欧·亨利短篇小说选(外国文学经典)(插图本)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：(美）欧·亨利

出版社：外语教学与研究出版社

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

欧·亨利短篇小说选(外国文学经典)(插图本)试读：

Chapter 1 The Gift of the Magi

ONE DOLLAR AND EIGHTY-SEVEN CENTS. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheek burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing left to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the look-out for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go,and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name ‘Mr. James Dillingham Young.’

The ‘Dillingham’ had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of ‘Dillingham’ looked blurred,as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called ‘Jim’ and greatly hugged by Mrs.James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag.She stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are.Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling—something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honour of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips,obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its colour within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and girts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly.Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out of the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: ‘Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.’ One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame,large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the ‘Sofronie.’‘Will you buy my hair?’ asked Della.‘I buy hair,’ said Madame. ‘Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.’

Down rippled the brown cascade.‘Twenty dollars,’ said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.‘Give it to me quick,’ said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else.There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design,properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents.With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love.Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends—a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.‘If Jim doesn’t kill me,’ she said to herself, ‘before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do—oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?’

At seven o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove, hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: ‘Please God, make him think I am still pretty.’”

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two—and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stepped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise,nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.‘Jim, darling,’ she cried, ‘don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold it because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again—you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say “Merry Christmas!” Jim,and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice—what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.’‘You’ve cut off your hair?’ asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labour.‘Cut it off and sold it,’ said Della. ‘Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?’

Jim looked about the room curiously.‘You say your hair is gone?’ he said with an air almost of idiocy.‘You needn’t look for it,’ said Della. ‘It’s sold, I tell you—sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you.Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,’ she went on with a sudden serious sweetness, ‘but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?’

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della.For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them.This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.‘Don’t make any mistake, Dell,’ he said, ‘about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going awhile at first.’

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoiseshell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession.And now they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: ‘My hair grows so fast, Jim!’

And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, ‘Oh, oh!’

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.‘Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.’

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.‘Dell,’ said he, ‘let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em awhile. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.’

The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give andFor there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, thatDella had worshipped for long in Broadway window. Beautifulcombs, pure tortoiseshell, with jeweled rims—just the shadeto wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensivecombs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearnedover them without the least hope of possession. And now theywere hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the covetedadornments were gone.

receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

Chapter 2 A Cosmopolite in a Café

AT MIDNIGHT THE CAFé was crowded. By some chance the little table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons.

And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find travellers instead of cosmopolites.

I invoke your consideration of the scene—the marble-topped tables,the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art, the sedulous and largess-loving gar?ons,the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the composers; the mélange of talk and laughter—and, if you will, the Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was truly Parisian.

My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new ‘attraction’ there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took the great,round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table-d’h?te grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You would have addressed the letter to ‘E. Rushmore Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,’ and have mailed it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.

I was sure that I had at last found the one true cosmopolite since Adam, and I listened to his world-wide discourse fearful lest I should discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities, countries and continents as the winds or gravitation.

And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that ‘the men that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.’ And whenever they walk ‘by roaring streets unknown’ they remember their native city ‘most faithful, foolish, fond;making her mere-breathed name their bond upon their bond.’ And my glee was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the inhabitants of the Moon.

Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing to me the topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was ‘Dixie,’ and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost every table.

It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés at nightfall. This applause of the ‘rebel’ air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years’ generous mint and water-melon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society, have made the South rather a ‘fad’ in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman’s in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the war, you know.

When ‘Dixie’ was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.

The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young man acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I had.‘Would you mind telling me,’ I began, ‘whether you are from—’

The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was jarred into silence.‘Excuse me,’ said he, ‘but that’s a question I never like to hear asked.What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a man by his post-office address? Why, I’ve seen Kentuckians who hated whisky, Virginians who weren’t descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn’t written a novel, Mexicans who didn’t wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, coldblooded Southerners, narrow-minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer’s clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don’t handicap him with the label of any section.’‘Pardon me,’ I said, ‘but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one. I know the South, and when the band plays “Dixie” I like to observe. I have formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special violence and ostensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of either Secaucus,N.J., or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and the Harlem River,this city. I was about to put my opinion to the test by inquiring of this gentleman when you interrupted with your own—larger theory, I must confess.’

And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.‘I should like to be a periwinkle,’ said he, mysteriously, ‘on the top of a valley, and sing too-ralloo-ralloo.’

This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.‘I’ve been around the world twelve times,’ said he. ‘I know an Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast-food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all the year round. I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a teahouse in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell ’em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It’s a mighty little old world. What’s the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manorhouse in the dale, or Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan’s Flats or any place? It’ll be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.’‘You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,’ I said admiringly. ‘But it also seems that you would decry patriotism.’‘A relic of the stone age,’ declared Coglan warmly. ‘We are all brothers—Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians, and the people in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one’s city or state or section or country will be wiped out, and we’ll all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be.’‘But while you are wandering in foreign lands,’ I persisted, ‘do not your thoughts revert to some spot—some dear and—’‘Nary a spot,’ interrupted E. R. Coglan flippantly. ‘The terrestrial,globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and known as the Earth, is my abode. I’ve met a good many object-bound citizens of this country abroad. I’ve seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage canal. I’ve seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his grandaunt on his mother’s side was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money and he came back to Kabul with the agent. “Afghanistan?” the natives said to him through an interpreter.“Well, not so slow, do you think?” “Oh, I don’t know,” says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab-driver at Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don’t suit me. I’m not tied down to anything that isn’t 8,000 miles in diameter. Just put me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere.’

My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought that he saw someone through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I was left with the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Würzburger without further ability to voice his aspirations to perch, melodious, upon the summit of a valley.

I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering how the poet had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and I believed in him. How was it? ‘The men that breed from them they traffic up and down,but cling to their cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.’

Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his—

My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and conflict in another part of the café. I saw above the heads of the seated patrons E.Rushmore Coglan and a stranger to me engaged in terrific battle. They fought between the tables like Titans, and glasses crashed, and men caught their hats up and were knocked down, and a brunette screamed, and a blonde began to sing ‘Teasing.’

My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the Earth when the waiters closed in on both combatants with their famous flying wedge formation and bore them outside, still resisting.

I called McCarthy, one of the French garçons, and asked him the cause of the conflict.‘The man with the red tie’ (that was my cosmopolite), said he, ‘got hot on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supply of the place he come from by the other guy.’‘Why,’ said I, bewildered, ‘that man is a citizen of the world—a cosmopolite. He—’‘Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said,’ continued McCarthy, ‘and he wouldn’t stand for no knockin’ the place.’

Chapter 3 Between Rounds

THE MAY MOON SHONE BRIGHT upon the private boarding-house of Mrs.Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of territory will be discovered upon which its rays also fell. Spring was in its heyday, with hay fever soon to follow. The parks were green with new leaves and buyers for the Western and Southern trade. Flowers and summer-resort agents were blowing; the air and answers to Lawson were growing milder; handorgans, fountains and pinochle were playing everywhere.

The windows of Mrs. Murphy’s boarding-house were open. A group of boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like German pancakes.

In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went into Mrs. McCaskey.

At nine Mr. McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and his pipe in his teeth; and he apologized for disturbing the boarders on the steps as he selected spots of stone between them on which to set his size 9, width Ds.

As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise. Instead of the usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to dodge, came only words.

Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened the breast of his spouse.‘I heard ye,’ came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. ‘Ye can apollygize to riff-raff of the streets for settin’ yer unhandy feet on the tails of their frocks, but ye’d walk on the neck of yer wife the length of a clothesline without so much as a “Kiss me fut,” and I’m sure it’s that long from rubberin’ out the windy for ye and the victuals cold such as there’s money to buy after drinkin’ up yer wages at Gallegher’s every Saturday evenin’,and the gas man here twice to-day for his.’‘Woman!’ said Mr. McCaskey, dashing his coat and hat upon a chair,‘the noise of ye is an insult to me appetite. When ye run down politeness ye take the mortar from between the bricks of the foundations of society.’Tis no more than exercisin’ the acrimony of a gentleman when ye ask the dissent of ladies blockin’ the way for steppin’ between them. Will ye bring the pig’s face of ye out of the windy and see to the food?’

Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily and went to the stove. There was something in her manner that warned Mr. McCaskey. When the corners of her mouth went down suddenly like a barometer it usually foretold a fall of crockery and tinware.‘Pig’s face, is it?’ said Mrs. McCaskey, and hurled a stewpan full of bacon and turnips at her lord.

Mr. McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what should follow the entree. On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, garnished with shamrocks. He retorted with this, and drew the appropriate return of a bread pudding in an earthen dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese accurately thrown by her husband struck Mrs. McCaskey below one eye. When she replied with a well-aimed coffee-pot full of a hot, black, semi-fragrant liquid the battle,according to courses, should have ended.

But Mr. McCaskey was no 50 cent table d’hôter. Let cheap Bohemians consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make that faux pas. He was foxier still. Finger-bowls were not beyond the compass of his experience.They were not to be had in the Pension Murphy; but their equivalent was at hand. Triumphantly he sent the granite-ware wash-basin at the head of his matrimonial adversary. Mrs. McCaskey dodged in time. She reached for a flat-iron, with which, as a sort of cordial, she hoped to bring the gastronomical duel to a close. But a loud, wailing scream downstairs caused both her and Mr. McCaskey to pause in a sort of involuntary armistice.

On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman Cleary was standing with one ear upturned, listening to the crash of household utensils.‘ ’Tis Jawn McCaskey and his missus at it again,’ meditated the policeman. ‘I wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will not. Married folks they are; and few pleasures they have. ’Twill not last long. Sure, they’ll have to borrow more dishes to keep it up with.’

And just then came the loud scream below-stairs, betokening fear or dire extremity. ‘ ’Tis probably the cat,’ said Policeman Cleary, and walked hastily in the other direction.

The boarders on the steps were fluttered. Mr. Toomey, an insurance solicitor by birth and an investigator by profession, went inside to analyse the scream. He returned with the news that Mrs. Murphy’s little boy Mike was lost. Following the messenger, out bounced Mrs. Murphy—two hundred pounds in tears and hysterics, clutching the air and howling to the sky for the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and mischief. Bathos, truly; but Mr.Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy, milliner, and their hands came together in sympathy. The two old maids, Misses Walsh, who complained every day about the noise in the halls, inquired immediately if anybody had looked behind the clock.

Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose and buttoned his coat. ‘The little one lost?’ he exclaimed. ‘I will scour the city.’ His wife never allowed him out after dark. But now she said: ‘Go,Ludovic!’ in a baritone voice. ‘Whoever can look upon that mother’s grief without springing to her relief has a heart of stone.’ ‘Give me some thirty or—sixty cents, my love,’ said the Major. ‘Lost children sometimes stray far. I may need car-fares.’

Old man Denny, hall-room, fourth floor back, who sat on the lowest step, trying to read a paper by the street lamp, turned over a page to follow up the article about the carpenters’ strike. Mrs. Murphy shrieked to the moon: ‘Oh, ar-r-Mike, f’r Gawd’s sake, where is me little bit av a boy?’‘When’d ye see him last?’ asked old man Denny, with one eye on the report of the Building Trades League.‘Oh,’ wailed Mrs. Murphy, ‘ ’twas yisterday, or maybe four hours ago!I dunno. But it’s lost he is, me little boy Mike. He was playin’ on the sidewalk only this mornin’—or was it Wednesday? I’m that busy with work ’tis hard to keep up with dates. But I’ve looked the house over from top to cellar, and it’s gone he is. Oh, for the love av Hiven—’

Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers.They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom;they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence. We would call no one a lobster without good and sufficient claws.

No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as does the straying of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain and feeble; the ways are so steep and strange.

Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue into Billy’s place. ‘Gimme a rye-high,’ he said to the servitor. ‘Haven’t seen a bowlegged, dirty-faced little devil of a six-year-old lost kid around here anywhere, have you?’

Mr. Toomey retained Miss Purdy’s hand on the steps. ‘Think of that dear little babe,’ said Miss Purdy, ‘lost from his mother’s side—perhaps already fallen beneath the iron hoofs of galloping steeds—oh, isn’t it dreadful?’‘Ain’t that right?’ agreed Mr. Toomey, squeezing her hand. ‘Say I start out and help look for um!’‘Perhaps,’ said Miss Purdy, ‘you should. But oh, Mr. Toomey, you are so dashing—so reckless—suppose in your enthusiasm some accident should befall you, then what—’

Old man Denny read on about the arbitration agreement, with one finger on the lines.

In the second floor front Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey came to the window to recover their second wind. Mr. McCaskey was scooping turnips out of his vest with a crooked forefinger, and his lady was wiping an eye that the salt of the roast pork had not benefited. They heard the outcry below, and thrust their heads out of the window.‘ ’Tis little Mike is lost,’ said Mrs. McCaskey in a hushed voice, ‘the beautiful, little, trouble-making angel of a gossoon!’‘The bit of a boy mislaid?’ said Mr. McCaskey leaning out of the window. ‘Why, now, that’s bad enough, entirely. The childer, they be different.If ’twas a woman I’d be willin’, for they leave peace behind ’em when they go.’

Disregarding the thrust, Mrs. McCaskey caught her husband’s arm.‘Jawn,’ she said sentimentally, ‘Missis Murphy’s little bye is lost. ’Tis a great city for losing little boys. Six years old he was. Jawn, ’tis the same age our little bye would have been if we had had one six years ago.’‘We never did,’ said Mr. McCaskey, lingering with the fact.‘But if we had, Jawn, think what sorrow would be in our hearts this night, with our little Phelan run away and stolen in the city nowheres at all.’‘Ye talk foolishness,’ said Mr. McCaskey.‘’ Tis Pat he would be named, after me old father in Cantrim.’‘Ye lie!’ said Mrs. McCaskey, without anger. ‘Me brother was worth tin dozen bog-trotting McCaskeys. After him would the bye be named.’She leaned over the window-sill and looked down at the hurrying and bustle below.‘Jawn,’ said Mrs. McCaskey softly, ‘I’m sorry I was hasty wid ye.’‘ ’Twas hasty puddin’, as ye say,’ said her husband, ‘and hurry-up turnips and get-a-move-on-ye coffee. ’Twas what ye could call a quick lunch,all right, and tell no lie.’

