Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic
When I looked at them they were quietly sitting at the table; but her
face was pale, his flushed. Pretty soon the waiter came and served
champagne. I felt sure that she had never seen any before.
"How funny it looks," said she, "with the bubbles coming up in the
middle like a little fountain; and how pretty! Why, the stem is hollow,
isn't it?"
He laughed and made some foolish remark about love bubbling up in his
heart. When he set his glass down, I could see that his hands were
trembling as with palsy,--so much so that it was tipped over and broken.
"I'll fill another," said he. "Aren't you sorry you broke it?"
"I?" she queried. "You're not going to lay that to me, are you?"
"You're the only one to blame!" he replied. "You must hold it till it's
steady. I'll hold your glass with the other. Why, you don't take any at
all! Don't you like it, dear?"
She shrank back, looked toward the door, and then took the hand in both
of hers, holding it close to her side, and drank the wine like a child
taking medicine. His arm, his hand still holding the glass, slipped
about her waist, but she turned swiftly and silently freed herself and
sat down by the chair in which he had meant that both should sit,
holding his hands. Then in a moment I saw her sitting on the other side
of the table, and he was filling the glasses again. The guests had all
departed. The well-disciplined waiters had effaced themselves. Only we
three were there. I wondered if I ought to do anything.
They sat and talked in low tones. He was drinking a good deal of the
champagne; she, little; and neither seemed to be eating anything. He sat
opposite to her, leaning over as if to consume her with his eyes. She
returned his gaze often now, and often smiled; but her smile was drawn
and tremulous, and, to my mind, pitifully appealing. I no longer
wondered if I ought to do anything; for, once, when I partly rose to go
and speak to them, the impossibility of the thing overcame my half
resolve, and I sat down. The anti-quixotic spirit won, after all.
At last a waiter, returning with the change for the bill with which I
had paid my score, was hailed by Sir John, and was paid for their
supper. I looked to see them as they started for home. The girl rose and
made a movement toward her wrap. He reached it first and placed it about
her shoulders. In so doing, he drew her to him, and began speaking
softly and passionately to her in words I could not hear. Her face was
turned upward and backward toward him, and all her resistance seemed
gone. I should have been glad to believe this the safe and triumphant
surrender to an honest love; but here, after the dances and Stamboul
spectacles, hidden by the palms, beside the table with its empty bottles
and its broken glass, how could I believe it such? I turned away, as if
to avoid the sight of the crushing of some innocent thing which I was
powerless to aid, and strode toward the door.
Then I heard a little cry, and saw her come flying down the great hall,
leaving him standing amazedly in the archway of the palm alcove.
She passed me at the door, her face vividly white, went out into the
street, like a dove from the trap at a shooting tournament, and sprang
lightly upon a passing street-car. I could act now, and I would see her
to a place of safety; so I, too, swung on by the rail of the rear car.
She never once turned her face; but I saw Sir John come to the door of
the restaurant and look both ways for her, and as he stood perplexed and
alarmed, our train turned the curve at the next corner, we were swept
off toward the South Side, and the dark young man passed, as I supposed,
"into my dreams forever." I made my way forward a few seats and saw her
sitting there with her head bowed upon the back of the seat in front of
her. I bitterly wished that he, if he had a heart, might see her there,
bruised in spirit, her little ignorant white soul, searching itself for
smutches of the uncleanness it feared. I wished that Alice might be
there to go to her and comfort her without a word. I paid her fare, and
the conductor seemed to understand that she was not to be disturbed. A
drunken man in rough clothes came into the car, walked forward and
looked at her a moment, and as I was about to go to him and make him sit
elsewhere, he turned away and came back to the rear, as if he had some
sort of maudlin realization that the front of the train was sacred
ground.
At last she looked about, signalled for the car to stop, and alighted. I
followed, rather suspecting that she did not know her way. She walked
steadily on, however, to a big, dark house with a vine-covered porch,
close to the sidewalk. A stout man, coatless, and in a white shirt,
stood at the gate. He wore a slouch hat, and I knew him, even in that
dim light, for a farmer. She stopped for a moment, and without a word,
sprang into his arms.
"Wal, little gal, ain't yeh out purty late?" I heard him say, as I
walked past. "Didn't expect yer dad to see yeh, did yeh? Why, yeh ain't
a-cryin', be yeh?"
"O pa! O pa!" was all I heard her say; but it was enough. I walked to
the corner, and sat down on the curbstone, dead tired, but happy. In a
little while I went back toward the street-car line, and as I passed the
vine-clad porch, heard the farmer's bass voice, and stopped to listen,
frankly an eavesdropper, and feeling, somehow, that I had earned the
right to hear.
"Why, o' course, I'll take yeh away, ef yeh don't like it here, little
gal," he was saying. "Yes, we'll go right in an' pack up now, if yeh say
so. Only it's a little suddent, and may hurt the Madame's feelin's, y'
know--"
* * * * *
At the hotel I was forced by the crowded state of the city to share the
bed of one of my fellow delegates. He was a judge from down the state,
and awoke as I lay down.
"That you, Barslow?" said he. "Do you know a fellow by the name of
Elkins, of Cleveland?"
