Vallance seized his arm and forced him back to the bench.
"Be quiet!" he commanded, with something like disgust in his tones.
"One would think you had lost a fortune, instead of being about to
acquire one. Of what are you afraid?"
Ide cowered and shivered on the bench. He clung to Vallance's
sleeve, and even in the dim glow of the Broadway lights the latest
disinherited one could see drops on the other's brow wrung out by
some strange terror.
"Why, I'm afraid something will happen to me before morning. I don't
know what - something to keep me from coming into that money. I'm
afraid a tree will fall on me - I'm afraid a cab will run over me, or
a stone drop on me from a housetop, or something. I never was afraid
before. I've sat in this park a hundred nights as calm as a graven
image without knowing where my breakfast was to come from. But now
it's different. I love money, Dawson - I'm happy as a god when it's
trickling through my fingers, and people are bowing to me, with the
music and the flowers and fine clothes all around. As long as I knew
I was out of the game I didn't mind. I was even happy sitting here
ragged and hungry, listening to the fountain jump and watching the
carriages go up the avenue. But it's in reach of my hand again
now - almost - and I can't stand it to wait twelve hours, Dawson - I
can't stand it. There are fifty things that could happen to me - I
could go blind - I might be attacked with heart disease - the world
might come to an end before I could - "
Ide sprang to his feet again, with a shriek. People stirred on the
benches and began to look. Vallance took his arm.
"Come and walk," he said, soothingly. "And try to calm yourself.
There is no need to become excited or alarmed. Nothing is going to
happen to you. One night is like another."
"That's right," said Ide. "Stay with me, Dawson - that's a good
fellow. Walk around with me awhile. I never went to pieces like this
before, and I've had a good many hard knocks. Do you think you could
hustle something in the way of a little lunch, old man? I'm afraid my
nerve's too far gone to try any panhandling."
Vallance led his companion up almost deserted Fifth Avenue, and
then westward along the Thirties toward Broadway. "Wait here a few
minutes," he said, leaving Ide in a quiet and shadowed spot. He
entered a familiar hotel, and strolled toward the bar quite in his
old assured way.
"There's a poor devil outside, Jimmy," he said to the bartender, "who
says he's hungry and looks it. You know what they do when you give
them money. Fix up a sandwich or two for him; and I'll see that he
doesn't throw it away."
"Certainly, Mr. Vallance," said the bartender. "They ain't all fakes.
Don't like to see anybody go hungry."
He folded a liberal supply of the free lunch into a napkin. Vallance
went with it and joined his companion. Ide pounced upon the food
ravenously. "I haven't had any free lunch as good as this in a year,"
he said. "Aren't you going to eat any, Dawson?
"I'm not hungry - thanks," said Vallance.
"We'll go back to the Square," said Ide. "The cops won't bother us
there. I'll roll up the rest of this ham and stuff for our breakfast.
I won't eat any more; I'm afraid I'll get sick. Suppose I'd die of
cramps or something to-night, and never get to touch that money
again! It's eleven hours yet till time to see that lawyer. You won't
leave me, will you, Dawson? I'm afraid something might happen. You
haven't any place to go, have you?"
"No," said Vallance, "nowhere to-night. I'll have a bench with you."
"You take it cool," said Ide, "if you've told it to me straight. I
should think a man put on the bum from a good job just in one day
would be tearing his hair."
"I believe I've already remarked," said Vallance, laughing, "that
I would have thought that a man who was expecting to come into a
fortune on the next day would be feeling pretty easy and quiet."
"It's funny business," philosophized Ide, "about the way people take
things, anyhow. Here's your bench, Dawson, right next to mine. The
light don't shine in your eyes here. Say, Dawson, I'll get the old
man to give you a letter to somebody about a job when I get back
home. You've helped me a lot to-night. I don't believe I could have
gone through the night if I hadn't struck you."
"Thank you," said Vallance. "Do you lie down or sit up on these when
you sleep?"