Mrs. McCaskey slipped her arm inside her husband’s and took his rough hand in hers.‘Listen at the cryin’ of poor Mrs. Murphy,’ she said. ‘ ’Tis an awful thing for a bit of a bye to be lost in this great big city. If ’twas our little Phelan, Jawn, I’d be breakin’ me heart.’

Awkwardly Mr. McCaskey withdrew his hand. But he laid it around the nearing shoulders of his wife.‘ ’Tis foolishness, of course,’ said he, roughly, ‘but I’d be cut up some meself, if our little—Pat was kidnapped or anything. But there never was any childer for us. Sometimes I’ve been ugly and hard with ye, Judy. Forget it.’

They leaned together, and looked down at the heart-drama being acted below.

Long they sat thus. People surged along the sidewalk, crowding,questioning, filling the air with rumours and inconsequent surmises. Mrs.Murphy ploughed back and forth in their midst, like a soft mountain down which plunged an audible cataract of tears. Couriers came and went.

Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the boarding-house.‘What’s up now, Judy?’ asked Mr. McCaskey.‘ ’Tis Missis Murphy’s voice,’ said Mrs. McCaskey, harking. ‘She says she’s after finding little Mike asleep behind the roll of old linoleum under the bed in her room.’

Mr. McCaskey laughed loudly.‘That’s yer Phelan,’ he shouted sardonically, ‘Divil a bit would a Pat have done that trick if the bye we never had is strayed and stole, by the powers, call him Phelan, and see him hide out under the bed like a mangy pup.’

Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily, and went toward the dish closet, with the corners of her mouth drawn down.

Policeman Cleary came back around the corner as the crowd dispersed.Surprised, he upturned an ear toward the McCaskey apartment where the crash of irons and chinaware and the ring of hurled kitchen utensils seemed as loud as before. Policeman Cleary took out his timepiece.‘By the deported snakes!’ he exclaimed, ‘Jawn McCaskey and his lady have been fightin’ for an hour and a quarter by the watch. The missis could give him forty pounds weight. Strength to his arm.’

Policeman Cleary strolled back around the corner.

Old man Denny folded his paper and hurried up the steps just as Mrs.Murphy was about to lock the door for the night.

Chapter 4 The Skylight Room

FIRST MRS. PARKER would show you the double parlours. You would not dare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of the merits of the gentleman who had occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth the confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker’s manner of receiving the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain the same feeling toward your parents,who had neglected to train you up in one of the professions that fitted Mrs.Parker’s parlours.

Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second floor back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the$12 that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until he left to take charge of his brother’s orange plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs.McIntyre always spent the winters that had the double front room with private bath, you managed to babble that you wanted something still cheaper.

If you survived Mrs. Parker’s scorn, you were taken to look at Mr.Skidder’s large hall-room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder’s room was not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long. But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire the lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.

Then—oh, then—if you still stood on one foot with your hot hand clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely proclaimed your hideous and culpable poverty, nevermore would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly the word ‘Clara,’ she would show you her back, and march downstairs. Then Clara, the coloured maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7 by 8 feet of floorspace at the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber closet or store-room.

In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the dresser.Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coin.Your hand crept to your throat, you gasped, you looked up as from a well—and breathed once more. Through the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity.‘Two dollars, suh,’ Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, halfTuskegeenial tones.

One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She was a very little girl, with eyes and hair that kept on growing after she had stopped and that always looked as if they were saying: ‘Goodness me. Why didn’t you keep up with us?’

Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. ‘In this closet,’ she said,‘one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal—’‘But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist,’ said Miss Leeson with a shiver.

Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and led the way to the second floor back.‘Eight dollars?’ said Miss Leeson. ‘Dear me! I’m not Hetty if I do look green. I’m just a poor little working girl. Show me something higher and lower.’

Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap on his door.‘Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,’ said Mrs. Parker, with her demon’s smile at his pale looks. ‘I didn’t know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your lambrequins.’‘They’re too lovely for anything,’ said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly the way the angels do.

After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall, blackhaired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and inserting a small,roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features.‘Anna Held’ll jump at it,’ said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish.

Presently the tocsin call of ‘Clara!’ sounded to the world the state of Miss Leeson’s purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway,thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and cabalistic words ‘Two dollars!’‘I’ll take it!’ sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron bed.

Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter.Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a skylight room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, ‘It’s No Kid; or,The Heir of the Subway.’

There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker,the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said ‘Well, really!’ to everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed. Miss Leeson sat on the middle step, and the men would quickly group around her.

Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And especially Mr.Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flushed and foolish. And especially very young Mr. Evans, who set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted her ‘the funniest and jolliest ever,’ but the sniffs on the top step and the lower step were implacable.

I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo’s rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff.To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat, is meat for perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.

As Mrs. Parker’s roomers sat thus one summer’s evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:‘Why, there’s Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too.’

All looked up—some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for an airship, Jackson-guided.‘It’s that star,’ explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. ‘Not the big one that twinkles—the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson.’‘Well, really!’ said Miss Longnecker. ‘I didn’t know you were an astronomer, Miss Leeson.’‘Oh, yes,’ said the small star-gazer, ‘I know as much as any of them about the style of sleeves they’re going to wear next fall in Mars.’‘Well, really!’ said Miss Longnecker. ‘The star you refer to is Gamma,of the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude, and its meridian passage is—’‘Oh,’ said the very young Mr. Evans, ‘I think Billy Jackson is a much better name for it.’‘Same here,’ said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss Longnecker. ‘I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as any of those old astrologers had.’‘Well, really!’ said Miss Longnecker.‘I wonder whether it’s a shooting star,’ remarked Miss Dorn. ‘I hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday.’‘He doesn’t show up very well from down here,’ said Miss Leeson. ‘You ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of a coal-mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with.’

There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable papers home to copy. And when she went in the morning, instead of working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.

There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker’s stoop at the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But she had had no dinner.

As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance.He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade. He tried for her hand,and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face. Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder’s door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his(unaccepted) comedy, to ‘pirouette across stage from L to the side of the Count.’ Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened the door of the skylight room.

She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in that Erebus of a room she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled.

For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she had so whimsically, and oh, so ineffectually, named. Miss Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she could not let it be Gamma.

As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.‘Good-bye, Billy,’ she murmured faintly. ‘You’re millions of miles away and you won’t even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time up there when there wasn’t anything else but darkness to look at, didn’t you? . . . Millions of miles.... Good-bye, Billy Jackson.’

Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at ten the next day,and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and even burnt feathers, proving of no avail, someone ran to ’phone for an ambulance.

In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident,with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps.‘Ambulance call to 49,’ he said briefly. ‘What’s the trouble?’‘Oh yes, doctor,’ sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there should be trouble in the house was the greater. ‘I can’t think what can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It’s a young woman, a Miss Elsie—yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never before in my house—’‘What room?’ cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker was a stranger.‘The skylight room. It—’

Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.

On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue,not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail. Ever afterwards there remained crumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the doctor said to her.‘Let that be,’ she would answer. ‘If I can get forgiveness for having heard it I will be satisfied.’

The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own dead.

They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was: ‘Drive like h—I, Wilson,’ to the driver.

That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning’s paper I saw a little news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me) to weld the incidents together.

It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who had been removed from No. 49 East—Street, suffering from debility induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:‘Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case,says the patient will recover.’

Chapter 5 A Service of Love

WHEN ONE LOVES ONES ART no service seems too hard.That is our premise. This story shall draw a conclusion from it, and show at the same time that the premise is incorrect. That will be a new thing in logic, and a feat in story-telling somewhat older than the Great Wall of China.

Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle West pulsing with a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a picture of the town pump with a prominent citizen passing it hastily. This effort was framed and hung in the drug store window by the side of the ear of corn with an uneven number of rows. At twenty he left for New York with a flowing necktie and a capital tied up somewhat closer.

Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a pine-tree village in the South that her relatives chipped in enough in her chip hat for her to go ‘North’ and ‘finish.’ They could not see her f—, but that is our story.

Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, Rembrandt’s works pictures, Waldteufel, wall-paper, Chopin, and Oolong.

Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other or each of the other,as you please, and in a short time were married—for (see above), when one loves one’s Art no service seem too hard.

Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a lonesome flat—something like the A sharp way down at the left-hand end of the keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their Art and they had each other. And my advice to the rich young man would be—sell all thou hast,and give it to the poor—janitor for the privilege of living in a flat with your Art and your Delia.

Flat-dwellers shall endorse my dictum that theirs is the only true happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close—let the dresser collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to a rowing machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the wash-stand to an upright piano; let the four walls come together, if they will, so you and your Delia are between.But if home be the other kind, let it be wide and long—enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras, your cape on Cape Horn, and go out by Labrador.

Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister—you know his fame. His fees are high; his lessons are light—his high-lights have brought him renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock—you know his repute as a disturber of the piano keys.

They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is every—but I will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and defined. Joe was to become capable very soon of turning out pictures that old gentlemen with thin side-whiskers and thick pocket-books would sandbag one another in his studio for the privilege of buying. Delia was to become familiar and then contemptuous with Music, so that when she saw the orchestra seats and boxes unsold she could have sore throat and lobster in a private diningroom and refuse to go on the stage.

But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat—the ardent, voluble chats after the day’s study; the cosy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions—ambitions interwoven each with the other’s or else inconsiderable—the mutual help and inspiration; and—overlook my artlessness—stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 p.m.

But after a while Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some switchman doesn’t flag it. Everything going out and nothing coming in, as the vulgarians say. Money was lacking to pay Mr. Magister and Herr Rosenstock their prices. When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard. So,Delia said she must give music lessons to keep the chafing dish bubbling.

For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils. One evening she came home elated.‘Joe, dear,’ she said gleefully, ‘I’ve a pupil. And, oh, the loveliest people! General—General A. B. Pinkney’s daughter—on Seventy-first Street.Such a splendid house, Joe—you ought to see the front door! Byzantine I think you would call it. And inside! Oh, Joe, I never saw anything like it before.‘My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already. She’s a delicate thing—dresses always in white; and the sweetest, simplest manners! Only eighteen years old. I’m to give three lessons a week; and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I don’t mind it a bit; for when I get two or three more pupils I can resume my lessons with Herr Rosenstock. Now, smooth out that wrinkle between your brows, dear, and let’s have a nice supper.’‘That’s all right for you, Dele,’ said Joe, attacking a can of peas with a carving knife and a hatchet, ‘but how about me? Do you think I’m going to let you hustle for wages while I philander in the regions of high art? Not by the bones of Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.’

Delia came and hung about his neck.‘Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is not as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else. While I teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily as millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn’t think of leaving Mr. Magister.’‘All right,’ said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish. ‘But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn’t Art. But you’re a trump and a dear to do it.’‘When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard,’ said Delia.‘Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,’ said Joe.‘And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I may sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.’‘I’m sure you will,’ said Delia sweetly. ‘And now let’s be thankful for General Pinkney and this veal roast.’

During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe was enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in Central Park, and Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised, and kissed at seven o’clock. Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times seven o’clock when he returned in the evening.

At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid, triumphantly tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8 by 10 (inches) centre table of the 8 by10 (feet) flat parlour.‘Sometimes,’ she said, a little wearily, ‘Clementina tries me. I’m afraid she doesn’t practise enough, and I have to tell her the same things so often.And then she always dresses entirely in white, and that does get monotonous. But General Pinkney is the dearest old man! I wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with Clementina at the piano—he is a widower, you know—and stands there pulling his white goatee. “And how are the semiquavers and the demi-semiquavers progressing?” he always asks.‘I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, Joe! And those Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina has such a funny little cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am getting attached to her, she is so gentle and high bred. General Pinkney’s brother was once Minister to Bolivia.’

And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a five,a two and a one—all legal tender notes—and laid them beside Delia’s earnings.‘Sold that water-colour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,’ he announced overwhelmingly.‘Don’t joke with me,’ said Delia—‘not from Peoria!’‘All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle’s window and thought it was a windmill at first. He was game, though, and bought it anyhow. He ordered another—an oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight depot—to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.’‘I’m so glad you’ve kept on,’ said Delia heartily. ‘You’re bound to win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend before.We’ll have oysters to-night.’‘And filet mignon with champignons,’ said Joe. ‘Where is the olive fork?’

On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his$18 on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of dark paint from his hands.

Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless bundle of wraps and bandages.‘How is this?’ asked Joe after the usual greetings.

Delia laughed, but not very joyously.‘Clementina,’ she explained, ‘insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at five in the afternoon. The General was there. You should have seen him run for the chafing dish, Joe,just as if there wasn’t a servant in the house. I know Clementina isn’t in good health; she is so nervous. In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But General Pinkney!—Joe, that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody—they said the furnace man or somebody in the basement—out to a drug store for some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesn’t hurt so much now.’‘What’s this?’ asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some white strands beneath the bandages.‘It’s something soft,’ said Delia, ‘that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did you sell　another sketch?’ She had seen the money on the table.‘Did I?’ said Joe. ‘Just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot today, and he isn’t sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?’‘Five o’clock, I think,’ said Dele plaintively. ‘The iron—I mean the rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen General Pinkney, Joe, when—’‘Sit down here a moment, Dele,’ said Joe. He drew her to the couch,sat down beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.‘What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?’ he asked.

She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of General Pinkney; but at length down went her head and out came the truth and tears.‘I couldn’t get any pupils,’ she confessed. ‘And I couldn’t bear to have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big Twenty-fourth Street laundry. And I think I did very well to make up both General Pinkney and Clementina, don’t you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all the way home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You’re not angry are you, Joe? And if I hadn’t got the work you mightn’t have sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.’‘He wasn’t from Peoria,’ said Joe slowly.‘Well, it doesn’t matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe—and—kiss me, Joe—and what made you ever suspect that I wasn’t giving music lessons to Clementina?’‘I didn’t,’ said Joe, ‘until to-night. And I wouldn’t have then, only I sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron. I’ve been firing the engine in that laundry for the last two weeks.’‘And then you didn’t—’‘My purchaser from Peoria,’ said Joe, ‘and General Pinkney are both creations of the same art—but you wouldn’t call it either painting or music.’