"No," said I, "why?"
"He was here to see you, or rather to inquire if you were Al Barslow who
used to live in Pleasant Valley Township," the Judge went on. "He's the
fellow who organized the Ohio flambeau brigade. Seems smart."
"Pleasant Valley Township, did he say? Yes, I know him. It's Jimmie
Elkins."
And I sank to sleep and to dreams, in which Jimmie Elkins, the Empress,
Sir John, Alice, and myself acted in a spectacular drama, like that at
McVicker's. And yet there are those who say there is nothing in dreams!
CHAPTER III.
Reminiscentially Autobiographical.
This Jimmie Elkins was several years older than I; but that did not
prevent us, as boys, from being fast friends. At seventeen he had a
coterie of followers among the smaller fry of ten and twelve, his tastes
clinging long to the things of boyhood. He and I played together, after
the darkening of his lip suggested the razor, and when the youths of his
age were most of them acquiring top buggies, and thinking of the long
Sunday-night drives with their girls. Jim preferred the boys, and the
trade of the fisher and huntsman.
Why, in spite of parental opposition, I loved Jimmie, is not hard to
guess. He had an odd and freakish humor, and talked more of
Indian-fighting, filibustering in gold-bearing regions, and of moving
accidents by flood and field, than of crops, live-stock, or bowery
dances. He liked me just as did the older men who sent me to the
National Convention,--in spite of my youth. He was a ne'er-do-weel, said
my father, but I snared gophers and hunted and fished with him, and we
loved each other as brothers seldom do.
At last, I began teaching school, and working my way to a better
education than our local standard accepted as either useful or
necessary, and Jim and I drifted apart. He had always kept up a
voluminous correspondence with that class of advertisers whose
black-letter "Agents Wanted" is so attractive to the farmer-boy; and he
was usually agent for some of their wares. Finally, I heard of him as a
canvasser for a book sold by subscription,--a "Veterinarians' Guide," I
believe it was,--and report said that he was "making money." Again I
learned that he had established a publishing business of some kind; and,
later, that reverses had forced him to discontinue it,--the old farmer
who told me said he had "failed up." Then I heard no more of him until
that night of the convention, when I had the adventure with the Empress
and Sir John, all unknown to them; and Jim made the ineffectual attempt
to find me. His family had left the old neighborhood, and so had mine;
and the chances of our ever meeting seemed very slight. In fact it was
some years later and after many of the brave dreams of the youthful
publicist had passed away, that I casually stumbled upon him in the
smoking-room of a parlor-car, coming out of Chicago.
I did not know him at first. He came forward, and, extending his hand,
said, "How are you, Al?" and paused, holding the hand I gave him,
evidently expecting to enjoy a period of perplexity on my part. But with
one good look in his eyes I knew him. I made him sit down by me, and for
half an hour we were too much engrossed in reminiscences to ask after
such small matters as business, residence, and general welfare.
"Where all have you been, Jim, and what have you been doing, since you
followed off the 'Veterinarians' Guide,' and I lost you?" I inquired at
last.
"I've been everywhere, and I've done everything, almost," said he. "Put
it in the 'negative case,' and my history'll be briefer."
"I should regard organizing a flambeau brigade," said I, "as about the
last thing you would engage in."
"Ah!" he replied, "His Whiskers at the hotel told you I called that
time, did he? Well, I didn't think he had the sense. And I doubted the
memory on your part, and I wasn't at all sure you were the real Barslow.
But about the flambeaux. The fact is, I had some stock in the flambeau
factory, and I was a rabid partisan of flambeaux. They seemed so
patriotic, you know, so sort of ennobling, and so convincing, as to the
merits of the tariff controversy!"
It was the same old Jim, I thought.
"We used to have a scheme," I remarked, "our favorite one, of occupying
an island in the Pacific,--or was it somewhere in the vicinity of the
Spanish Main--"
"If it was the place where we were to make slaves of all the natives,
and I was to be king, and you Grand Vizier," he answered, as if it were
a weighty matter, and he on the witness-stand, "it was in the
Pacific--the South Pacific, where the whale-oil comes from. A coral
atoll, with a crystal lagoon in the middle for our ships, and a fringe
of palms along the margin--coco-palms, you remember; and the lagoon was
green, sometimes, and sometimes blue; and the sharks never came over the
bar, but the porpoises came in and played for us, and made fireworks in
the phosphorescent waves...."
His eyes grew almost tender, as he gazed out of the window, and ceased
to speak without finishing the sentence,--which it took me some minutes
to follow out to the end, in my mind. I was delighted and touched to
find these foolish things so green in his memory.
"The plan involved," said I soberly, "capturing a Spanish galleon filled
with treasure, finding two lovely ladies in the cabin, and offering them
their liberty. And we sailed with them for a port; and, as I remember
it, their tears at parting conquered us, and we married them; and lived
richer than oil magnates, and grander than Monte Cristos forever after:
do you remember?"
"Remember! Well, I should smile!"--he had been laughing like a boy, with
his old frank laugh. "Them's the things we don't forget.... Did you ever
gather any information as to what a galleon really was? I never did."
"I had no more idea than I now have of the Rosicrucian Mysteries; and I