Be
thoughtful.'
"At the Quaker City squab en casserole the idea about Artemisia Blye
comes to me.
"'Suppose I can manage to get you in the papers,' says I - 'a column or
two every day in all of 'em and your picture in most of 'em for a week.
How much would it be worth to you?'
"'Ten thousand dollars,' says Vaucross, warm in a minute. 'But no
murder,' says he; 'and I won't wear pink pants at a cotillon.'
"'I wouldn't ask you to,' says I. 'This is honorable, stylish and
uneffeminate. Tell the waiter to bring a demi tasse and some other
beans, and I will disclose to you the opus moderandi.'
"We closed the deal an hour later in the rococo rouge et noise room. I
telegraphed that night to Miss Artemisia in Salina. She took a couple
of photographs and an autograph letter to an elder in the Fourth
Presbyterian Church in the morning, and got some transportation and $80.
She stopped in Topeka long enough to trade a flashlight interior and a
valentine to the vice-president of a trust company for a mileage book
and a package of five-dollar notes with $250 scrawled on the band.
"The fifth evening after she got my wire she was waiting, all decolletee
and dressed up, for me and Vaucross to take her to dinner in one of
these New York feminine apartment houses where a man can't get in unless
he plays bezique and smokes depilatory powder cigarettes.
"'She's a stunner,' says Vaucross when he saw her. 'They'll give her a
two-column cut sure.'
"This was the scheme the three of us concocted. It was business straight
through. Vaucross was to rush Miss Blye with all the style and display
and emotion he could for a month. Of course, that amounted to nothing as
far as his ambitions were concerned. The sight of a man in a white tie
and patent leather pumps pouring greenbacks through the large end of
a cornucopia to purchase nutriment and heartsease for tall, willowy
blondes in New York is as common a sight as blue turtles in delirium
tremens. But he was to write her love letters - the worst kind of love
letters, such as your wife publishes after you are dead - every day. At
the end of the month he was to drop her, and she would bring suit for
$100,000 for breach of promise.
"Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she won the suit that was all;
and if she lost she was to get it anyhow. There was a signed contract to
that effect.
"Sometimes they had me out with 'em, but not often. I couldn't keep up
to their style. She used to pull out his notes and criticize them like
bills of lading.
"'Say, you!' she'd say. 'What do you call this - letter to a Hardware
Merchant from His Nephew on Learning that His Aunt Has Nettlerash? You
Eastern duffers know as much about writing love letters as a Kansas
grasshopper does about tugboats. "My dear Miss Blye!" - wouldn't that put
pink icing and a little red sugar bird on your bridal cake? How long do
you expect to hold an audience in a court-room with that kind of stuff?
You want to get down to business, and call me "Tweedlums Babe" and
"Honeysuckle," and sign yourself "Mama's Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy Boy" if
you want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs. Get
sappy.'
"After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible tabasco. His
notes read like something or other in the original. I could see a jury
sitting up, and women tearing one another's hats to hear 'em read. And I
could see piling up for Mr. Vaucross as much notoriousness as Archbishop
Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese-on-salad ever enjoyed. He
seemed mighty pleased at the prospects.
"They agreed on a night; and I stood on Fifth Avenue outside a solemn
restaurant and watched 'em. A process-server walked in and handed
Vaucross the papers at his table. Everybody looked at 'em; and he
looked as proud as Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five-cent
cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good as ours.
"About two hours later somebody knocked at my door. There stood Vaucross
and Miss Artemisia, and she was clinging - yes, sir, clinging - to his
arm. And they tells me they'd been out and got married. And they
articulated some trivial cadences about love and such. And they laid
down a bundle on the table and said 'Good night' and left.
"And that's why I say," concluded Ferguson Pogue, "that a woman is too
busy occupied with her natural vocation and instinct of graft such as is
given her for self-preservation and amusement to make any great success
in special lines."
"What was in the bundle that they left?" I asked, with my usual
curiosity.
"Why," said Ferguson, "there was a scalper's railroad ticket as far as
Kansas City and two pairs of Mr. Vaucross's old pants."