And then they both laughed, and Joe began:‘When one loves one’s Art no service seems—’

But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. ‘No,’ she said— ‘just“When one loves.” ’

Chapter 6 The Cop and the Anthem

ON HIS BENCH IN MADISON SQUARE Soapy moved uneasily. When wild goose honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at hand.

A dead leaf fell in Soapy’s lap. That was Jack Frost’s card. Jack is kind to the regular denizens of Madison Square, and gives fair warning of his annual call. At the corners of four streets he hands his pasteboard to the North Wind, footman of the mansion of All Outdoors, so that the inhabitants thereof may make ready.

Soapy’s mind became cognizant of the fact that the time had come for him to resolve himself into a singular Committee of Ways and Means to provide against the coming rigour. And therefore he moved uneasily on his bench.

The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In them were no considerations of Mediterranean cruises, of soporific Southern skies or drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months on the Island was what his soul craved. Three months of assured board and bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the essence of things desirable.

For years the hospitable Blackwell’s had been his winter quarters. Just as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the time was come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers, distributed beneath his coat,about his ankles and over his lap, had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting fountain in the ancient square. So the Island loomed large and timely in Soapy’s mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of charity for the city’s dependents. In Soapy’s opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There was an endless round of institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might set out and receive lodging and food accordant with the simple life. But to one of Soapy’s proud spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman’s private affairs

Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and then,after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do the rest.

Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering café, where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm.

Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, readytied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him that would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter’s mind. A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing—with a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demi-tasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar would be enough.The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from the café management; and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy for the journey to his winter refuge.

But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter’s eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.

Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted Island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo must be thought of.

At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed wares behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took a cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came running round the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands in his pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons.‘Where’s the man that done that?’ inquired the officer excitedly.‘Don’t you figure out that I might have had something to do with it?’said Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good fortune.

The policeman’s mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who smash windows do not remain to parley with the law’s minions. They take to their heels. The policeman saw a man halfway down the block running to catch a car. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit. Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed along, twice unsuccessful.

On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great pretensions.It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its crockery and atmosphere were thick; its soup and napery thin. Into this place Soapy took his accusive shoes and tell-tale trousers without challenge. At a table he sat and consumed beefsteak, flapjacks, doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter he betrayed the fact that the minutest coin and himself were strangers.‘Now, get busy and call a cop,’ said Soapy. ‘And don’t keep a gentleman waiting.’‘No cop for youse,’ said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes and an eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. ‘Hey, Con!’

Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched Soapy. He arose, joint by joint, as a carpenter’s rule opens, and beat the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The Island seemed very far away. A policeman who stood before a drug store two doors away laughed and walked down the street.

Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted him to woo capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he fatuously termed to himself a ‘cinch.’ A young woman of a modest and pleasing guise was standing before a show window gazing with sprightly interest at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards from the window a large policeman of severe demeanour leaned against a water-plug.

It was Soapy’s design to assume the role of the despicable and execrated ‘masher.’ The refined and elegant appearance of his victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that would ensure his winter quarters on the right little, tight little isle.

Soapy straightened the lady missionary’s ready-made tie, dragged his shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden coughs and‘hems,’ smiled, smirked and went brazenly through the impudent and contemptible litany of the ‘masher.’ With half an eye Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him fixedly. The young woman moved away a few steps, and again bestowed her absorbed attention upon the shaving mugs.Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her side, raised his hat and said:‘Ah there, Bedelia! Don’t you want to come and play in my yard?’

The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cosy warmth of the station-house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand,caught Soapy’s coat-sleeve.‘Sure, Mike,’ she said joyfully, ‘if you’ll blow me to a pail of suds. I’d have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.’

With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak, Soapy walked past the policeman, overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty.

At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had rendered him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of panic upon it,and when he came upon another policeman lounging grandly in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the immediate straw of ‘disorderly conduct.’

On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise disturbed the welkin.

The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked to a citizen:‘ ’Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin’ the goose egg they give to the Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We’ve instructions to lave them be.’

Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling wind.In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering. Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered off with it slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily.‘My umbrella,’ he said sternly.‘Oh, is it?’ sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. ‘Well, why don’t you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don’t you call a cop? There stands one at the corner.’

The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman looked at the two curiously.‘Of course,’ said the umbrella man—‘that is—well, you know how these mistakes occur—I—if it’s your umbrella I hope you’ll excuse me—I picked it up this morning in a restaurant—If you recognize it as yours,why—I hope you’ll—’‘Of course it’s mine,’ said Soapy viciously.

The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car that was approaching two blocks away.

Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements.He hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong.

At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench.

But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet-stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy’s ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of the iron fence.

The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves—for a little while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it welt in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.

The conjunction of Soapy’s receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul.He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and base motives that made up his existence.

And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. To-morrow he would go into the roaring down-town district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him to-morrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would—

Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman.‘What are you doin’ here?’ asked the officer.‘Nothin’,’ said Soapy.‘Then come along,’ said the policeman.‘Three months on the Island,’ said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next morning.

Chapter 7 Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

I DON’T SUPPOSE it will knock any of you people off your perch to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pelée horror.

But you needn’t look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog that’s spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremen’s banquet), mustn’t be expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.

I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown.The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine Pomeranian-HambletonianRed-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros grain flannelette in her shopping-bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From that moment I was a pet—a mamma’s own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau d’Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: ‘Oh, oo’s um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum,toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?’

From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that Noah chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison Square Garden for the Siberian bloodhound prize.

I’ll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones above the first floor. Our flat was three fl—well, not flights—climbs up.My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the regular things—1903 antique upholstered parlour set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea-house,rubber plant and husband.

By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Hen-pecked?—well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they’d never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour’s talk with the iceman,reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across the air-shaft—that’s about all there is to it. Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it won’t show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.

I led a dog’s life in that flat. ’Most all day I lay there in my corner watching the fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose—but what could I do? A dog can’t chew cloves.

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn’t. We looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the streets that Morgan’s cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles of last December’s snow on the streets where cheap people live.

One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn’t have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn’s wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:‘What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She don’t kiss you. You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus.You ought to be thankful you’re not a dog. Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues begone.’

The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine intelligence in his face.‘Why, doggie,’ says he, ‘good doggie. You almost look like you could speak. What is it, doggie—Cats?’

Cats! Could speak!

But, of course, he couldn’t understand. Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an elucidation.‘See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,’ I says, ‘you know that it ain’t the nature of a real man to play dry-nurse to a dog in public. I never saw one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn’t look like he’d like to lick every other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in every day as perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing the egg trick. How does he do it? Don’t tell me he likes it.’‘Him?’ says the black-and-tan. ‘Why, he uses Nature’s Own Remedy.He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he’s as shy as the man on the steamer who would rather play pedro when they make ’em all jackpots. By the time we’ve been in eight saloons he don’t care whether the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a catfish. I’ve lost two inches of my tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors.’

The pointer I got from that terrier—vaudeville please copy—set me to thinking.

One evening about six o’clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is what she called me. The black-and-tan was called ‘Tweetness.’ I consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still ‘Lovey’is something of a nomenclatural tin-can on the tail of one’s self-respect.

At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches that lets the family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in the brook.‘Why, darn my eyes,’ says the old man, with a grin; ‘darn my eyes if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain’t asking me in to take a drink. Lemme see—how long’s it been since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on the footrest? I believe I’ll—’

I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store eight minutes before papa comes home.

When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it into the street.‘Poor doggie,’ says he; ‘good doggie. She shan’t kiss you any more. ’S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street car and be happy.’

I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man’s legs happy as a pug on a rug.‘You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,’ I said to him—‘you moonbaying, rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, can’t you see that I don’t want to leave you? Can’t you see that we’re both Pups in the Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle after you with the dish towel and me with the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why not cut that all out and be pards for evermore?’

Maybe you’ll say he didn’t understand—maybe he didn’t. But he kind of got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute, thinking.‘Doggie,’ says he finally, ‘we don’t live more than a dozen lives on this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see that flat any more I’m a flat, and if you do you’re flatter; and that’s no flattery. I’m offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out by the length of a dachshund.’

There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the Twenty-third Street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to give thanks that prehensile claws had been given them.

On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood eating a currant bun:‘Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.’

But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my ears until I howled, and said:‘You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured son of a door-mat, do you know what I’m going to call you?’

I thought of ‘Lovey,’ and I whined dolefully.‘I’m going to call you “Pete,” ’ says my master; and if I’d had five tails I couldn’t have done enough wagging to do justice to the occasion.

Chapter 8 The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

THE BLUE LIGHT DRUG STORE is down-town, between the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of brica-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for a pain-killer it will not give you a bonbon.

The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk—pills rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb,dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round, pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed,hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough-drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.

Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of pharmacy is not glacé. There, as it should be, the druggist is a counsellor, a confessor,an adviser, an able and willing missionary and mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated and whose medicine is often poured, untasted, into the gutter. Therefore Ikey’s corniform, bespectacled nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.

Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle’s, two squares away.Mrs. Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in vain—you must have guessed it—Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all his thoughts; she was the compound extract of all that was chemically pure and officinal—the dispensatory contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey was timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum of his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he was a superior being, calmly conscious of special knowledge and worth; outside, he was a weak-kneed,purblind, motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting clothes stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and valerianate of ammonia.

The fly in Ikey’s ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk McGowan.

Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed about by Rosy. But he was no out-fielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the bat.At the same time he was Ikey’s friend and customer, and often dropped in at the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent along the Bowery.

One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way, and sat,comely, smoothed-faced, hard, indomitable, good-natured, upon a stool.‘Ikey,’ said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, ‘get busy with your ear. It’s drugs for me if you’ve got the line I need.’

Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr. McGowan for the usual evidences of conflict, but found none.‘Take your coat off,’ he ordered. ‘I guess already that you have been stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you those Dagoes would do you up.’

Mr. McGowan smiled. ‘Not them,’ he said. ‘Not any Dagoes. But you’ve located the diagnosis all right enough—it’s under my coat, near the ribs. Say! Ikey—Rosy and me are goin’ to run away and get married tonight.’

Ikey’s left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt it not. Meanwhile Mr. McGowan’s smile faded to a look of perplexed gloom.‘That is,’ he continued, ‘if she keeps in the notion until the time comes.We’ve been layin’ pipes for the gateway for two weeks. One day she says she will; the same evenin’ she says nixy. We’ve agreed on to-night, and Rosy’s stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole days. But it’s five hours yet till the time, and I’m afraid she’ll stand me up when it comes to the scratch.’‘You said you wanted drugs,’ remarked Ikey.

Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed—a condition opposed to his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.‘I wouldn’t have this double handicap make a false start to-night for a million,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I’ve engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 9.30. It’s got to come off. And if Rosy don’t change her mind again!’—Mr. McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.‘I don’t see then yet,’ said Ikey shortly, ‘what makes it that you talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it.’‘Old man Riddle don’t like me a little bit,’ went on the uneasy suitor,bent upon marshalling his arguments. ‘For a week he hasn’t let Rosy step outside the door with me. If it wasn’t for losin’ a boarder they’d have bounced me long ago. I’m makin’ $20 a week and she’ll never regret flyin’the coop with Chunk McGowan.’‘You will excuse me, Chunk,’ said Ikey. ‘I must make a prescription that is to be called for soon.’‘Say,’ said McGowan, looking up suddenly, ‘say, Ikey, ain’t there a drug of some kind—some kind of powders that’ll make a girl like you better if you give ’em to her?’

Ikey’s lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:‘Tim Lacy told me once that he got some from a croaker uptown and fed ’em to his girl in soda water. From the very first dose he was ace-high and everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They was married in less than two weeks.’

Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men than Ikey was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon fine wires.Like a good general who was about to invade the enemy’s territory he was seeking to guard every point against possible failure.‘I thought,’ went on Chunk hopefully, ‘that if I had one of them powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper to-night it might brace her up and keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess she don’t need a mule team to drag her away, but women are better at coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff’ll work just for a couple of hours it’ll do the trick.’‘When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?’ asked Ikey.‘Nine o’clock,’ said Mr. McGowan. ‘Supper’s at seven. At eight Rosy goes to bed with a headache. At nine old Parvenzano lets me through to his backyard, where there’s a board off Riddle’s fence, next door. I go under her window and help her down the fire-escape. We’ve got to make it early on the preacher’s account. It’s all dead easy if Rosy don’t balk when the flag drops. Can you fix me one of them powders, Ikey?’

Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.‘Chunk,’ said he, ‘it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists must have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I entrust a powder like that. But for you I shall make it, and you shall see how it makes Rosy to think of you.’

Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia. To them he added a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk, and folded the mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an adult this powder would ensure several hours of heavy slumber without danger to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to administer it in a liquid, if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar.

The subtlety of Ikey’s action becomes apparent upon recital of his subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle and disclosed the plans of McGowan for eloping with Rosy. Mr. Riddle was a stout man, brickdusty of complexion and sudden in action.‘Much obliged,’ he said briefly to Ikey. ‘the lazy Irish loafer! My own room’s just above Rosy’s. I’ll just go up there myself after supper and load the shot-gun and wait. If he comes in my backyard he’ll go away in an ambulance instead of a bridal chaise.’

With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many-hours’ deep slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.

All night in the Blue Light Store he waited at his duties for chance news of the tragedy, but none came.

At eight o’clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey started hurriedly for Mrs. Riddle’s to learn the outcome. And, lo! as he stepped out of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing street-car and grasped his hand—Chunk McGowan with a victor’s smile and flushed with joy.‘Pulled it off,’ said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. ‘Rosy hit the fireescape on time to a second and we was under the wire at the Reverend’s at 9.30. She’s up at the flat—she cooked eggs this mornin’ in a blue kimono—Lord I how lucky I am! You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I’ve got a job down near the bridge, and that’s where I’m heading for now.’‘The—the powder?’ stammered Ikey.‘Oh, that stuff you gave me!’ said Chunk broadening his grin; ‘well,it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle’s, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, “Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square—don’t try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her.”And I keeps the paper you give me in my pocket. And then my lamps falls on another party present, who, I says to myself, is failin’ in a proper affection toward his comin’ son-in-law, so I watches my chance and dumps that powder in old man Riddle’s coffee—see?’