For hours Vallance gazed almost without winking at the stars through
the branches of the trees and listened to the sharp slapping of
horses' hoofs on the sea of asphalt to the south. His mind was
active, but his feelings were dormant. Every emotion seemed to
have been eradicated. He felt no regrets, no fears, no pain or
discomfort. Even when he thought of the girl, it was as of an
inhabitant of one of those remote stars at which he gazed. He
remembered the absurd antics of his companion and laughed softly, yet
without a feeling of mirth. Soon the daily army of milk wagons made
of the city a roaring drum to which they marched. Vallance fell
asleep on his comfortless bench.
At ten o'clock on the next day the two stood at the door of Lawyer
Mead's office in Ann Street.
Ide's nerves fluttered worse than ever when the hour approached; and
Vallance could not decide to leave him a possible prey to the dangers
he dreaded.
When they entered the office, Lawyer Mead looked at them wonderingly.
He and Vallance were old friends. After his greeting, he turned
to Ide, who stood with white face and trembling limbs before the
expected crisis.
"I sent a second letter to your address last night, Mr. Ide," he
said. "I learned this morning that you were not there to receive it.
It will inform you that Mr. Paulding has reconsidered his offer to
take you back into favor. He has decided not to do so, and desires
you to understand that no change will be made in the relations
existing between you and him."
Ide's trembling suddenly ceased. The color came back to his face,
and he straightened his back. His jaw went forward half an inch,
and a gleam came into his eye. He pushed back his battered hat with
one hand, and extended the other, with levelled fingers, toward the
lawyer. He took a long breath and then laughed sardonically.
"Tell old Paulding he may go to the devil," he said, loudly and
clearly, and turned and walked out of the office with a firm and
lively step.
Lawyer Mead turned on his heel to Vallance and smiled.
"I am glad you came in," he said, genially. "Your uncle wants you to
return home at once. He is reconciled to the situation that led to
his hasty action, and desires to say that all will be as - "
"Hey, Adams!" cried Lawyer Mead, breaking his sentence, and calling
to his clerk. "Bring a glass of water - Mr. Vallance has fainted."
XII
THE PLUTONIAN FIRE
There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in
contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in
contact with me. There is a difference.
They tell me that with a large number of the manuscripts that are
submitted to them come advices (in the way of a boost) from the
author asseverating that the incidents in the story are true. The
destination of such contributions depends wholly upon the question of
the enclosure of stamps. Some are returned, the rest are thrown on
the floor in a corner on top of a pair of gum shoes, an overturned
statuette of the Winged Victory, and a pile of old magazines
containing a picture of the editor in the act of reading the latest
copy of _Le Petit Journal_, right side up - you can tell by the
illustrations. It is only a legend that there are waste baskets in
editors' offices.
Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth and science and
nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically,
and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board
of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced
from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press
despatches.
This preamble is to warn you off the grade crossing of a true story.
Being that, it shall be told simply, with conjunctions substituted
for adjectives wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style may
appear in it shall be due to the linotype man. It is a story of the
literary life in a great city, and it should be of interest to every
author within a 20-mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a
MS. story beginning thus: "While the cheers following his nomination
were still ringing through the old court-house, Harwood broke away
from the congratulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to
Judge Creswell's house to find Ida."
Pettit came up out of Alabama to write fiction. The Southern
papers had printed eight of his stories under an editorial caption
identifying the author as the son of "the gallant Major Pettingill
Pettit, our former County Attorney and hero of the battle of Lookout
Mountain."
Pettit was a rugged fellow, with a kind of shame-faced culture,
and my good friend. His father kept a general store in a little
town called Hosea. Pettit had been raised in the pine-woods and
broom-sedge fields adjacent thereto. He had in his gripsack two
manuscript novels of the adventures in Picardy of one Gaston
Laboulaye, Vicompte de Montrepos, in the year 1329. That's nothing.