IX
THE CALL OF THE TAME
When the inauguration was accomplished - the proceedings were made smooth
by the presence of the Rough Riders - it is well known that a herd of
those competent and loyal ex-warriors paid a visit to the big city. The
newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks the old broad-brimmed hats
and leather belts that they wear to North Beach fish fries, and mixed
with the visitors. No damage was done beyond the employment of the
wonderful plural "tenderfeet" in each of the scribe's stories. The
Westerners mildly contemplated the skyscrapers as high as the third
story, yawned at Broadway, hunched down in the big chairs in hotel
corridors, and altogether looked as bored and dejected as a member of Ye
Ancient and Honorable Artillery separated during a sham battle from his
valet.
Out of this sightseeing delegations of good King Teddy's Gentlemen of
the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye, of Pin Feather, Ariz.
The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue's rush hour swept him away from the
company of his pardners true. The dust from a thousand rustling skirts
filled his eyes. The mighty roar of trains rushing across the sky
deafened him. The lightning-flash of twice ten hundred beaming eyes
confused his vision.
The storm was so sudden and tremendous that Greenbrier's first impulse
was to lie down and grab a root. And then he remembered that the
disturbance was human, and not elemental; and he backed out of it with
a grin into a doorway.
The reporters had written that but for the wide-brimmed hats the West
was not visible upon these gauchos of the North. Heaven sharpen their
eyes! The suit of black diagonal, wrinkled in impossible places; the
bright blue four-in-hand, factory tied; the low, turned-down collar,
pattern of the days of Seymour and Blair, white glazed as the letters
on the window of the open-day-and-night-except-Sunday restaurants; the
out-curve at the knees from the saddle grip; the peculiar spread of
the half-closed right thumb and fingers from the stiff hold upon the
circling lasso; the deeply absorbed weather tan that the hottest
sun of Cape May can never equal; the seldom-winking blue eyes that
unconsciously divided the rushing crowds into fours, as though they were
being counted out of a corral; the segregated loneliness and solemnity
of expression, as of an Emperor or of one whose horizons have not
intruded upon him nearer than a day's ride - these brands of the West
were set upon Greenbrier Nye. Oh, yes; he wore a broad-brimmed hat,
gentle reader - just like those the Madison Square Post Office mail
carriers wear when they go up to Bronx Park on Sunday afternoons.
Suddenly Greenbrier Nye jumped into the drifting herd of metropolitan
cattle, seized upon a man, dragged him out of the stream and gave him
a buffet upon his collar-bone that sent him reeling against a wall.
The victim recovered his hat, with the angry look of a New Yorker who
has suffered an outrage and intends to write to the Trib. about it. But
he looked at his assailant, and knew that the blow was in consideration
of love and affection after the manner of the West, which greets its
friends with contumely and uproar and pounding fists, and receives its
enemies in decorum and order, such as the judicious placing of the
welcoming bullet demands.
"God in the mountains!" cried Greenbrier, holding fast to the foreleg of
his cull. "Can this be Longhorn Merritt?"
The other man was - oh, look on Broadway any day for the
pattern - business man - latest rolled-brim derby - good barber, business,
digestion and tailor.
"Greenbrier Nye!" he exclaimed, grasping the hand that had smitten him.
"My dear fellow! So glad to see you! How did you come to - oh, to be
sure - the inaugural ceremonies - I remember you joined the Rough Riders.
You must come and have luncheon with me, of course."
Greenbrier pinned him sadly but firmly to the wall with a hand the size,
shape and color of a McClellan saddle.
"Longy," he said, in a melancholy voice that disturbed traffic, "what
have they been doing to you? You act just like a citizen. They done made
you into an inmate of the city directory. You never made no such Johnny
Branch execration of yourself as that out on the Gila. 'Come and have
lunching with me!' You never defined grub by any such terms of reproach
in them days."
"I've been living in New York seven years," said Merritt. "It's been
eight since we punched cows together in Old Man Garcia's outfit. Well,
let's go to a cafe, anyhow. It sounds good to hear it called 'grub'
again."
They picked their way through the crowd to a hotel, and drifted, as by
a natural law, to the bar.
"Speak up," invited Greenbrier.
"A dry Martini," said Merritt.