Chapter 9 Mammon and the Archer

OLD ANTHONY ROCKWALL, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall’s Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right—the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—came out to his waiting motor-car, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace’s front elevation.‘Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!’ commented the ex-Soap King. ‘The Eden Musee’ll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don’t watch out. I’ll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and see if that’ll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher.’

And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the door of his library and shouted ‘Mike!’ in the same voice that had once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.‘Tell my son,’ said Anthony to the answering menial, ‘to come in here before he leaves the house.’

When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth, ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and rattled the keys in his pocket with the other.‘Richard,’ said Anthony Rockwall, ‘what do you pay for the soap that you use?’

Richard, only six months home from college, was startled a little. He had not yet taken the measure of this sire of his, who was as full of unexpectednesses as a girl at her first party.‘Six dollars a dozen, I think, dad.’‘And your clothes?’‘I suppose about sixty dollars, as a rule.’‘You’re a gentleman,’ said Anthony decidedly. ‘I’ve heard of these young bloods spending $24 a dozen for soap, and going over the hundred mark for clothes. You’ve got as much money to waste as any of ’em, and yet you stick to what’s decent and moderate. Now I use the old Eureka—not only for sentiment, but it’s the purest soap made. Whenever you pay more than ten cents a cake for soap you buy bad perfumes and labels. But fifty cents is doing very well for a young man in your generation, position and condition. As I said, you’re a gentleman. They say it takes three generations to make one. They’re off. Money’ll do it as slick as soap grease. It’s made you one. By hokey! it’s almost made one of me. I’m nearly as impolite and disagreeable and ill-mannered as these two old Knickerbocker gents on each side of me that can’t sleep of nights because I bought in between’em.’‘There are some things that money can’t accomplish,’ remarked young Rockwall rather gloomily.‘Now, don’t say that,’ said old Anthony, shocked. ‘I bet my money on money every time. I’ve been through the encyclopaedia down to Y looking for something you can’t buy with it; and I expect to have to take up the appendix next week. I’m for money against the field. Tell me something money won’t buy.’‘For one thing,’ answered Richard, rankling a little, ‘it won’t buy one into the exclusive circles of society.’‘Oho won’t it?’ thundered the champion of the root of evil. ‘You tell me where your exclusive circles would be if the first Astor hadn’t had the money to pay for his steerage passage over?’

Richard sighed.‘And that’s what I was coming to,’ said the old man less boisterously.‘That’s why I asked you to comein. There’s something going wrong with you, boy. I’ve been noticing it for two weeks. Out with it. I guess I could lay my hands on eleven millions within twenty-four hours, besides the real estate. If it’s your liver, there’s the Rambler down in the bay, coaled, and ready to steam down to the Bahamas in two days.’‘Not a bad guess, dad; you haven’t missed it far.’‘Ah,’ said Anthony keenly; ‘what’s her name?’

Richard began to walk up and down the library floor. There was enough comradeship and sympathy in this crude old father of his to draw his confidence.‘Why don’t you ask her?’ demanded old Anthony. ‘She’ll jump at you.You’ve got the money and the looks, and you’re a decent boy. Your hands are clean. You’ve got no Eureka soap on ’em. You’ve been to college, but she’ll overlook that.’‘I haven’t had a chance,’ said Richard.‘Make one,’ said Anthony. ‘Take her for a walk in the park, or a straw ride, or walk home with her from church. Chancel Pshaw!’‘You don’t know the social mill, dad. She’s part of the stream that turns it. Every hour and minute of her time is arranged for days in advance.I must have that girl, dad, or this town is a blackjack swamp for evermore.And I can’t write it—I can’t do that.’‘Tut!’ said the old man. ‘Do you mean to tell me that with all the money I’ve got you can’t get an hour or two of a girl’s time for yourself?’‘I’ve put it off too late. She’s going to sail for Europe at noon day after to-morrow for a two years’ stay. I’m to see her alone tomorrow evening for a few minutes. She’s at Larchmont now at her aunt’s. I can’t go there. But I’m allowed to meet her with a cab at the Grand Central Station to-morrow evening at the 8.30 train. We drive down Broadway to Wallack’s at a gallop, where her mother and a box party will be waiting for us in the lobby.Do you think she would listen to a declaration from me during those six or eight minutes under those circumstances? No. And what chance would I have in the theatre or afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that your money can’t unravel. We can’t buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer. There’s no hope of getting a talk with Miss Lantry before she sails.’‘All right, Richard, my boy,’ said old Anthony cheerfully. ‘You may run along down to your club now. I’m glad it ain’t your liver. But don’t forget to burn a few punk sticks in the joss-house to the great god Mazuma from time to time. You say money won’t buy time? Well, of course, you can’t order eternity wrapped up and delivered at your residence for a price,but I’ve seen Father Time get pretty bad stone bruises on his heels when he walked through the gold diggings.’

That night came Aunt Ellen, gentle, sentimental, wrinkled, sighing, oppressed by wealth, in to Brother Anthony at his evening paper, and began discourse on the subject of lovers’ woes.‘He told me all about it,’ said brother Anthony yawning. ‘I told him my bank account was at his service. And then he began to knock money.Said money couldn’t help. Said the rules of society couldn’t be buckled for a yard by a team of ten-millionaires.’‘Oh, Anthony,’ sighed Aunt Ellen, ‘I wish you would not think so much of money. Wealth is nothing where a true affection is concerned.Love is all-powerful. If he only had spoken earlier! She could not have refused our Richard. But now I fear it is too late. He will have no opportunity to address her. All your gold cannot bring happiness to your son.’

At eight o’clock the next evening Aunt Ellen took a quaint old gold ring from a moth-eaten case and gave it to Richard.‘Wear it to-night, nephew,’ she begged. ‘Your mother gave it to me.Good luck in love, she said it brought. She asked me to give it to you when you had found the one you loved.’

Young Rockwall took the ring reverently and tried it on his smallest ringer. It slipped as far as the second joint and stopped. He took it off and stuffed it into his vest pocket, after the manner of man. And then he ’phoned for his cab.

At the station he captured Miss Lantry out of the gadding mob at 8.32.‘We mustn’t keep mamma and the others waiting,’ said she.‘To Wallack’s Theatre as fast as you can drive,’ said Richard loyally.

They whirled up Forty-second to Broadway, and then down the whitestarred lane that leads from the soft meadows of sunset to the rocky hills of morning.

At Thirty-fourth Street young Richard quickly thrust up the trap and ordered the cabman to stop.‘I’ve dropped a ring,’ he apologized, as he climbed out. ‘It was my mother’s, and I’d hate to lose it. I won’t detain you a minute—I saw where it fell.’

In less than a minute he was back in the cab with the ring.

But within that minute a cross-town car had stopped directly in front of the cab. The cabman tried to pass to the left, but a heavy express wagon cut him off. He tried the right, and had to back away from a furniture van that had no business to be there. He tried to back out, but dropped his reins and swore dutifully. He was blockaded in a tangled mess of vehicles and horses.

One of those street blockades had occurred that sometimes tie up commerce and movement quite suddenly in the big city.‘Why don’t you drive on?’ said Miss Lantry impatiently. ‘We’ll be late.’

Richard stood up in the cab and looked around. He saw a congested flood of wagons, trucks, cabs, vans and street-cars filling the vast space where Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross one another as a twenty-six-inch maiden fills her twenty-two-inch girdle. And still from all the cross-streets they were hurrying and rattling toward the converging point at full speed, and hurling themselves into the struggling mass, locking wheels and adding their drivers imprecations to the clamour. The entire traffic of Manhattan seemed to have jammed itself around them. The oldest New Yorker among the thousands of spectators that lined the sidewalks had not witnessed a street blockade of the proportions of this one.‘I’m very sorry,’ said Richard, as he resumed his seat, ‘but it looks as if we are stuck. They won’t get this jumble loosened up in an hour. It was my fault. If I hadn’t dropped the ring we—’‘Let me see the ring,’ said Miss Lantry. ‘Now that it can’t be helped, I don’t care. I think theatres are stupid, anyway.’

At eleven o’clock that night somebody tapped lightly on Anthony Rockwall’s door.‘Come in,’ shouted Anthony, who was in a red dressing-gown, reading a book of piratical adventures.

Somebody was Aunt Ellen, looking like a grey-haired angel that had been left on earth by mistake.‘They’re engaged, Anthony,’ she said softly. ‘She has promised to marry our Richard. On their way to the theatre there was a street blockade,and it was two hours before their cab could get out of it.‘And oh, brother Anthony, don’t ever boast of the power of money again. A little emblem of true love—a little ring that symbolized unending and unmercenary affection—was the cause of our Richard finding his happiness. He dropped it in the street, and got out to recover it. And before they could continue the blockade occurred. He spoke to his love and won her there while the cab was hemmed in. Money is dross compared with true love, Anthony.’‘All right,’ said old Anthony. ‘I’m glad the boy has got what he wanted.I told him I wouldn’t spare any expense in the matter if—’‘But, brother Anthony, what good could your money have done?’‘Sister,’ said Anthony Rockwall, ‘I’ve got my pirate in a devil of a scrape. His ship has just been scuttled, and he’s too good a judge of the value of money to let drown. I wish you would let me go on with this chapter.’

The story should end here. I wish it would as heartily as you who read it wish it did. But we must go to the bottom of the well for truth.

The next day a person with red hands and a blue polka-dot necktie,who called himself Kelly, called at Anthony Rockwall’s house, and was at once received in the library.‘Well,’ said Anthony, reaching for his chequebook, ‘it was a good bilin’ of soap. Let’s see—you had $5,000 in cash.’‘I paid out $300 more of my own,’ said Kelly. ‘I had to go a little above the estimate. I got the express wagons and cabs mostly for $5; but the trucks and two-horse teams mostly raised me to $10. The motormen wanted $10, and some of the loaded teams $20. The cops struck me hardest—$50 I paid two, and the rest $20 and $25. But didn’t it work beautiful, Mr. Rockwall? I’m glad William A. Brady wasn’t on to that little outdoor vehicle mob scene. I wouldn’t want William to break his heart with jealousy. And never a rehearsal, either! The boys was on time to the fraction of a second. It was two hours before a snake could get below Greeley’s statue.’‘Thirteen hundred—there you are, Kelly,’ said Anthony, tearing off a cheque. ‘Your thousand, and the $300 you were out. You don’t despise money, do you, Kelly?’‘Me?’ said Kelly. ‘I can lick the man that invented poverty.’

Anthony called Kelly when he was at the door.‘You didn’t notice,’ said he, ‘anywhere in the tie-up, a kind of a fat boy without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow, did you?’‘Why, no,’ said Kelly, mystified. ‘I didn’t. If he was like you say, maybe the cops pinched him before I got there.’‘I thought the little rascal wouldn’t be on hand,’ chuckled Anthony.‘Good-bye, Kelly.’

Chapter 10 Springtime à la Carte

IT WAS A DAY IN MARCH.

Never, never begin a story this way when you write one. No opening could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely to consist of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For the following paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative, is too wildly extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face of the reader without preparation.

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare.

Think of a New York girl shedding tears on the menu card!

To account for this you will be allowed to guess that the lobsters were all out, or that she had sworn ice-cream off during Lent, or that she had ordered onions, or that she had just come from a Hackett matinée. And then,all these theories being wrong, you will please let the story proceed.

The gentleman who announced that the world was an oyster which he with his sword would open made a larger hit than he deserved. It is not difficult to open an oyster with a sword. But did you ever notice anyone try to open the terrestrial bivalve with a typewriter? Like to wait for a dozen raw opened that way?

Sarah had managed to pry apart the shells with her unhandy weapon far enough to nibble a wee bit at the cold and clammy world within. She knew no more shorthand than if she had been a graduate in stenography just let slip upon the world by a business college. So, not being able to stenog, she could not enter that bright galaxy of office talent. She was a free-lance typewriter and canvassed for odd jobs of copying.

The most brilliant and crowning feat of Sarah’s battle with the world was the deal she made with Schulenberg’s Home Restaurant. The restaurant was next door to the old red brick in which she hall-roomed. One evening after dining at Schulenberg’s 40-cent five-course table d’h?te(served as fast as you throw the five baseballs at the coloured gentleman’s head) Sarah took away with her the bill of fare. It was written in an almost unreadable script neither English nor German, and so arranged that if you were not careful you began with a toothpick and rice pudding and ended with soup and the day of the week.

The next day Sarah showed Schulenberg a neat card on which the menu was beautifully typewritten with the viands temptingly marshalled under their right and proper heads from ‘hors d’ceuvre’ to ‘not responsible for overcoats and umbrellas.’

Schulenberg became a naturalized citizen on the spot. Before Sarah left him she had him willingly committed to an agreement. She was to furnish typewritten bills of fare for the twenty-one tables in the restaurant—a new bill for each day’s dinner, and new ones for breakfast and lunch as often as changes occurred in the food or as neatness required.

In return for this Schulenberg was to send three meals per diem to Sarah’s hall-room by a waiter—an obsequious one if possible—and furnish her each afternoon with a pencil draft of what Fate had in store for Schulenberg’s customers on the morrow.

Mutual satisfaction resulted from the agreement. Schulenberg’s patrons now knew what the food they ate was called even if its nature sometimes puzzled them. And Sarah had food during a cold, dull winter, which was the main thing with her.

And then the almanac lied, and said that spring had come. Spring comes when it comes. The frozen snows of January still lay like adamant in the cross-town streets. The hand-organs still played ‘In the Good Old Summertime,’ with their December vivacity and expression. Men began to make thirty-day notes to buy Easter dresses. Janitors shut off steam. And when these things happen one may know that the city is still in the clutches of winter.