We all do that. And some day when we make a hit with the little
sketch about a newsy and his lame dog, the editor prints the other
one for us - or "on us," as the saying is - and then - and then we have
to get a big valise and peddle those patent air-draft gas burners.
At $1.25 everybody should have 'em.
I took Pettit to the red-brick house which was to appear in an
article entitled "Literary Landmarks of Old New York," some day when
we got through with it. He engaged a room there, drawing on the
general store for his expenses. I showed New York to him, and he did
not mention how much narrower Broadway is than Lee Avenue in Hosea.
This seemed a good sign, so I put the final test.
"Suppose you try your hand at a descriptive article," I suggested,
"giving your impressions of New York as seen from the Brooklyn
Bridge. The fresh point of view, the - "
"Don't be a fool," said Pettit. "Let's go have some beer. On the
whole I rather like the city."
We discovered and enjoyed the only true Bohemia. Every day and night
we repaired to one of those palaces of marble and glass and tilework,
where goes on a tremendous and sounding epic of life. Valhalla itself
could not be more glorious and sonorous. The classic marble on which
we ate, the great, light-flooded, vitreous front, adorned with
snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and
bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing
recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like
banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register - it
was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening,
soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life. And the beans
were only ten cents. We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine
at sad little tables in their so-called Bohemian restaurants; and
we shuddered lest they should seek out our resorts and make them
conspicuous with their presence.
Pettit wrote many stories, which the editors returned to him. He
wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the
belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly a
matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the
alienists and florists. But the editors had told him that they wanted
love stories, because they said the women read them.
Now, the editors are wrong about that, of course. Women do not read
the love stories in the magazines. They read the poker-game stories
and the recipes for cucumber lotion. The love stories are read by fat
cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls. I am not criticising
the judgment of editors. They are mostly very fine men, but a man
can be but one man, with individual opinions and tastes. I knew two
associate editors of a magazine who were wonderfully alike in almost
everything. And yet one of them was very fond of Flaubert, while the
other preferred gin.
Pettit brought me his returned manuscripts, and we looked them over
together to find out why they were not accepted. They seemed to me
pretty fair stories, written in a good style, and ended, as they
should, at the bottom of the last page.
They were well constructed and the events were marshalled in orderly
and logical sequence. But I thought I detected a lack of living
substance - it was much as if I gazed at a symmetrical array of
presentable clamshells from which the succulent and vital inhabitants
had been removed. I intimated that the author might do well to get
better acquainted with his theme.
"You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about a gun fight in an
Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot
seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter
could - "
"Oh, well," said I, "that's different. Arizona is a long way from New
York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair
of chaparreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn't be noticed until the
usual error-sharp from around McAdams Junction isolates the erratum
and writes in to the papers about it. But you are up against another
proposition. This thing they call love is as common around New York
as it is in Sheboygan during the young onion season. It may be mixed
here with a little commercialism - they read Byron, but they look
up Bradstreet's, too, while they're among the B's, and Brigham
also if they have time - but it's pretty much the same old internal
disturbance everywhere. You can fool an editor with a fake picture of
a cowboy mounting a pony with his left hand on the saddle horn, but
you can't put him up a tree with a love story. So, you've got to fall
in love and then write the real thing."
Pettit did. I never knew whether he was taking my advice or whether
he fell an accidental victim.
There was a girl he had met at one of these studio contrivances - a
glorious, impudent, lucid, open-minded girl with hair the color of
Culmbacher, and a good-natured way of despising you. She was a New
York girl.
Well (as the narrative style permits us to say infrequently),
Pettit went to pieces. All those pains, those lover's doubts, those
heart-burnings and tremors of which he had written so unconvincingly
were his. Talk about Shylock's pound of flesh! Twenty-five pounds
Cupid got from Pettit. Which is the usurer?