"Oh, Lord!" cried Greenbrier; "and yet me and you once saw the same pink
Gila monsters crawling up the walls of the same hotel in Canon Diablo! A
dry - but let that pass. Whiskey straight - and they're on you."
Merritt smiled, and paid.
They lunched in a small extension of the dining room that connected with
the cafe. Merritt dexterously diverted his friend's choice, that hovered
over ham and eggs, to a puree of celery, a salmon cutlet, a partridge
pie and a desirable salad.
"On the day," said Greenbrier, grieved and thunderous, "when I can't
hold but one drink before eating when I meet a friend I ain't seen in
eight years at a 2 by 4 table in a thirty-cent town at 1 o'clock on the
third day of the week, I want nine broncos to kick me forty times over a
640-acre section of land. Get them statistics?"
"Right, old man," laughed Merritt. "Waiter, bring an absinthe frappe
and - what's yours, Greenbrier?"
"Whiskey straight," mourned Nye. "Out of the neck of a bottle you used
to take it, Longy - straight out of the neck of a bottle on a galloping
pony - Arizona redeye, not this ab - oh, what's the use? They're on you."
Merritt slipped the wine card under his glass.
"All right. I suppose you think I'm spoiled by the city. I'm as good a
Westerner as you are, Greenbrier; but, somehow, I can't make up my mind
to go back out there. New York is comfortable - comfortable. I make a
good living, and I live it. No more wet blankets and riding herd in
snowstorms, and bacon and cold coffee, and blowouts once in six months
for me. I reckon I'll hang out here in the future. We'll take in the
theatre to-night, Greenbrier, and after that we'll dine at - "
"I'll tell you what you are, Merritt," said Greenbrier, laying one elbow
in his salad and the other in his butter. "You are a concentrated,
effete, unconditional, short-sleeved, gotch-eared Miss Sally Walker. God
made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle and use cuss words
in the original. Wherefore you have suffered his handiwork to elapse
by removing yourself to New York and putting on little shoes tied with
strings, and making faces when you talk. I've seen you rope and tie a
steer in 42 1/2. If you was to see one now you'd write to the Police
Commissioner about it. And these flapdoodle drinks that you inoculate
your system with - these little essences of cowslip with acorns in 'em,
and paregoric flip - they ain't anyways in assent with the cordiality of
manhood. I hate to see you this way."
"Well, Mr. Greenbrier," said Merritt, with apology in his tone, "in a
way you are right. Sometimes I do feel like I was being raised on the
bottle. But, I tell you, New York is comfortable - comfortable. There's
something about it - the sights and the crowds, and the way it changes
every day, and the very air of it that seems to tie a one-mile-long
stake rope around a man's neck, with the other end fastened somewhere
about Thirty-fourth Street. I don't know what it is."
"God knows," said Greenbrier sadly, "and I know. The East has gobbled
you up. You was venison, and now you're veal. You put me in mind of a
japonica in a window. You've been signed, sealed and diskivered.
Requiescat in hoc signo. You make me thirsty."
"A green chartreuse here," said Merritt to the waiter.
"Whiskey straight," sighed Greenbrier, "and they're on you, you renegade
of the round-ups."
"Guilty, with an application for mercy," said Merritt. "You don't know
how it is, Greenbrier. It's so comfortable here that - "
"Please loan me your smelling salts," pleaded Greenbrier. "If I hadn't
seen you once bluff three bluffers from Mazatzal City with an empty gun
in Phoenix - "
Greenbrier's voice died away in pure grief.
"Cigars!" he called harshly to the waiter, to hide his emotion.
"A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine," said Merritt.
"They're on you," chanted Greenbrier, struggling to conceal his
contempt.
At seven they dined in the Where-to-Dine-Well column.
That evening a galaxy had assembled there. Bright shone the lights o'er
fair women and br - let it go, anyhow - brave men. The orchestra played
charmingly. Hardly had a tip from a diner been placed in its hands by a
waiter when it would burst forth into soniferousness. The more beer you
contributed to it the more Meyerbeer it gave you. Which is reciprocity.
Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner. Greenbrier was his old
friend, and he liked him. He persuaded him to drink a cocktail.
"I take the horehound tea," said Greenbrier, "for old times' sake. But
I'd prefer whiskey straight. They're on you."