One afternoon Sarah shivered in her elegant hall-bedroom; ‘house heated; scrupulously clean; conveniences; seen to be appreciated.’ She had no work to do except Schulenberg’s menu cards. Sarah sat in her squeaky willow rocker, and looked out the window. The calendar on the wall kept crying to her: ‘springtime is here, Sarah—springtime is here, I tell you.Look at me, Sarah, my figures show it. You’ve got a neat figure yourself,Sarah—a—nice, springtime figure—why do you look out the window so sadly?’

Sarah’s room was at the back of the house. Looking out the window she could see the windowless rear brick wall of the box factory on the next street. But the wall was clearest crystal; and Sarah was looking down a grassy lane shaded with cherry trees and elms and bordered with raspberry bushes and Cherokee roses.

Spring’s real harbingers are too subtle for the eye and ear. Some must have the flowering crocus, the wood-starring dogwood, the voice of bluebird—even so gross a reminder as the farewell handshake of the retiring buckwheat and oyster before they can welcome the Lady in Green to their dull bosoms. But to old earth’s choicest kin there come straight, sweet messages from his newest bride, telling them they shall be no stepchildren unless they choose to be.

On the previous summer Sarah had gone into the country and loved a farmer.

(In writing your story never hark back thus. It is bad art, and cripples interest. Let it march, march.)

Sarah stayed two weeks at Sunnybrook Farm. There she learned to love old Farmer Franklin’s son, Walter. Farmers have been loved and wedded and turned out to grass in less time. But young Walter Franklin was a modern agriculturist. He had a telephone in his cow-house, and he could figure up exactly what effect next year’s Canada wheat crop would have on potatoes planted in the dark of the moon.

It was in this shaded and raspberried lane that Walter had wooed and won her. And together they had sat and woven a crown of dandelions for her hair. He had immoderately praised the effect of the yellow blossoms against her brown tresses; and she had left the chaplet there, and walked back to the house swinging her straw sailor in her hands.

They were to marry in the spring—at the very first signs of spring,Walter said. And Sarah came back to the city to pound her typewriter.

A knock at the door dispelled Sarah’s visions of that happy day. A waiter had brought the rough pencil draft of the Home Restaurant’s next day fare in old Schulenberg’s angular hand.

Sarah sat down at her typewriter and slipped a card between the rollers. She was a nimble worker. Generally in an hour and a half the twenty one menu cards were written and ready.

To-day there were more changes on the bill of fare than usual. The soups were lighter; pork was eliminated from the entrees, figuring only with Russian turnips among the roasts. The gracious spirit of spring pervaded the entire menu. Lamb, that lately capered on the greening hill-sides,was becoming exploited with the sauce that commemorated its gambols.The song of the oyster, though not silenced, was diminuendo con amore.The frying-pan seemed to be held, inactive, behind the beneficent bars of the broiler. The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.

Sarah’s fingers danced like midgets above a summer stream. Down through the courses she worked, giving each item its position according to its length with an accurate eye.

Just above the desserts came the list of vegetables. Carrots and peas,asparagus on toast, the perennial tomatoes and corn and succotash, lima beans, cabbage—and then—

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare. Tears from the depths of some divine despair rose in her heart and gathered to her eyes. Down went her head on the little typewriter stand; and the keyboard rattled a dry accompaniment to her moist sobs.

For she had received no letter from Walter in two weeks, and the next item on the bill of fare was dandelions—dandelions with some kind of egg—but bother the egg!—dandelions, with whose golden blooms Walter had crowned her his queen of love and future bride—dandelions, the harbingers of spring, her sorrow’s crown of sorrow—reminder of her happiest days.

Madam, I dare you to smile until you suffer this test: Let the Marlchal Niel roses that Percy brought you on the night you gave him your heart be served as a salad with French dressing before your eyes at a Schulenberg table d’hôte. Had Juliet so seen her love tokens dishonoured the sooner would she have sought the lethean herbs of the good apothecary.

But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron a message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little hardy courier of the fields with his rough, green coat and modest air. He is a true soldier of fortune, this dent-de-lion—this lion’s tooth, as the French chefs call him. Flowered, he will assist at love-making, wreathed in my lady’s nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed, he goes into the boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign mistress.

By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But,still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and heart in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came swiftly back to the rock-bound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter began to rattle and jump like a strike-breaker’s motor-car.

At six o’clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh, the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As this dark mass had been transformed from a bright and love-endorsed flower to be an ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted and perished. Love may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but Sarah could not bring herself to eat the dandelions that had graced, as ornaments, the first spiritual banquet of her heart’s true affection.

At 7.30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel; the man in the room above sought for A on his flute; the gas went a little lower; three coal wagons started to unload—the only sound of which the phonograph is jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated toward Mukden. By these signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to read. She got out The Cloister and the Hearth, the best non-selling book of the month, settled her feet on her trunk, and began to wander with Gerard.

The front-door bell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left Gerard and Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would, just as she did!

And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round easily the bear’s.

You have guessed it. She reached the top of the stairs just as her farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and garnered her, with nothing left for the gleaners.‘Why haven’t you written—oh, why?’ cried Sarah.‘New York is a pretty large town,’ said Walter Fanklin. I came in a week ago to your old address. I found that you went away on a Thursday.That consoled some; it eliminated the possible Friday bad luck. But it didn’t prevent my hunting for you with police and otherwise ever since!’‘I wrote!’ said Sarah vehemently.‘Never got it!’‘Then how did you find me?’

The young farmer smiled a springtime smile.‘I dropped into that Home Restaurant next door this evening,’ said he.‘I don’t care who knows it; I like a dish of some kind of greens at this time of the year. I ran my eye down that nice, typewritten bill of fare looking for something in that line. When I got below cabbage I turned my chair over and hollered for the proprietor. He told me where you lived.’‘I remember,’ sighed Sarah happily. ‘that was dandelions below cabbage.’‘I’d know that cranky capital W ’way above the line that your typewriter makes anywhere in the world,’ said Franklin.‘Why, there’s no W in dandelions,’ said Sarah, in surprise.

The young man drew the bill of fare from his pocket, and pointed to a line.

Sarah recognized the first card she had typewritten that afternoon.There was still the rayed splotch in the upper right-hand corner where a tear had fallen. But over the spot where one should have read the name of the meadow plant, the clinging memory of their golden blossoms had allowed her fingers to strike strange keys.

Between the red cabbage and the stuffed green peppers was the item:‘DEAREST WALTER, WITH HARD-BOILED EGG.’

Chapter 11 From the Cabby’s Seat

THE CABBY HAS HIS POINT OF VIEW. It is more single-minded, perhaps,than that of a follower of any other calling. From the high, swaying seat of his hansom he looks upon his fellowmen as nomadic particles, of no account except when possessed of migratory desires. He is Jehu, and you are goods in transit. Be you President or vagabond, to cabby you are only a fare. He takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles your vertebra; and sets you down.

When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with legal rates, you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you have left your pocket-book behind you, you are made to realize the mildness of Dante’s imagination.

It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby’s singleness of purpose and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom’s peculiar construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather. Helpless,ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap—you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land—and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.

Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents. You are a cargo at sea, and the ‘cherub that sits up aloft’ has Davy Jones’s street and number by heart.

One night there were sounds of revelry in the big brick tenementhouse next door but one to McGary’s Family Café. The sounds seemed to emanate from the apartments of the Walsh family. The sidewalk was obstructed by an assortment of interested neighbours, who opened a lane from time to time for a hurrying messenger bearing from McGary’s goods pertinent to festivity and diversion. The sidewalk contingent was engaged in comment and discussion from which it made no effort to eliminate the news that Norah Walsh was being married.

In the fullness of time there was an eruption of the merrymakers to the sidewalk. The uninvited guests enveloped and permeated them, and upon the night air rose joyous cries, congratulations laughter and unclassified noises born of McGary’s oblations to the hymeneal scene.

Close to the kerb stood Jerry O’Donovan’s cab. Night-hawk was Jerry called; but no more lustrous or cleaner hansom than his ever closed its doors upon point lace and November violets. And Jerry’s horse! I am within bounds when I tell you that he was stuffed with oats until one of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled—yes, smiled—to have seen him.

Among the shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of Jerry’s high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of millionaires and by contumacious fores; of his brass-buttoned green coat, admired in the vicinity of McGary’s. It was plain that Jerry had usurped the functions of his cab, and was carrying a ‘load’. Indeed, the figure may be extended and he be likened to a bread-wagon if we admit the testimony of a youthful spectator, who was heard to remark ‘Jerry has got a bun.’

From somewhere among the throng in the street or else out of the thin stream of pedestrians a young woman tripped and stood by the cab.The professional hawk’s eye of Jerry caught the movement. He made a lurch for the cab, overturning three or four onlookers and himself—no! he caught the cap of a water-plug and kept his feet. Like a sailor shinning up the ratlins during a squall, Jerry mounted to his professional seat. Once he was there McGary’s liquids were baffled. He seesawed on the mizzen-mast of his craft as safe as a steeplejack rigged to the flagpole of a skyscraper.‘Step in, lady,’ said Jerry, gathering his lines.

The young woman stepped into the cab; the doors shut with a bang;Jerry’s whip cracked in the air; the crowd in the gutter scattered, and the fine hansom dashed away’ cross-town.

When the oat-spry horse had hedged a little his first spurt of speed Jerry broke the lid of his cab and called down through the aperture in the voice of a cracked megaphone trying to please:‘Where, now, will ye be drivin’ to?’‘Anywhere you please,’ came up the answer, musical and contented.‘ ’Tis drivin’ for pleasure she is,’ thought Jerry. And then he suggested as a matter of course:‘Take a thrip around in the park, lady. ’Twill be ilegant cool and fine.’‘Just as you like,’ answered the fare pleasantly.

The cab headed for Fifth Avenue and sped up that perfect street. Jerry bounced and swayed in his seat. The potent fluids of McGary were disquieted and they sent new fumes to his head. He sang an ancient song of Killisnook and brandished his whip like a baton.

Inside the cab the fare sat up straight on the cushions, looking to right and left at the lights and houses. Even in the shadowed hansom her eyes shone like stars at twilight.

When they reached Fifty-ninth Street Jerry’s head was bobbing and his reins were slack. But his horse turned in through the park gate and began the old familiar, nocturnal round. And then the fare leaned back entranced,and breathed deep the clean, wholesome odours of grass and leaf and bloom. And the wise beast in the shafts, knowing his ground, struck into his by-the-hour gait and kept to the right of the road.

Habit also struggled successfully against Jerry’s increasing torpor. He raised the hatch of his storm-tossed vessel and made the inquiry that cabbies do make in the park.‘Like shtop at the Cas-sino, lady? Gezzer r’freshm’s, ’n lish’n the music. Ev’body shtops.’‘I think that would be nice,’ said the fare.

They reined up with a plunge at the Casino entrance. The cab doors flew open. The fare stepped directly upon the floor. At once she was caught in a web of ravishing music and dazzled by a panorama of lights and colours. Someone slipped a little square card into her hand on which was printed a number—34. She looked around and saw her cab twenty yards away already lining up in its place among the waiting mass of carriages,cabs and motor-cars. And then a man who seemed to be all shirt-front danced backward before her; and next she was seated at a little table by a railing over which climbed a Jessamine vine.

There seemed to be a wordless invitation to purchase; she consulted a collection of small coins in a thin purse, and received from them licence to order a glass of beer. There she sat, inhaling and absorbing it all—the newcoloured, new-shaped life in a fairy palace in an enchanted wood.

At fifty tables sat princes and queens clad in all the silks and gems of the world. And now and then one of them would look curiously at Jerry’s fare. They saw a plain figure dressed in a pink silk of the kind that is tempered by the word ‘foulard,’ and a plain face that wore a look of love of life that the queens envied.

Twice the long hands of the clocks went round. Royalties thinned from their alfresco thrones, and buzzed or clattered away in their vehicles of state. The music retired into cases of wood and bags of leather and baize.Waiters removed cloths pointedly near the plain figure sitting almost alone.

Jerry’s fare rose, and held out her numbered card simply:‘Is there anything coming on the ticket?’ she asked.

A waiter told her it was her cab check, and that she should give it to the man at the entrance. This man took it, and called the number. Only three hansoms stood in line. The driver of one of them went and routed out Jerry, asleep in his cab. He swore deeply, climbed to the captain’s bridge and steered his craft to the pier. His fare entered, and the cab whirled into the cool fastnesses of the park along the shortest homeward cuts.

At the gate a glimmer of reason in the form of sudden suspicion seized upon Jerry’s beclouded mind. One or two things occurred to him. He stopped his horse, raised the trap and dropped his phonographic voice, like a lead plummet, through the aperture:‘I want to see four dollars before goin’ any further on th’ thrip. Have ye got th’ dough?’‘Four dollars!’ laughed the fare softly, ‘dear me, no. I’ve only got a few pennies and a dime or two.’

Jerry shut down the trap and slashed his oatfed horse. The clatter of hoofs strangled but could not drown the sound of his profanity. He shouted choking and gurgling curses at the starry heavens; he cut viciously with his whip at passing vehicles; he scattered fierce and ever-changing oaths and imprecations along the streets, so that a late truck driver, crawling homeward, heard and was abashed. But he knew his recourse, and made for it at a gallop.

At the house with the green lights beside the steps he pulled up. He flung wide the cab doors and tumbled heavily to the ground.‘Come on, you,’ he said roughly.

His fare came forth with the Casino dreamy smile still on her plain face. Jerry took her by the arm and led her into the police station. A greymoustached sergeant looked keenly across the desk. He and the cabby were no strangers.‘Sargeant,’ began Jerry in his old raucous, martyred, thunderous tones of complaint. ‘I’ve got a fare here that—’

Jerry paused. He drew a knotted, red hand across his brow. The fog set up by McGary was beginning to clear away.‘A fare, sargeant,’ he continued, with a grin, ‘that I want to inthroduce to ye. It’s me wife that I married at ould man Walsh’s this avening. And a divil of a time we had, ‘tis thrue. Shake hands wid th’ sargeant, Norah, and we’ll be off to home.’

Before stepping into the cab Norah sighed profoundly.‘I’ve had such a nice time, Jerry,’ said she.

Chapter 12 An Unfinished Sroty

WE NO LONGER GROAN and heap ashes upon our heads when the flames of Tophet are mentioned. For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction. This is a pleasing hypothesis; but there lingers yet some of the old, goodly terror of orthodoxy.

There are but two subjects upon which one may discourse with a free imagination, and without the possibility of being controverted. You may talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say. Both Morpheus and the bird are incompetent witnesses; and your listener dare not attack your recital. The baseless fabric of a vision, then, shall furnish my theme—chosen with apologies and regrets instead of the more limited field of Pretty Polly’s small talk.

I had a dream that was so far removed from the higher criticism that it had to do with the ancient, respectable, and lamented bar-of-judgment theory.

Gabriel had played his trump; and those of us who could not follow suit were arraigned for examination. I noticed at one side a gathering of professional bondsmen in solemn black and collars that buttoned behind;but it seemed there was some trouble about their real estate titles; and they did not appear to be getting any of us out.

A fly cop—an angel policeman—flew over to me and took me by the left wing. Near at hand was a group of very prosperous-looking spirits arraigned for Judgment.‘Do you belong with that bunch?’ the policeman asked.‘Who are they?’ was my answer.‘Why,’ said he, ‘they are—’

But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should occupy.

Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging, or stuffed peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they keep in department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six dollars per week. The remainder was credited to her and debited to somebody else’s account in the ledger kept by G—Oh, primal energy, you say, Reverend Doctor—Well then, in the Ledger of Primal Energy.

During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars per week. It would be instructive to know how she lived on that amount. Don’t care? Very well; probably you are interested in larger amounts. Six dollars is a larger amount. I will tell you how she lived on six dollars per week.

One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat-pin within an eighth of an inch of her medulla oblongata, she said to her chum, Sadie—the girl that waits on you with her left side:‘Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy.’‘You never did!’ exclaimed Sadie admiringly. ‘Well, ain’t you the lucky one? Piggy’s an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places. He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You’ll have a swell time,Dulcie.’

Dulcie hurried off homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks showed the delicate pink of life’s—real life’s—approaching dawn. It was Friday; and she had fifty cents left of her last week’s wages.

The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The electric lights of Broadway were glowing—calling moths from miles, from leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and attend the singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces like those carved on cherry-stones by the old salts in sailors’ homes, turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them. Manhattan, the nightblooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead-white, heavy-odoured petals.

Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an imitation lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been spent otherwise—fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten cents for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her small store of savings; and five cents was to be squandered for liquorice drops—the kind that made your cheek look like the toothache, and last as long. The liquorice was an extravagance—almost a carouse—but what is life without pleasures?

Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a furnished room and a boarding-house. In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry.

Dulcie went up to her room—the third floor back in a West Side brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond is the hardest substance known. Their mistake. Landladies know of a compound beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it in the tips of gas-burners;and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in vain until one’s fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not remove it; therefore let us call it immovable.

So Dulcie lit the gas. In its one-fourth-candlepower glow we will observe the room.

Couch-bed, dresser, table, washstand, chair—of this much the landlady was guilty. The rest was Dulcie’s. On the dresser were her treasures—a gilt china vase presented to her by Sadie, a calendar issued by a pickle works,a book on the divination of dreams, some rice powder in a glass dish, and a cluster of artificial cherries tied with a pink ribbon.

Against the wrinkly mirror stood pictures of General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini.Against one wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O’Callahan in a Roman helmet. Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemgn-coloured child assaulting an inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie’s final judgment in art;but it had never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers of stolen copes; no critic had elevated his eyebrows at her infantile entomologist.

Piggy was to call for her at seven. While she swiftly makes ready, let us discreetly face the other way and gossip.

For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On weekdays her breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally on veal chops and pineapple fritters at ‘Billy’s’ restaurant, at a cost of twentyfive cents—and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York presents so many temptations for one to run into extravagance. She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening papers—show me a New Yorker going without his daily paper!—came to six cents; and two Sunday papers—one for the personal column and the other to read—were ten cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes, and—

I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie’s life some of those joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. ’Tis a weary thing to count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours.

Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving stigma was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of-three-letters lesson in the old blue spelling-book begins with Piggy’s biography. He was fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat, and the magnanimity of a cat. ... He wore expensive clothes; and was a connoisseur in starvation. He could look at a show-girl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than marsh-mallows and tea. He hung about the shopping districts, and prowled around in department stores with his invitations to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets at the end of a string look down upon him. He is a type; I can dwell upon him no longer; my pen is not the kind intended for him; I am no carpenter.

At ten minutes to seven Dulcie was ready. She looked at herself in the wrinkly mirror. The reflection was satisfactory. The dark blue dress, fitting without a wrinkle, the hat with its jaunty black feather, the but-slightlysoiled gloves—all representing self-denial, even of food itself- were vastly becoming.

Dulcie forgot everything else for a moment except that she was beautiful, and that life was about to lift a corner of its mysterious veil for her to observe its wonders. No gentleman had ever asked her out before. Now she was going for a brief moment into the glitter and exalted show.

The girls said that Piggy was a ‘spender.’ There would be a grand dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things to eat that strangely twisted the girls’ jaws when they tried to tell about them. No doubt she would be asked out again.

There was a blue pongee suit in a window that she knew—by saving twenty cents a week instead of ten, in—let’s see—Oh, it would run into years! But there was a second-hand store in Seventh Avenue where—

Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood there with a spurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas.‘A gentleman’s downstairs to see you,’ she said. ‘Name is Mr. Wiggins.’

By such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had to take him seriously.

Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; then she stopped still, and bit her underlip hard. While looking in her mirror she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a long slumber.She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad, beautiful, stern eyes—the only one there was to approve or condemn what she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful reproach on his handsome,melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on the dresser.

Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady.‘Tell him I can’t go,’ she said dully. ‘Tell him I’m sick, or something.Tell him I’m not going out.’

After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed, crushing her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener was her only friend. He was Dulcie’s ideal of a gallant knight. He looked as if he might have a secret sorrow, and his wonderful moustache was a dream, and she was a little afraid of that stern yet tender look in his eyes. She used to have little fancies that he would call at the house some time, and ask for her, with his sword clanking against his high boots. Once, when a boy was rattling a piece of chain against a lamp-post she had opened the window and looked out. But: there was no use. She knew that General Kitchener was away over in Japan leading his army against the savage Turks; and he would never step out of his gilt frame for her. Yet one look from him had vanquished Piggy that night. Yes, for that night.

When her cry was over Dulcie got up and took off her best dress, and put on her old blue kimono. She wanted no dinner. She sang two verses of‘Sammy.’ Then she became intensely interested in a little red speck on the side of her nose. And after that was attended to, she drew up a chair to the rickety table, and told her fortune with an old deck of cards.‘The horrid, impudent thing!’ she said aloud ‘And I never gave him a word or a look to make him think it!

At nine o’clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers and a little pot of raspberry jam out of her trunk and had a feast. She offered General Kitchener some jam on a cracker; but he only looked at her as the Sphinx would have looked at a butterfly—if there are butterflies in the desert.‘Don’t eat if you don’t want to,’ said Dulcie. ‘And don’t put on so many airs and scold so with your eyes. I wonder if you’d be so superior and snippy if you had to live on six dollars a week.’

It was not a good sign for Dulcie to be rude to General Kitchener. And then she turned Benvenuto Cellini face downward with a severe gesture.But that was not inexcusable; for she had always thought he was Henry VIII, and she did not approve of him.

At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the dresser,turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It’s an awful thing to go to bed with a good-night look at General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini.

This story really doesn’t get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later—some time when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the other way; and then—

As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and asked if I belonged with them.‘Who are they?’ I asked.‘Why,’ said he, ‘they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid ’em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?’‘Not on your immortality,’ said I. ‘I’m only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.’

Chapter 13 The Romance of a Busy Broker

PITCHER, CONFIDENTIAL CLERK in the office of Harvey Maxwell, broker,allowed a look of mild interest and surprise to visit his usually expressionless countenance when his employer briskly entered at half-past nine in company with his young lady stenographer. With a snappy ‘Good morning, Pitcher,’ Maxwell dashed at his desk as though he were intending to leap over it, and then plunged into the great heap of letters and telegrams waiting there for him.

The young lady had been Maxwell’s stenographer for a year. She was beautiful in a way that was decidedly unstenographic. She forwent the pomp of the alluring pompadour. She wore no chains, bracelets or lockets.She had not the air of being about to accept an invitation to luncheon. Her dress was grey and plain, but it fitted her figure with fidelity and discretion.In her neat black turban hat was the gold-green wing of a macaw. On this morning she was softly and shyly radiant. Her eyes were dreamily bright,her cheeks genuine peachblow, her expression a happy one, tinged with reminiscence.

Pitcher, still mildly curious, noticed a difference in her ways this morning. Instead of going straight into the adjoining room, where her desk was, she lingered, slightly irresolute, in the outer office. Once she moved over by Maxwell’s desk, near enough for him to be aware of her presence.

The machine sitting at that desk was no longer a man; it was a busy New York broker, moved by buzzing wheels and uncoiling springs.‘Well—what is it? Anything?’ asked Maxwell sharply. His opened mail lay like a bank of stage snow on his crowded desk. His keen grey eye,impersonal and brusque, flashed upon her half impatiently.‘Nothing,’ answered the stenographer, moving away with a little smile.‘Mr. Pitcher,’ she said to the confidential clerk, ‘did Mr. Maxwell say anything yesterday about engaging another stenographer?’‘He did,’ answered Pitcher. ‘He told me to get another one. I notified the agency yesterday afternoon to send over a few samples this morning.It’s 9.45 o’clock, and not a single picture hat or piece of pineapple chewing gum has showed up yet.’‘I will do the work as usual, then,’ said the young lady, ‘until someone comes to fill the place.’ And she went to her desk at once and hung the black turban hat with the gold-green macaw wing in its accustomed place.

He who has been denied the spectacle of a busy Manhattan broker during a rush of business is handicapped for the profession of anthropology.The poet sings of the ‘crowded hour of glorious life.’ The broker’s hour is not only crowded, but the minutes and seconds are hanging to all the straps and packing both front and rear platforms.

And this day was Harvey Maxwell’s busy day. The ticker began to reel out jerkily its fitful coils of tape, the desk telephone had a chronic attack of buzzing. Men began to throng into the office and call at him over the railing, jovially, sharply, viciously, excitedly. Messenger boys ran in and out with messages and telegrams. The clerks in the office jumped about like sailors during a storm. Even Pitcher’s face relaxed into something resembling animation.

On the Exchange there were hurricanes and landslides and snowstorms and glaciers and volcanoes, and those elemental disturbances were reproduced in miniature in the broker’s offices. Maxwell shoved his chair against the wall and transacted business after the manner of a toe-dancer.He jumped from ticker to ’phone, from desk to door with the trained agility of a harlequin.

In the midst of this growing and important stress the broker became suddenly aware of a high-rolled fringe of golden hair under a nodding canopy of velvet and ostrich tips, an imitation sealskin sacque and a string of beads as large as hickory nuts, ending near the floor with a silver heart.There was a self-possessed young lady connected with these accessories;and Pitcher was there to construe her.‘Lady from the Stenographer’s Agency to see about the position,’ said Pitcher.

Maxwell turned half around, with his hands full of papers and ticker tape.‘What position?’ he asked, with a frown.‘Position of stenographer,’ said Pitcher. ‘You told me yesterday to call them up and have one sent over this morning.‘You are losing your mind, Pitcher,’ said Maxwell. ‘Why should I have given you any such instructions? Miss Leslie has given perfect satisfaction during the year she has been here. The place is hers as long as she chooses to retain it. There’s no place open here, madam. Countermand that order with the agency, Pitcher, and don’t bring any more of’em in here.’

The silver heart left the office, swinging and banging itself independently against the office furniture as it indignantly departed. Pitcher seized a moment to remark to the bookkeeper that the ‘old man’ seemed to get more absent-minded and forgetful every day of the world.

The rush and pace of business grew fiercer and faster. On the floor they were pounding half a dozen stocks in which Maxwell’s customers were heavy investors. Orders to buy and sell were coming and going as swift as the flight of swallows. Some of his own holdings were imperilled,and the man was working like some high-geared, delicate, strong machine—strung to full tension, going at full speed, accurate, never hesitating, with the proper word and decision and act ready and prompt as clockwork.Stocks and bonds, loans and mortgages, margins and securities—here was a world of finance, and there was no room in it for the human world or the world of nature.

When the luncheon hour drew near there came a slight lull in the uproar.

Maxwell stood by his desk with his hands full of telegrams and memoranda, with a fountain pen over his right ear and his hair hanging in disorderly strings over his forehead. His window was open, for the beloved janitress Spring had turned on a little warmth through the waking registers of the earth.

And through the window came a wandering—perhaps a lost—odour—a delicate, sweet odour of lilac that fixed the broker for a moment immovable.For this odour belonged to Miss Leslie; it was her own, and hers only.

The odour brought her vividly, almost tangibly before him. The world of finance dwindled suddenly to a speck. And she was in the next room—The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemedovercome with amazement; then tears flowed from herwondering eyes; and then she smiled sunnily through them,and one of her arms slid tenderly about the broker’s neck.“Don’t you rember, Harvey? We were married last evening ateight o’clock in the Little Church Around the Corner.”

twenty steps away.‘By George, I’ll do it now,’ said Maxwell, half aloud. ‘I’ll ask her now.I wonder I didn’t do it long ago.’

He dashed into the inner office with the haste of a short trying to cover.He charged upon the desk of the stenographer.

She looked up at him with a smile. A soft pink crept over her cheek,and her eyes were kind and frank. Maxwell leaned one elbow on her desk.He still clutched fluttering papers with both hands and the pen was above his ear.‘Miss Leslie,’ he began hurriedly, ‘I have but a moment to spare. I want to say something in that moment. Will you be my wife? I haven’t had rime to make love to you in the ordinary way, but I really do love you.Talk quick, please—those fellows are clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific.’‘Oh, what are you talking about?’ exclaimed the young lady. She rose to her feet and gazed upon him, round-eyed.‘Don’t you understand?’ said Maxwell restively. ‘I want you to marry me. I love you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and I snatched a minute when things had slackened up a bit. They’re calling me for the ‘phone now.Tell ‘em to wait a minute, Pitcher. Won’t you, Miss Leslie?’

The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed overcome with amazement; then tears flowed from her wondering eyes; and then she smiled sunnily through them, and one of her arms slid tenderly about the broker’s neck.‘I know now,’ she said softly. ‘It’s this old business that has driven everything else out of your head for the time. I was frightened at first.Don’t you remember, Harvey? We were married last evening at eight o’clock in the Little Church Around the Corner.”

Chapter 14 The Furnished Room

RESTLESS, SHIFTING, FUGACIOUS as time itself, is a certain vast bulk of the population of the redbrick district of the lower West Side. Homeless,they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients for ever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind.They sing ‘Home Sweet Home’ in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.

Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellerg,should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant ghosts.

One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean handbaggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hat-band and forehead.The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths.

To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.

He asked if there was a room to let.‘Come in,’ said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. ‘I have the third floor back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?’

The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.‘This is the room,’ said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. ‘It’s a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney-kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls—you may have heard of her—Oh, that was just the stage names—right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long.’‘Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?’ asked the young man.‘They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes.’

He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired,he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money.The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.‘A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.’‘No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call that one to mind.’

No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers,agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music-halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.

The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudohospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a footwide cheap pier glass between die two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.

The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.

A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered, rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gaypapered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.

One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny finger-prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name‘Marie.’ It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury—perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.

The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod,through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby,and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.

Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong,sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud, ‘What, dear?’ as if he had been called,and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him about. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?‘She has been in this room,’ he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette,the odour that she had loved and made her own—whence came it?

The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet,indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a pawnbroker’s card,two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman’s black satin hair-bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is femininity’s demure, impersonal,common ornament, and tells no tales.

And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognizant of the call. Once again he answered loudly,‘Yes, dear!’ and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.

He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes.These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace.

And then he thought of the housekeeper.

He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.‘Will you tell me, madam,’ he besought her, ‘who occupied the room I have before I came?’‘Yes, sir. I can tell you again. Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said.Miss B’retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was.My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung,framed, on a nail over—’‘What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?’‘Why, black-haired, sir, short and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago Tuesday.’‘And before they occupied it?’‘Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr.Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember.’

He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.

The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow,singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.

It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where housekeepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.‘I rented out my third floor back, this evening,’ said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. ‘A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago.‘Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am?’ said Mrs. McCool, with intense admiration. ‘You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?’ she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.‘Rooms,’ said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, ‘are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.’‘ ’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ‘tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’ in the bed of it.’‘As you say, we has our living to be making,’ remarked Mrs. Purdy.‘Yis, ma’am; ‘tis true. ‘Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin’ herself wid the gas a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am.’‘She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,’ said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but critical, ‘but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.’

Chapter 15 The Trimmed Lamp

OF COURSE THERE ARE TWO SIDES to the question. Let us look at the other.We often hear ‘shop-girls’ spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as ‘marriage-girls.’

Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around. Nancy was nineteen; Lou was twenty. Both were pretty, active, country girls who had no ambition to go on the stage.

The little cherub that sits up aloft guided them to a cheap and respectable boarding-house. Both found positions and became wage-earners. They remained chums. It is at the end of six months that I would beg you to step forward and be introduced to them. Meddlesome Reader: My Lady friends,Miss Nancy and Miss Lou. While you are shaking hands please take notice—cautiously—of their attire. Yes, cautiously; for they are as quick to resent a stare as a lady in a box at the horse show is.

Lou is a piece-work ironer in a hand laundry. She is clothed in a badlyfitting purple dress, and her hat plume is four inches too long; but her ermine muff and scarf cost $25, and its fellow beasts will be ticketed in the windows at $7.98 before the season is over. Her cheeks are pink, and her light blue eyes bright. Contentment radiates from her.

Nancy you would call a shop-girl—because you have the habit. There is no type; but a perverse generation is always seeking a type; so this is what the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompadour, and the exaggerated straight-front. Her skirt is shoddy, but has the correct flare. No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were Persian lamb! On her face and in her eyes, remorseless type-seeker, is the typical shop-girl expression. It is a look of silent but contemptuous revolt against cheated womanhood; of sad prophecy of the vengeance to come. When she laughs her loudest the look is still there. The same look can be seen in the eyes of Russian peasants;and those of us left will see it some day on Gabriel’s face when he comes to blow us up. It is a look that should wither and abash man; but he has been known to smirk at it and offer flowers—with a string tied to them.

Now lift your hat and come away, while you receive Lou’s cheery ‘See you again,’ and the sardonic, sweet smile of Nancy that seems, somehow,to miss you and go fluttering like a white moth up over the house-tops to the stars.

The two waited on the corner for Dan. Dan was Lou’s steady company. Faithful? Well, he was on hand when Mary would have had to hire a dozen subpoena servers to find her lamb.‘Ain’t you cold, Nance?’ said Lou. ‘Say, what a chump you are for working in that old store for $8 a week! I made $18.50 last week. Of course ironing ain’t as swell work as selling lace behind a counter, but it pays. None of us ironers make less than $10. And I don’t know that it’s any less respectful work, either.’‘You can have it,’ said Nancy, with uplifted nose. ‘I’ll take my eight a week and hall-bedroom. I like to be among nice things and swell people.And look what a chance I’ve got! Why, one of our glove girls married a Pittsburg—steel maker, or blacksmith or something—the other day worth a million dollars. I’ll catch a swell myself some time. I ain’t bragging on my looks or anything; but I’ll take my chances where there’s big prizes offered. What show would a girl have in a laundry?’‘Why, that’s where I met Dan,’ said Lou triumphantly. ‘He came in for his Sunday shirt and collars and saw me at the first board ironing. We all try to get to work at the first board. Ella Maginnis was sick that day, and I had her place. He said he noticed my arms first, how round and white they was. I had my sleeves rolled up. Some nice fellows come into laundries.You can tell ’em by their bringing their clothes in suit-cases, and turning in the door sharp and sudden.’‘How can you wear a waist like that, Lou?’ said Nancy, gazing down at the offending article with sweet scorn in her heavy-lidded eyes. ‘It shows fierce taste.’‘This waist?’ cried Lou, with wide-eyed indignation. ‘Why, I paid $16for this waist. It’s worth twenty-five. A woman left it to be laundered, and never called for it. The boss sold it to me. It’s got yards and yards of hand embroidery on it. Better talk about that ugly, plain thing you’ve got on.’‘This ugly, plain thing,’ said Nancy calmly, ‘was copied from one that Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher was wearing. The girls say her bill in the store last year was $12,000. I made mine myself. It cost me $1.50. Ten feet away you couldn’t tell it from hers.’‘Oh, well,’ said Lou good-naturedly, ‘if you want to starve and put on airs, go ahead. But I’ll take my job and good wages; and after hours give me something as fancy and attractive to wear as I am able to buy.’

But just then Dan came—a serious young man with a ready-made necktie, who had escaped the city’s brand of frivolity—an electrician earning $30 per week who looked upon Lou with the sad eyes of Romeo, and thought her embroidered waist a web in which any fly should delight to be caught.‘My friend, Mr. Owens—shake hands with Miss Danforth,’ said Lou.‘I’m mighty glad to know you, Miss Danforth,’ said Dan, with outstretched hand. ‘I’ve heard Lou speak of you so often.’‘Thanks,’ said Nancy, touching his fingers with the tips of her cool ones, ‘I’ve heard her mention you—a few times.’

Lou giggled.‘Did you get that handshake from Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher, Nance?’she asked.‘If I did, you can feel safe in copying it,’ said Nancy.‘Oh, I couldn’t use it at all. It’s too stylish for me. It’s intended to set off diamond rings, that high shake is. Wait till I get a few and then I’ll try it.’‘Learn it first,’ said Nancy wisely, ‘and you’ll be more likely to get the rings.’‘Now, to settle this argument, said Dan with his ready, cheerful smile,‘let me make a proposition. As I can’t take both of you up to Tiffany’s and do the right thing, what do you say to a little vaudeville? I’ve got the tickets.How about looking at stage diamonds since we can’t shake hands with the real sparklers?’

The faithful squire took his place close to the kerb; Lou next, a little peacocky in her bright and pretty clothes; Nancy on the inside, slender, and soberly clothed as the sparrow, but with the true Van Alstyne Fisher walk—thus they set out for their evening’s moderate diversion.

I do not suppose that many look upon a great department store as an educational institution. But the one in which Nancy worked was something like that to her. She was surrounded by beautiful things that breathed of taste and refinement. If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another’s.

The people she served were mostly women whose dress, manners, and position in the social world were quoted as criterions. From them Nancy began to take toll—the best from each according to her view.

From one she would copy and practise a gesture, from another an eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others, a manner of walking, of carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing ‘inferiors in station.’From her best beloved model, Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher, she made requisition for that excellent thing, a soft, low voice as clear as silver and as perfect in articulation as the notes of a thrush. Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it. As good habits are said to be better than good principles, so, perhaps, good manners are better than good habits. The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a straight-back chair and repeat the words ‘prisms and pilgrims’forty times the devil will flee from you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alstyne Fisher tones she felt the thrill of noblesse oblige to her very bones.

There was another source of learning in the great departmental school.Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch and jingle their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently frivolous conversation, do not think that they are there for the purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting may lack the dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it has all the importance of the occasion on which Eve and her first daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his proper place in the household. It is a Woman’s Conference for Common Defence and Exchange of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse upon and against the World, which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience who Persists in Throwing Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most helpless of the young of any animal—with the fawn’s grace but without its fleetness; with the bird’s beauty but without its power of flight; with the honeybee’s burden of sweetness but without its—Oh, let’s drop that simile—some of us may have been stung.

During this council of war they pass weapons one to another, and exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the tactics of life.‘I says to ’im,’ says Sadie, ‘ain’t you the fresh thing! Who do you suppose I am, to be addressing such a remark to me? And what do you think he says back to me?’

The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red, and yellow bob together; the answer is given; and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be used by each thereafter in passages-at-arms with the common enemy, man.

Thus Nancy learned the art of defence; and to women successful defence means victory.

The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other college could have fitted her as well for her life’s ambition—the drawing of a matrimonial prize.

Her station in the store was a favoured one. The music-room was near enough for her to hear and become familiar with the works of the best composers—at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying to set a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating influence of artwares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments that are almost culture to women.

The other girls soon became aware of Nancy’s ambition. ‘Here comes your millionaire, Nance,’ they would call to her whenever any man who looked the role approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men, who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to stroll over to the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric squares. Nancy’s imitation high-bred air and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted.Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may have been millionaires; others were certainly not more than their sedulous apes. Nancy learned to discriminate. There was a window at the end of the handkerchief counter; and she could see the rows of vehicles waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She looked, and perceived that automobiles differ as well as do their owners.

Once a fascinating gentleman bought four dozen handkerchiefs, and wooed her across the counter with a King Cophetua air. When he had gone one of the girls said:‘What’s wrong, Nance, that you didn’t warm up to that fellow? He looks the swell article, all right, to me.’‘Him?’ said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van Alstyne Fisher smile; ‘not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H.P.machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he bought—silk! And he’s got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please.’

Two of the most ‘refined’ women in the store—a forelady and a cashier—had a few ‘swell gentlemen friends’ with whom they now and then dined. Once they included Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular café whose tables are engaged for New Year’s Eve a year in advance. There were two ‘gentlemen friends’—one without any hair on his head—high living ungrew it; and we can prove it—the other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing ways—he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellences in Nancy. His taste ran to show-girls; and here was one that added the voice and manner of his high social world to the franker charms of her own caste. So, on the following day, he appeared in the store and made her a serious proposal of marriage over a box of hemstitched, grass-bleached Irish linens. Nancy declined. A brown pompadour ten feet away had been using her eyes and ears. When the rejected suitor had gone she heaped carboys of upbraidings and horror upon Nancy’s head.‘What a terrible little fool you are! That fellow’s a millionaire—he’s a nephew of old Van Skittles himself. And he was talking on the level, too.Have you gone crazy, Nance?’‘Have I?’ said Nancy. ‘I didn’t take him, did I? He isn’t a millionaire so hard that you could notice it, anyhow. His family only allows him $20,000a year to spend. The bald-headed fellow was guying him about it the other night at supper.’

The brown pompadour came nearer and narrowed her eyes.‘Say, what do you want?’ she inquired, in a voice hoarse for lack of chewing-gum. ‘Ain’t that enough for you? Do you want to be a Mormon,and marry Rockefeller and Gladstone Dowie and the King of Spain and the whole bunch? Ain’t $20,000 a year good enough for you?’

Nancy flushed a little under the level gaze of the black, shallow eyes.‘It wasn’t altogether the money, Carrie,’ she explained. ‘His friend caught him in a rank lie the other night at dinner. It was about some girl he said he hadn’t been to the theatre with. Well, I can’t stand a liar. Put everything together—I don’t like him; and that settles it. When I sell out it’s not going to be on any bargain day. I’ve got to have something that sits up in a chair like a man, anyhow. Yes, I’m looking out for a catch; but it’s got to be able to do something more than make a noise like a toy bank.’‘The physiopathic ward for yours!’ said the brown pompadour, walking away.

The high ideas, if not ideals—Nancy continued to cultivate on $8 per week. She bivouacked on the trail of the great unknown ‘catch,’ eating her dry bread and tightening her belt day by day. On her face was the faint,soldierly, sweet, grim smile of the preordained man-hunter. The store was her forest; and many times she raised her rifle at game that seemed broadantlered and big; but always some deep, unerring instinct—perhaps of the huntress, perhaps of the woman—made her hold her fire and take up the trail again.

Lou flourished in the laundry. Out of her $18.50 per week she paid $6for her room and board. The rest went mainly for clothes. Her opportunities for bettering her taste and manners were few compared with Nancy’s.In the steaming laundry there was nothing but work, work and her thoughts of the evening pleasures to come. Many costly and showy fabrics passed under her iron; and it may be that her growing fondness for dress was thus transmitted to her through the conducting metal.