One night Pettit came to my room exalted. Pale and haggard but
exalted. She had given him a jonquil.
"Old Hoss," said he, with a new smile flickering around his mouth, "I
believe I could write that story to-night - the one, you know, that is
to win out. I can feel it. I don't know whether it will come out or
not, but I can feel it."
I pushed him out of my door. "Go to your room and write it," I
ordered. "Else I can see your finish. I told you this must come
first. Write it to-night and put it under my door when it is done.
Put it under my door to-night when it is finished - don't keep it
until to-morrow."
I was reading my bully old pal Montaigne at two o'clock when I heard
the sheets rustle under my door. I gathered them up and read the
story.
The hissing of geese, the languishing cooing of doves, the braying
of donkeys, the chatter of irresponsible sparrows - these were in my
mind's ear as I read. "Suffering Sappho!" I exclaimed to myself. "Is
this the divine fire that is supposed to ignite genius and make it
practical and wage-earning?"
The story was sentimental drivel, full of whimpering soft-heartedness
and gushing egoism. All the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A
perusal of its buttery phrases would have made a cynic of a sighing
chambermaid.
In the morning Pettit came to my room. I read him his doom
mercilessly. He laughed idiotically.
"All right, Old Hoss," he said, cheerily, "make cigar-lighters of it.
What's the difference? I'm going to take her to lunch at Claremont
to-day."
There was about a month of it. And then Pettit came to me bearing an
invisible mitten, with the fortitude of a dish-rag. He talked of the
grave and South America and prussic acid; and I lost an afternoon
getting him straight. I took him out and saw that large and curative
doses of whiskey were administered to him. I warned you this was a
true story - 'ware your white ribbons if only follow this tale. For
two weeks I fed him whiskey and Omar, and read to him regularly every
evening the column in the evening paper that reveals the secrets of
female beauty. I recommend the treatment.
After Pettit was cured he wrote more stories. He recovered his
old-time facility and did work just short of good enough. Then the
curtain rose on the third act.
A little, dark-eyed, silent girl from New Hampshire, who was studying
applied design, fell deeply in love with him. She was the intense
sort, but externally _glacé_, such as New England sometimes fools us
with. Pettit liked her mildly, and took her about a good deal. She
worshipped him, and now and then bored him.
There came a climax when she tried to jump out of a window, and he
had to save her by some perfunctary, unmeant wooing. Even I was
shaken by the depths of the absorbing affection she showed. Home,
friends, traditions, creeds went up like thistle-down in the scale
against her love. It was really discomposing.
One night again Pettit sauntered in, yawning. As he had told me
before, he said he felt that he could do a great story, and as before
I hunted him to his room and saw him open his inkstand. At one
o'clock the sheets of paper slid under my door.
I read that story, and I jumped up, late as it was, with a whoop of
joy. Old Pettit had done it. Just as though it lay there, red and
bleeding, a woman's heart was written into the lines. You couldn't
see the joining, but art, exquisite art, and pulsing nature had been
combined into a love story that took you by the throat like the
quinsy. I broke into Pettit's room and beat him on the back and
called him names - names high up in the galaxy of the immortals that
we admired. And Pettit yawned and begged to be allowed to sleep.
On the morrow, I dragged him to an editor. The great man read, and,
rising, gave Pettit his hand. That was a decoration, a wreath of bay,
and a guarantee of rent.
And then old Pettit smiled slowly. I call him Gentleman Pettit now
to myself. It's a miserable name to give a man, but it sounds better
than it looks in print.
"I see," said old Pettit, as he took up his story and began tearing
it into small strips. "I see the game now. You can't write with ink,
and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but you can write
with the heart's blood of some one else. You have to be a cad before
you can be an artist. Well, I am for old Alabam and the Major's
store. Have you got a light, Old Hoss?"
I went with Pettit to the dépôt and died hard.
"Shakespeare's sonnets?" I blurted, making a last stand. "How about
him?"
"A cad," said Pettit. "They give it to you, and you sell it - love,
you know. I'd rather sell ploughs for father."
"But," I protested, "you are reversing the decision of the world's
greatest - "
"Good-by, Old Hoss," said Pettit.
"Critics," I continued. "But - say - if the Major can use a fairly good
salesman and book-keeper down there in the store, let me know, will
you?"
XIII
NEMESIS AND THE CANDY MAN
"We sail at eight in the morning on the _Celtic_," said Honoria,
plucking a loose thread from her lace sleeve.
"I heard so," said young Ives, dropping his hat, and muffing it as he
tried to catch it, "and I came around to wish you a pleasant voyage."
"Of course you heard it," said Honoria, coldly sweet, "since we have
had no opportunity of informing you ourselves."
Ives looked at her pleadingly, but with little hope.
Outside in the street a high-pitched voice chanted, not
unmusically, a commercial gamut of "Cand-ee-ee-ee-s! Nice, fresh
cand-ee-ee-ee-ees!"
"It's our old candy man," said Honoria, leaning out the window and
beckoning. "I want some of his motto kisses. There's nothing in the
Broadway shops half so good."
The candy man stopped his pushcart in front of the old Madison Avenue
home. He had a holiday and festival air unusual to street peddlers.
His tie was new and bright red, and a horseshoe pin, almost
life-size, glittered speciously from its folds. His brown, thin face
was crinkled into a semi-foolish smile. Striped cuffs with dog-head
buttons covered the tan on his wrists.
"I do believe he's going to get married," said Honoria, pityingly. "I
never saw him taken that way before. And to-day is the first time in
months that he has cried his wares, I am sure."
Ives threw a coin to the sidewalk. The candy man knows his customers.
He filled a paper bag, climbed the old-fashioned stoop and handed it
in. "I remember - " said Ives.
"Wait," said Honoria.
She took a small portfolio from the drawer of a writing desk and from
the portfolio a slip of flimsy paper one-quarter of an inch by two
inches in size.
"This," said Honoria, inflexibly, "was wrapped about the first one we
opened."
"It was a year ago," apologized Ives, as he held out his hand for
it,
"As long as skies above are blue
To you, my love, I will be true."
This he read from the slip of flimsy paper.
"We were to have sailed a fortnight ago," said Honoria, gossipingly.
"It has been such a warm summer. The town is quite deserted. There is
nowhere to go. Yet I am told that one or two of the roof gardens are
amusing. The singing - and the dancing - on one or two seem to have met
with approval."
Ives did not wince. When you are in the ring you are not surprised
when your adversary taps you on the ribs.
"I followed the candy man that time," said Ives, irrelevantly, "and
gave him five dollars at the corner of Broadway."
He reached for the paper bag in Honoria's lap, took out one of the
square, wrapped confections and slowly unrolled it.
"Sara Chillingworth's father," said Honoria, "has given her an
automobile."
"Read that," said Ives, handing over the slip that had been wrapped
around the square of candy.
"Life teaches us - how to live,
Love teaches us - to forgive."
Honoria's checks turned pink.
"Honoria!" cried Ives, starting up from his chair.
"Miss Clinton," corrected Honoria, rising like Venus from the bead
on the surf. "I warned you not to speak that name again."'
"Honoria," repeated Ives, "you must hear me. I know I do not
deserve your forgiveness, but I must have it. There is a madness
that possesses one sometimes for which his better nature is not
responsible. I throw everything else but you to the winds. I strike
off the chains that have bound me. I renounce the siren that lured me
from you. Let the bought verse of that street peddler plead for me.
It is you only whom I can love. Let your love forgive, and I swear to
you that mine will be true 'as long as skies above are blue.'"
On the west side, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, an alley cuts
the block in the middle. It perishes in a little court in the centre
of the block. The district is theatrical; the inhabitants, the
bubbling froth of half a dozen nations. The atmosphere is Bohemian,
the language polyglot, the locality precarious.
In the court at the rear of the alley lived the candy man. At seven
o'clock he pushed his cart into the narrow entrance, rested it upon
the irregular stone slats and sat upon one of the handles to cool
himself. There was a great draught of cool wind through the alley.
There was a window above the spot where he always stopped his
pushcart. In the cool of the afternoon, Mlle. Adèle, drawing card of
the Aërial Roof Garden, sat at the window and took the air. Generally
her ponderous mass of dark auburn hair was down, that the breeze
might have the felicity of aiding Sidonie, the maid, in drying
and airing it. About her shoulders - the point of her that the
photographers always made the most of - was loosely draped a
heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare - there were no
sculptors there to rave over them - but even the stolid bricks in
the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to
disapprove. While she sat thus Félice, another maid, anointed and
bathed the small feet that twinkled and so charmed the nightly Aërial
audiences.
Gradually Mademoiselle began to notice the candy man stopping to mop
his brow and cool himself beneath her window. In the hands of her
maids she was deprived for the time of her vocation - the charming
and binding to her chariot of man. To lose time was displeasing to
Mademoiselle. Here was the candy man - no fit game for her darts,
truly - but of the sex upon which she had been born to make war.
After casting upon him looks of unseeing coldness for a dozen times,
one afternoon she suddenly thawed and poured down upon him a smile
that put to shame the sweets upon his cart.
"Candy man," she said, cooingly, while Sidonie followed her impulsive
dive, brushing the heavy auburn hair, "don't you think I am
beautiful?"
The candy man laughed harshly, and looked up, with his thin jaw set,
while he wiped his forehead with a red-and-blue handkerchief.
"Yer'd make a dandy magazine cover," he said, grudgingly. "Beautiful
or not is for them that cares. It's not my line. If yer lookin' for
bouquets apply elsewhere between nine and twelve. I think we'll have
rain."
Truly, fascinating a candy man is like killing rabbits in a deep
snow; but the hunter's blood is widely diffused. Mademoiselle tugged
a great coil of hair from Sidonie's hands and let it fall out the
window.
"Candy man, have you a sweetheart anywhere with hair as long and soft
as that? And with an arm so round?" She flexed an arm like Galatea's
after the miracle across the window-sill.
The candy man cackled shrilly as he arranged a stock of butter-scotch
that had tumbled down.
"Smoke up!" said he, vulgarly. "Nothin' doin' in the complimentary
line. I'm too wise to be bamboozled by a switch of hair and a newly
massaged arm. Oh, I guess you'll make good in the calcium, all right,
with plenty of powder and paint on and the orchestra playing 'Under
the Old Apple Tree.' But don't put on your hat and chase downstairs
to fly to the Little Church Around the Corner with me. I've been
up against peroxide and make-up boxes before. Say, all joking
aside - don't you think we'll have rain?"
"Candy man," said Mademoiselle softly, with her lips curving and her
chin dimpling, "don't you think I'm pretty?"
The candy man grinned.
"Savin' money, ain't yer?" said he, "by bein' yer own press agent.
I smoke, but I haven't seen yer mug on any of the five-cent cigar
boxes. It'd take a new brand of woman to get me goin', anyway. I
know 'em from sidecombs to shoelaces. Gimme a good day's sales and
steak-and-onions at seven and a pipe and an evenin' paper back there
in the court, and I'll not trouble Lillian Russell herself to wink
at me, if you please."
Mademoiselle pouted.
"Candy man," she said, softly and deeply, "yet you shall say that I
am beautiful. All men say so and so shall you."
The candy man laughed and pulled out his pipe.
"Well," said he, "I must be goin' in. There is a story in the evenin'
paper that I am readin'. Men are divin' in the seas for a treasure,
and pirates are watchin' them from behind a reef. And there ain't a
woman on land or water or in the air. Good-evenin'." And he trundled
his pushcart down the alley and back to the musty court where he
lived.
Incredibly to him who has not learned woman, Mademoiselle sat at the
window each day and spread her nets for the ignominious game. Once
she kept a grand cavalier waiting in her reception chamber for half
an hour while she battered in vain the candy man's tough philosophy.
His rough laugh chafed her vanity to its core. Daily he sat on his
cart in the breeze of the alley while her hair was being ministered
to, and daily the shafts of her beauty rebounded from his dull bosom
pointless and ineffectual. Unworthy pique brightened her eyes.
Pride-hurt she glowed upon him in a way that would have sent her
higher adorers into an egoistic paradise. The candy man's hard eyes
looked upon her with a half-concealed derision that urged her to the
use of the sharpest arrow in her beauty's quiver.
One afternoon she leaned far over the sill, and she did not challenge
and torment him as usual.
"Candy man," said she, "stand up and look into my eyes."
He stood up and looked into her eyes, with his harsh laugh like the
sawing of wood. He took out his pipe, fumbled with it, and put it
back into big pocket with a trembling hand.
"That will do," said Mademoiselle, with a slow smile. "I must go now
to my masseuse. Good-evening."
The next evening at seven the candy man came and rested his cart
under the window. But was it the candy man? His clothes were a bright
new check. His necktie was a flaming red, adorned by a glittering
horseshoe pin, almost life-size. His shoes were polished; the tan
of his cheeks had paled - his hands had been washed. The window was
empty, and he waited under it with his nose upward, like a hound
hoping for a bone.
Mademoiselle came, with Sidonie carrying her load of hair. She looked
at the candy man and smiled a slow smile that faded away into ennui.
Instantly she knew that the game was bagged; and so quickly she
wearied of the chase. She began to talk to Sidonie.
"Been a fine day," said the candy man, hollowly. "First time in a
month I've felt first-class. Hit it up down old Madison, hollering
out like I useter. Think it'll rain to-morrow?"
Mademoiselle laid two round arms on the cushion on the window-sill,
and a dimpled chin upon them.
"Candy man," said she, softly, "do you not love me?"
The candy man stood up and leaned against the brick wall.
"Lady," said he, chokingly, "I've got $800 saved up. Did I say you
wasn't beautiful? Take it every bit of it and buy a collar for your
dog with it."
A sound as of a hundred silvery bells tinkled in the room of
Mademoiselle. The laughter filled the alley and trickled back into
the court, as strange a thing to enter there as sunlight itself.
Mademoiselle was amused. Sidonie, a wise echo, added a sepulchral
but faithful contralto. The laughter of the two seemed at last to
penetrate the candy man. He fumbled with his horseshoe pin. At length
Mademoiselle, exhausted, turned her flushed, beautiful face to the
window.
"Candy man," said she, "go away. When I laugh Sidonie pulls my hair.
I can but laugh while you remain there."
"Here is a note for Mademoiselle," said Félice, coming to the window
in the room.
"There is no justice," said the candy man, lifting the handle of his
cart and moving away.
Three yards he moved, and stopped. Loud shriek after shriek came from
the window of Mademoiselle. Quickly he ran back. He heard a body
thumping upon the floor and a sound as though heels beat alternately
upon it.
"What is it?" he called.
Sidonie's severe head came into the window.
"Mademoiselle is overcome by bad news," she said. "One whom she loved
with all her soul has gone - you may have heard of him - he is Monsieur
Ives. He sails across the ocean to-morrow. Oh, you men!"
XIV
SQUARING THE CIRCLE
At the hazard of wearying you this tale of vehement emotions must be
prefaced by a discourse on geometry.
Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines. The natural is
rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow
wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect circles; the city man's
feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and floors, carry him ever
away from himself.
The round eyes of childhood typify innocence; the narrowed line of
the flirt's optic proves the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth
is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature's most
spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss?
Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute.
Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid
temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the
ring for the waiter, and the "round" of drinks.
On the other hand, straight lines show that Nature has been
deflected. Imagine Venus's girdle transformed into a "straight
front"!
When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our
natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more
adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The
result is often a rather curious product - for instance: A prize
chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri,
cauliflower _au gratin_, and a New Yorker.
Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical,
not moral. The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the
rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating
pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of
all its ways - even of its recreation and sports - coldly exhibit a
sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.
Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demonstrated the
problem of squaring the circle. And it may be added that this
mathematical introduction precedes an account of the fate of a
Kentucky feud that was imported to the city that has a habit of
making its importations conform to its angles.
The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains between the Folwell and
the Harkness families. The first victim of the homespun vendetta was
a 'possum dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness family evened
up this dire loss by laying out the chief of the Folwell clan. The
Folwells were prompt at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles
and made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog to a land
where the 'possums come down when treed without the stroke of an ax.
The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses were shot at
the plough, through their lamp-lit cabin windows, coming from
camp-meeting, asleep, in duello, sober and otherwise, singly and in
family groups, prepared and unprepared. Folwells had the branches of
their family tree lopped off in similar ways, as the traditions of
their country prescribed and authorized.
By and by the pruning left but a single member of each family. And
then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the
controversy would give a too decided personal flavour to the feud,
suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands, baulking the
avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate opposing Folwell.
A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary,
unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the
big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he
mixed with lard and shined his boots with the compound. He put on his
store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and
packed a carpet-sack with Spartan _lingerie_. He took his squirrel
rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However
ethical and plausible the habit might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps
New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the
skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt's revolver
that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself
the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance.
This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the
carpet-sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad
station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at
the little cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that
marked the Folwell burying-ground.
Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living
in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable,
pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the great city waiting in the
dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould
him to the form of its millions of re-shaped victims. A cabby picked
him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a
bed of wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel
commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack.
On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the
city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath
his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung
between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an inch below his coat
collar. He knew this much - that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon
somewhere in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had come to kill
him. And as he stepped upon the sidewalk the red came into his eye
and the feud-hate into his heart.
The clamor of the central avenues drew him thitherward. He had half
expected to see Cal coming down the street in his shirt-sleeves,
with a jug and a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him in
Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by and Cal did not appear.
Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a
window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.
About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse and suddenly
squeezed him with its straight lines.
Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular arteries of the city
cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit
and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane.
All life moved on tracks, in grooves, according to system, within
boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube root; the measure
of existence was square measure. People streamed by in straight rows;
the horrible din and crash stupefied him.
Sam leaned against the sharp corner of a stone building. Those faces
passed him by thousands, and none of them were turned toward him.
A sudden foolish fear that he had died and was a spirit, and that
they could not see him, seized him. And then the city smote him with
loneliness.
A fat man dropped out of the stream and stood a few feet distant,
waiting for his car. Sam crept to his side and shouted above the
tumult into his ear:
"The Rankinses' hogs weighed more'n ourn a whole passel, but the mast
in thar neighborhood was a fine chance better than what it was
down - "
The fat man moved away unostentatiously, and bought roasted chestnuts
to cover his alarm.
Sam felt the need of a drop of mountain dew. Across the street men
passed in and out through swinging doors. Brief glimpses could be
had of a glistening bar and its bedeckings. The feudist crossed and
essayed to enter. Again had Art eliminated the familiar circle. Sam's
hand found no door-knob - it slid, in vain, over a rectangular brass
plate and polished oak with nothing even so large as a pin's head
upon which his fingers might close.
Abashed, reddened, heartbroken, he walked away from the bootless door
and sat upon a step. A locust club tickled him in the ribs.
"Take a walk for yourself," said the policeman. "You've been loafing
around here long enough."
At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam's ear. He wheeled
around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts
heaped on a steaming machine. He started across the street. An