"Right!" said Merritt. "Now, run your eye down that bill of fare and see
if it seems to hitch on any of these items."
"Lay me on my lava bed!" said Greenbrier, with bulging eyes. "All these
specimens of nutriment in the grub wagon! What's this? Horse with the
heaves? I pass. But look along! Here's truck for twenty round-ups all
spelled out in different directions. Wait till I see."
The viands ordered, Merritt turned to the wine list.
"This Medoc isn't bad," he suggested.
"You're the doc," said Greenbrier. "I'd rather have whiskey straight.
It's on you."
Greenbrier looked around the room. The waiter brought things and took
dishes away. He was observing. He saw a New York restaurant crowd
enjoying itself.
"How was the range when you left the Gila?" asked Merritt.
"Fine," said Greenbrier. "You see that lady in the red speckled silk at
that table. Well, she could warm over her beans at my campfire. Yes, the
range was good. She looks as nice as a white mustang I see once on Black
River."
When the coffee came, Greenbrier put one foot on the seat of the chair
next to him.
"You said it was a comfortable town, Longy," he said, meditatively.
"Yes, it's a comfortable town. It's different from the plains in a blue
norther. What did you call that mess in the crock with the handle,
Longy? Oh, yes, squabs in a cash roll. They're worth the roll. That
white mustang had just such a way of turning his head and shaking his
mane - look at her, Longy. If I thought I could sell out my ranch at a
fair price, I believe I'd -
"Gyar - song!" he suddenly cried, in a voice that paralyzed every knife
and fork in the restaurant.
The waiter dived toward the table.
"Two more of them cocktail drinks," ordered Greenbrier.
Merritt looked at him and smiled significantly.
"They're on me," said Greenbrier, blowing a puff of smoke to the
ceiling.
X
THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
The poet Longfellow - or was it Confucius, the inventor of
wisdom? - remarked:
"Life is real, life is earnest;
And things are not what they seem."
As mathematics are - or is: thanks, old subscriber! - the only just rule
by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means,
adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the
great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures - unassailable sums in
addition - shall be set over against whatever opposing element there
may be.
A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would
say: "Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that X plus - that is, that
life is real - then things (all of which life includes) are real.
Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the
proposition that 'things are not what they seem,' why - "
But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we
would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued,
satisfying, mysterious X.
Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an
old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated the discovery that bread
is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour
crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no perceptible
effect on the growing wheat, Mr. Kinsolving cornered the flour market.
The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never
had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accommodated) bought a
five-cent loaf of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which
went to Mr. Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.
A second result was that Mr. Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000
prof - er - rake-off.
Mr. Kinsolving's son Dan was at college when the mathematical experiment
in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and found the
old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading "Little Dorrit" on the
porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square. He had
retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from bread
buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the earth
and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.
Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village
to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always admired
Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious, mathematical,
studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of oligarchies.
Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watch-making in his
father's jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial, easy-tempered and
tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers. The two foregathered joyously,
being opposites. And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his
mainsprings - and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.
Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the
accumulations of B. A. and two years of Europe thick upon him. He took a
filial look at Septimus Kinsolving's elaborate tombstone in Greenwood
and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family
lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire,
hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.
Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his parent
from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches for
outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington
Square. Dan had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a dignity
that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz was more serious, more
intense, more learned, philosophical and socialistic.
"I know about it now," said Dan, finally. "I pumped it out of the
eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad's collections
of bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken. And I am told that
he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of
bread at little bakeries around the corner. You've studied economics,
Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and the masses, and octopuses,
and the rights of laboring people. I never thought about those things
before. Football and trying to be white to my fellow-man were about the
extent of my college curriculum.
"But since I came back and found out how dad made his money I've been
thinking. I'd like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give
up too much money for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income
for a good many yards; but I'd like to make it square with 'em. Is there
any way it can be done, old Ways and Means?"
Kenwitz's big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin, intellectual face
took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan's arm with the grip of a
friend and a judge.