When the day’s work was over Dan awaited her outside, her faithful shadow in whatever light she stood.

Sometimes he cast an honest and troubled glance at Lou’s clothes that increased in conspicuity rather than in style; but this was no disloyalty; he deprecated the attention they called to her in the streets.

And Lou was no less faithful to her chum. There was a law that Nancy should go with them on whatsoever outings they might take. Dan bore the extra burden heartily and in good cheer. It might be said that Lou furnished the colour, Nancy the tone, and Dan the weight of the distraction-seeking trio. The escort, in his neat but obviously ready-made suit, his ready-made tie and unfailing, genial, ready-made wit never startled or clashed. He was of that good kind that you are likely to forget while they are present, but remember distinctly after they are gone.

To Nancy’s superior taste the flavour of these ready-made pleasures was sometimes a little bitter: but she was young! and youth is a gourmand,when it cannot be a gourmet.‘Dan is always wanting me to marry him right away,’ Lou told her once. ‘But why should I? I’m independent. I can do as I please with the money I earn; and he never would agree for me to keep on working afterward. And say, Nance, what do you want to stick to that old store for, and half dress yourself? I could get you a place in the laundry right now if you’d come. It seems to me that you could afford to be a little less stuck-up if you could make a good deal more money.’‘I don’t think I’m stuck-up, Lou,’ said Nancy, ‘but I’d rather live on half rations and stay where I am. I suppose I’ve got the habit. It’s the chance that I want. I don’t expect to be always behind a counter. I’m learning something new every day. I’m right up against refined and rich people all the time—even if I do only wait on them; and I’m not missing any pointers that I see passing around.’‘Caught your millionaire yet?’ asked Lou, with her teasing laugh.‘I haven’t selected one yet,’ answered Nancy. ‘I’ve been looking them over.’‘Goodness! the idea of picking over ’em! Don’t you ever let one get by you, Nance—even if he’s a few dollars shy. But of course you’re joking—millionaires don’t think about working girls like us.’‘It might be better for them if they did,’ said Nancy, with cool wisdom.‘Some of us could teach them how to take care of their money.’‘If one was to speak to me,’ laughed Lou, ‘I know I’d have a duck-fit.’‘That’s because you don’t know any. The only difference between swells and other people is you have to watch ’em closer. Don’t you think that red silk lining is just a little bit too bright for that coat, Lou?’

Lou looked at the plain, dull olive jacket of her friend.‘Well, no I don’t—but it may seem so beside that faded-looking thing you’ve got on.’‘This jacket,’ said Nancy complacently, ‘has exactly the cut and fit of one that Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher was wearing the other day. The material cost me $3.98. I suppose hers cost about $100 more.’‘Oh, well,’ said Lou lightly, ‘it don’t strike me as millionaire bait.Shouldn’t wonder if I catch one before you do, anyway.’

Truly it would have taken a philosopher to decide upon the values of the theories held by the two friends. Lou, lacking that certain pride and fastidiousness that keeps stores and desks filled with girls working for the barest living, thumped away gaily with her iron in the noisy and stifling laundry. Her wages supported her even beyond the point of comfort; so that her dress profited until sometimes she cast a sidelong glance of impatience at the neat but inelegant apparel of Dan—Dan the constant, the immutable,the undeviating.

As for Nancy, her case was one of tens of thousands. Silk and jewels and laces and ornaments and the perfume and music of the fine world of good-breeding and taste—these were made for woman; they are her equitable portion. Let her keep near them if they are a part of life to her, and if she will. She is no traitor to herself, as Esau was; for she keeps her birthright, and the pottage she earns is often very scant.

In this atmosphere Nancy belonged, and she throve in it and ate her frugal meals and schemed over her cheap dresses with a determined and contented mind. She already knew woman; and she was studying man,the animal, both as to his habits and eligibility. Some day she would bring down the game that she wanted; but she promised herself it would be what seemed to her the biggest and the best, and nothing smaller.

Thus she kept her lamp trimmed and burning to receive the bridegroom when he should come.

But, another lesson she learned, perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of values began to shift and change. Sometimes the dollar-mark grew blurred in her mind’s eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as ‘truth’ and ‘honour’ and now and then just ‘kindness.’ Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill trickles, babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear of Nimrod himself grows blunt.

So Nancy wondered sometimes if Persian lamb was always quoted at its market value by the hearts that it covered.

One Thursday evening Nancy left the store and turned across Sixth Avenue, westward to the laundry. She was expected to go with Lou and Dan to a musical comedy.

Dan was just coming out of the laundry when she arrived. There was a queer, strained look on his face.‘I thought I would drop around to see if they had heard from her,’ he said.‘Heard from who?’ asked Nancy. ‘Isn’t Lou there?’‘I thought you knew,’ said Dan. ‘She hasn’t been there or at the house where she lived since Monday. She moved all her things there. She told one of the girls in the laundry she might be going to Europe.’‘Hasn’t anybody seen her anywhere?’ asked Nancy.

Dan looked at her with his jaws set grimly and a steely gleam in his steady grey eyes.‘They told me in the laundry,’ he said harshly, ‘that they saw her pass yesterday—in an automobile. With one of the millionaires, I suppose, that you and Lou were for ever busying your brains about.’

For the first time Nancy quailed before a man. She laid her hand, that trembled slightly, on Dan’s sleeve.‘You’ve no right to say such a thing to me, Dan—as if I had anything to do with it!’‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ said Dan, softening. He fumbled in his vest pocket.‘I’ve got the tickets for the show to-night,’ he said, with a gallant show of lightness. ‘If you—’

Nancy admired pluck whenever she saw it.‘I’ll go with you, Dan,’ she said.

Three months went by before Nancy saw Lou again.

At the twilight one evening the shop-girl was hurrying home along the border of a little quiet park. She heard her name called, and wheeled about in time to catch Lou rushing into her arms.

After the first embrace they drew their heads back as serpents do,ready to attack or to charm, with a thousand questions trembling on their swift tongues. And then Nancy noticed that prosperity had descended upon Lou, manifesting itself in costly furs, flashing gems, and creations of the tailor’s art.‘You little fool!” cried Lou, loudly and affectionately. ‘I see you are still working in that store, and as shabby as ever. And how about that big catch you were going to make—nothing doing yet, I suppose?

And then Lou looked, and saw that something better than prosperity had descended upon Nancy—something that shone brighter than gems in her eyes and redder than a rose in her cheeks, and that danced like electricity anxious to be loosed from the tip of her tongue.‘Yes, I’m still in the store,’ said Nancy, ‘but I’m going to leave it next week. I’ve made my catch—the biggest catch in the world. You won’t mind now, Lou, will you?—I’m going to be married to Dan—to Dan!—he’s my Dan now—why, Lou!’

Around the corner of the park strolled one of those new-crop, smoothfaced young policemen that are making the force more endurable—at least to the eye. He saw a woman with an expensive fur coat and diamondringed hands crouching down against the iron fence of the park, sobbing turbulently, while a slender, plainly dressed working girl leaned close, trying to console her. But the Gibsonian cop, being of the new order, passed on, pretending not to notice, for he was wise enough to know that these matters are beyond help, so far as the power he represents is concerned,though he rap the pavement with his night-stick till the sound goes up to the farthermost stars.

Chapter 16 The Pendulum

A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out and another flock scrambled aboard. Ding-ding! The cattle cars of the Manhattan Elevated rattled away,and John Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with the released flock.

John walked slowly toward his flat. Slowly, because in the lexicon of his daily life there was no such word as ‘perhaps.’ There are no surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a flat. As he walked John Perkins prophesied to himself with gloomy and downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusions of the monotonous day.

Katy would meet him at the door with a kiss flavoured with cold cream and butterscotch. He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized lounge and read, in the evening paper, of Russians and Japs slaughtered by the deadly linotype. For dinner there would be pot roast; a salad flavoured with a dressing warranted not to crack or injure the leather, stewed rhubarb and the bottle of strawberry marmalade blushing at the certificate of chemical purity on its label. After dinner Katy would show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the iceman had cut for her off the end of his four-in-hand. At half-past seven they would spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering that fell when the fat man in the flat overhead began to take his physical culture exercises. Exactly at eight Hickey & Mooney, of the vaudeville team (unbooked) in the flat across the hall would yield to the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs under the delusion that Ham-merstein was pursuing them with a five-hundred-dollar-a-week contract. Then the gent at the window across the air-shaft would get out his flute; the nightly gas leak would steal forth to frolic in the highways; the dumb-waiter would slip off its trolley;the janitor would drive Mrs. Zanowitski’s five children once more across the Yalu, the lady with the champagne shoes and the Skye terrier would trip downstairs and paste her Thursday name over her bell and letter-box—and the evening routine of the Frogmore flats would be under way.

John perkins knew these things would happen. And he knew that at a quarter-past eight he would summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and that his wife would deliver this speech in a querulous tone:‘Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?‘Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,’ he would answer, ‘and play a game or two of pool with the fellows.’

Of late such had been John Perkins’ habit. At ten or eleven he would return. Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes waiting up; ready to melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the wroughtsteel chains of matrimony. For these things Cupid will have to answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the Frogmore flats.

To-night John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the commonplace when he reached his door. No Katy was there with her affectionate,confectionate kiss. The three rooms seemed in portentous disorder. All about lay her things in confusion. Shoes in the middle of the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder-box, jumbled together on dresser and chairs—this was not Katy’s way. With a sinking heart John saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation must have possessed her, for she always carefully placed these combings in the little blue base on the mantel, to be some day formed into the coveted feminine ‘rat.’

Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper.John seized it. It was a note from his wife running thus:DEAR JOHN,—‘I just had a telegram saying mother is very sick. I am going to take the 4.30 train. Brother Sam is going to meet me at the depot there. There is cold mutton in the ice-box. I hope it isn’t her quinsy again. Pay the milkman 60 cents. She had it bad last spring. Don’t forget to write to the company about the gas meter, and your good socks are in the top drawer. I will write to-morrow.‘Hastily,‘KATY.’

Never during their two years of matrimony had he and Katy been separated for a night. John read the note over and over in a dumbfounded way.Here was a break in a routine that had never varied, and it left him dazed.

There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless, the red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting the meals.Her week-day clothes had been tossed here and there in her haste. A little paper bag of her favourite butter-scotch lay with its string yet unwound.A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping rectangularly where a railroad timetable had been clipped from it. Everything in the room spoke of a loss,of an essence gone, of its soul and life departed. John Perkins stood among the dead remains with a queer feeling of desolation in his heart.

He began to set the rooms tidy as well as he could. When he touched her clothes a thrill of something like terror went through him. He had never thought what existence would be without Katy. She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed—necessary but scarcely noticed. Now, without warning, she was gone, vanished, as completely absent as if she had never existed. Of course it would be only for a few days, or at most a week or two, but it seemed to him as if the very hand of death had pointed a finger at his secure and uneventful home.

John dragged the cold mutton from the ice-box, made coffee and sat down to a lonely meal face to face with the strawberry marmalade’s shameless certificate of purity. Bright among withdrawn blessings now appeared to him the ghosts of pot roast and the salad with tan polish dressing.His home was dismantled. A quinsied mother-in-law had knocked his lares and penates sky-high. After his solitary meal John sat at a front window.

He did not care to smoke. Outside the city roared to him to come join in its dance of folly and pleasure. The night was his. He might go forth unquestioned and thrum the strings of jollity as free as any gay bachelor there. He might carouse and wander and have his fling until dawn if he liked; and there would be no wrathful Katy waiting for him, bearing the chalice that held the dregs of his joy. He might play pool at McCloskey’s with his roistering friends until Aurora dimmed the electric bulbs if he chose. The hymeneal strings that had curbed him always when the Frogmore flats had palled upon him were loosened. Katy was gone.

John Perkins was not accustomed to analysing his emotions. But as he sat in his Katy-bereft 10 x 12 parlour he hit unerringly upon the keynote of his discomfort. He knew now that Katy was necessary to his happiness.His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her presence. Has it not been dinned into us by proverb and sermon and fable that we never prize the music till the sweet-voiced bird has flown—or in other no less florid and true utterances?‘I’m a double-dyed dub,’ mused John Perkins, ‘the way I’ve been treating Katy. Off every night playing pool and bumming with the boys instead of staying home with her. The poor girl here all alone with nothing to amuse her, and me acting that way! John Perkins, you’re the worst kind of a shine. I’m going to make it up for the little girl. I’ll take her out and let her see some amusement. And I’ll cut out the McCloskey gang right from this minute.’

Yes, there was the city roaring outside for John Perkins to come dance in the train of Momus. And at McCloskey’s the boys were knocking the balls idly into the pockets against the hour for the nightly game. But no primrose way nor clicking cue could woo the remorseful soul of Perkins,the bereft. The thing that was his, lightly held and half scorned, had been taken away from him, and he wanted it. Backward to a certain man named Adam, whom the cherubim bounced from the orchard, could Perkins, the remorseful, trace his descent.

Near the right hand of John Perkins stood a chair. On the back of it stood Katy’s blue shirtwaist. It still retained something of her contour.Midway of the sleeves were fine, individual wrinkles made by the movements of her arms in working for his comfort and pleasure. A delicate but impelling odour of bluebells came from it. John took it and looked long and soberly at the unresponsive grenadine. Katy had never been unresponsive. Tears—yes, tears—came into John Perkins’ eyes. When she came back things would be different. He would make up for all his neglect. What was life without her?

The door opened. Katy walked in carrying a little hand satchel. John stared at her stupidly.‘My! I’m glad to get back,’ said Katy. ‘Ma wasn’t sick to amount to anything. Sam was at the depot, and said she just had a little spell, and got all right soon after they telegraphed. So I took the next train back. I’m just dying for a cup of coffee.”

Nobody heard the click and the rattle of the cogwheels as the thirdfloor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and the wheels revolved in their old orbits.

John Perkins looked at the clock. It was 8.15. He reached for his hat and walked to the door.‘Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?’ asked Katy, in a querulous tone.‘Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’ s,’ said John, ‘and play a game or two of pool with the fellows.’

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