"You can't do it!" he said, emphatically. "One of the chief punishments
of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent you find that
you have lost the power to make reparation or restitution. I admire
your good intentions, Dan, but you can't do anything. Those people were
robbed of their precious pennies. It's too late to remedy the evil. You
can't pay them back"
"Of course," said Dan, lighting his pipe, "we couldn't hunt up every one
of the duffers and hand 'em back the right change. There's an awful lot
of 'em buying bread all the time. Funny taste they have - I never cared
for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with the Roquefort.
But we might find a few of 'em and chuck some of dad's cash back where
it came from. I'd feel better if I could. It seems tough for people to be
held up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn't mind standing a rise
in broiled lobsters or deviled crabs. Get to work and think, Ken. I want
to pay back all of that money I can."
"There are plenty of charities," said Kenwitz, mechanically.
"Easy enough," said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. "I suppose I could give
the city a park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But I don't
want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold Peter.
It's the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken."
The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.
"Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the losses of
consumers during that corner in flour?" he asked.
"I do not." said Dan, stoutly. "My lawyer tells me that I have two
millions."
"If you had a hundred millions," said Kenwitz, vehemently, "you couldn't
repair a thousandth part of the damage that has been done. You cannot
conceive of the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth.
Each penny that was wrung from the lean purses of the poor reacted a
thousandfold to their harm. You do not understand. You do not see how
hopeless is your desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance
can it be done."
"Back up, philosopher!" said Dan. "The penny has no sorrow that the
dollar cannot heal."
"Not in one instance," repeated Kenwitz. "I will give you one, and let
us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick Street.
He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of flour went up he
had to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor to pay it,
Boyne's business failed and he lost his $1,000 capital - all he had in
the world."
Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow with his fist.
"I accept the instance," he cried. "Take me to Boyne. I will repay his
thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery."
"Write your check," said Kenwitz, without moving, "and then begin to
write checks in payment of the train of consequences. Draw the next one
for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his failure and set fire to the
building from which he was about to be evicted. The loss amounted to
that much. Boyne died in an asylum."
"Stick to the instance," said Dan. "I haven't noticed any insurance
companies on my charity list."
"Draw your next check for $100,000," went on Kenwitz. "Boyne's son fell
into bad ways after the bakery closed, and was accused of murder. He was
acquitted last week after a three years' legal battle, and the state
draws upon taxpayers for that much expense."
"Back to the bakery!" exclaimed Dan, impatiently. "The Government
doesn't need to stand in the bread line."
"The last item of the instance is - come and I will show you," said
Kenwitz, rising.
The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-baiter by
nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath
that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch
needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.
He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square and into ragged,
poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid brick
tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a
door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.
In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing at a machine. She
nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream of
sunlight through the dingy window burnished her heavy hair to the color
of an ancient Tuscan's shield. She flashed a rippling smile at Kenwitz
and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry.
Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in
heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last
item of the Instance.
"How many this week, Miss Mary?" asked the watchmaker. A mountain of
coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor.
"Nearly thirty dozen," said the young woman cheerfully. "I've made
almost $4. I'm improving, Mr. Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so
much money." Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A
little pink spot came out on her round, pale cheek.
Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.
"Miss Boyne," he said, "let me present Mr. Kinsolving, the son of the
man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do
something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that act."
The smile left the young woman's face. She rose and pointed her
forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in
the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.
The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism
and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the
moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared to
be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him
warmly.
"I'm obliged to you, Ken, old man," he said, vaguely - "a thousand times
obliged."
"Mein Gott! you are crazy!" cried the watchmaker, dropping his
spectacles for the first time in years.
Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway
with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the
proprietor.
A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.
"These loaves are ten cents," said the clerk.
"I always get them at eight cents uptown," said the lady. "You need not
fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home."
The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.
"Mr. Kenwitz!" cried the lady, heartily. "How do you do?"
Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension
on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.
"Why, Miss Boyne!" he began.
"Mrs. Kinsolving," she corrected. "Dan and I were married a month ago."
XI
THE THING'S THE PLAY
Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free
passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the
popular vaudeville houses.
One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much
past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a
taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I
regarded the man.
"There was a story about that chap a month or two ago," said the
reporter. "They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was
to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to like
the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I'm working on
a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the
details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned
in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't
seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could
make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the
details."
After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts
over the Wuerzburger.
"I see no reason," said I, when he had concluded, "why that shouldn't
make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn't have acted
in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in
a real theatre. I'm really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow,
and all the players men and women. 'The thing's the play,' is the way I
quote Mr. Shakespeare."
"Try it," said the reporter.
"I will," said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a
humorous column of it for his paper.
There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there has
been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions and
stationery are sold.
One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the
store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was
married to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen,
and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the
headlines of a "Wholesale Female Murderess" story from Butte, Mont. But
after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized
your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as
one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west side.
Frank Barry and John Delaney were "prominent" young beaux of the same
side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every
time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats and
fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up in
the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen's hand. When Frank
won, John shook his hand and congratulated him - honestly, he did.
After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was
getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to Old
Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of gibbering
cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress gaiters
and paper bags of hominy.
Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the
mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his
forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one,
entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or
any old place where there are Italian skies and _dolce far niente_.
It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him. With
blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by demanding whatever
he meant by speaking to respectable people that way.
In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had possessed him
departed. He bowed low, and said something about "irresistible impulse"
and "forever carry in his heart the memory of" - and she suggested that
he catch the first fire-escape going down.
"I will away," said John Delaney, "to the furthermost parts of the
earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another's. I will
to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for - "
"For goodness sake, get out," said Helen. "Somebody might come in."
He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that he
might give it a farewell kiss.
Girls, was this choice boon of the great little god Cupid ever
vouchsafed you - to have the fellow you want hard and fast, and have the
one you don't want come with a damp curl on his forehead and kneel to
you and babble of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shall
forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To know your power, and to
feel the sweet security of your own happy state; to send the unlucky
one, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourself
as he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails are well
manicured - say, girls, it's galluptious - don't ever let it get by you.
And then, of course - how did you guess it? - the door opened and in
stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.
The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen's hand, and out of the window
and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.
A little slow music, if you please - faint violin, just a breath in the
clarinet and a touch of the 'cello. Imagine the scene. Frank, white-hot,
with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from him. Helen, rushing
and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her wrists and tears
them from his shoulders - once, twice, thrice he sways her this way and
that - the stage manager will show you how - and throws her from him to
the floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he cries, will he
look upon her face again, and rushes from the house through the staring
groups of astonished guests.
And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience must
stroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow gray,
rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of twenty years which
must precede the rising of the curtain again.
Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she could
have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and
general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but
she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth balls,
nor did she sell it to a magazine.
One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and
ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him.
"I'm really much obliged to you," said Helen, cheerfully, "but I married
another man twenty years ago. He was more a goose than a man, but I
think I love him yet. I have never seen him since about half an hour
after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just writing
fluid?"
The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a
respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes,
however romantic, may be overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight,
beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have got from her
lovers were approaches and adieus. Worse still, in the last one she had
lost a customer, too.
Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two large
rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Roomers
came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode
of neatness, comfort and taste.
One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above.
The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend had
sent him to this oasis in the desert of noise.
Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short,
pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and
his artist's temperament - revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic
manner - was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.
Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was
singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side
of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the
floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and
office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters;
and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and
sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent
much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where he
had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.
Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40's,
with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes.
He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of
Romeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes
and wooed her by respectful innuendo.
From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the
presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the
days of her youth's romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to
it, and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor
in that romance. And then with a woman's reasoning (oh, yes, they do,
sometimes) she leaped over common syllogisms and theory, and logic, and
was sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyes
love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and
remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love requited,
which is the _sine qua non_ in the house that Jack built.
But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twenty
years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers
laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar.
There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration. A little
purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be
trusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or
suspected.
And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent out
on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing
story of - but I will not knock a brother - let us go on with the story.
One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's hall-office-reception-room and
told his love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist.
His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the heart
of a man who is a dreamer and doer combined.
"But before you give me an answer," he went on, before she could accuse
him of suddenness, "I must tell you that 'Ramonti' is the only name I
have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or
where I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a
hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life
before that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in the
street with a wound on my head and was brought there in an ambulance.
They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the stones.
There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to remember.
After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I have
had success. Mrs. Barry - I do not know your name except that - I love
you; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the one woman in
the world for me - and" - oh, a lot of stuff like that.
Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrill