The Four Million
beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular
haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cozy 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 on 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 recognise 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
well 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 downtown 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.
AN ADJUSTMENT OF NATURE
In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had been sold
for $5,000. The painter was a young scrub out of the West named Kraft,
who had a favourite food and a pet theory. His pabulum was an
unquenchable belief in the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature. His
theory was fixed around corned-beef hash with poached egg. There was a
story behind the picture, so I went home and let it drip out of a
fountain-pen. The idea of Kraft—but that is not the beginning of the
story.
Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took our meals at
Cypher’s, on Eighth Avenue. I say “took.” When we had money, Cypher got
it “off of” us, as he expressed it. We had no credit; we went in,
called for food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had
confidence in Cypher’s sullenness and smouldering ferocity. Deep down
in his sunless soul he was either a prince, a fool or an artist. He sat
at a worm-eaten desk, covered with files of waiters’ checks so old that
I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that Hendrik Hudson had
eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power, in common with Napoleon III.
and the goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a film over his eyes, rendering
opaque the windows of his soul. Once when we left him unpaid, with
egregious excuses, I looked back and saw him shaking with inaudible
laughter behind his film. Now and then we paid up back scores.
But the chief thing at Cypher’s was Milly. Milly was a waitress. She
was a grand example of Kraft’s theory of the artistic adjustment of
nature. She belonged, largely, to waiting, as Minerva did to the art of
scrapping, or Venus to the science of serious flirtation. Pedestalled
and in bronze she might have stood with the noblest of her heroic
sisters as “Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World.” She belonged to
Cypher’s. You expected to see her colossal figure loom through that
reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you expect the
Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog. There amid the
steam of vegetables and the vapours of acres of “ham and,” the crash of
crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of “short orders,” the
cries of the hungering and all the horrid tumult of feeding man,
surrounded by swarms of the buzzing winged beasts bequeathed us by
Pharaoh, Milly steered her magnificent way like some great liner
cleaving among the canoes of howling savages.
Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they could be
followed only with awe. Her sleeves were always rolled above her
elbows. She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands and
dropped us out of the window. She had seen fewer years than any of us,
but she was of such superb Evehood and simplicity that she mothered us
from the beginning. Cypher’s store of eatables she poured out upon us
with royal indifference to price and quantity, as from a cornucopia
that knew no exhaustion. Her voice rang like a great silver bell; her
smile was many-toothed and frequent; she seemed like a yellow sunrise
on mountain tops. I never saw her but I thought of the Yosemite. And
yet, somehow, I could never think of her as existing outside of
Cypher’s. There nature had placed her, and she had taken root and grown
mightily. She seemed happy, and took her few poor dollars on Saturday
nights with the flushed pleasure of a child that receives an unexpected
donation.
It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held
latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art at
which we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing
between a Haydn symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite
congruity between Milly and Cypher’s.
“There is a certain fate hanging over Milly,” said Kraft, “and if it
overtakes her she is lost to Cypher’s and to us.”
“She will grow fat?” asked Judkins, fearsomely.
“She will go to night school and become refined?” I ventured anxiously.
“It is this,” said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee
with a stiff forefinger. “Caesar had his Brutus—the cotton has its
bollworm, the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has
his poison ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan,
the rose has its—”
“Speak,” I interrupted, much perturbed. “You do not think that Milly
will begin to lace?”
“One day,” concluded Kraft, solemnly, “there will come to Cypher’s for
a plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and he will
marry Milly.”
“Never!” exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.
“A lumberman,” repeated Kraft, hoarsely.
“And a millionaire lumberman!” I sighed, despairingly.
“From Wisconsin!” groaned Judkins.
We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few things were
less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods,
was made to catch the lumberman’s eye. And well we knew the habits of
the Badgers, once fortune smiled upon them. Straight to New York they
hie, and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them beans
in a beanery. Why, the alphabet itself connives. The Sunday newspaper’s
headliner’s work is cut for him.
“Winsome Waitress Wins Wealthy Wisconsin Woodsman.”
For a while we felt that Milly was on the verge of being lost to us.
It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that
inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed
by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her
voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble
teepee of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher’s she belonged—in the bacon
smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled
ironstone china and rattling casters.
Our fears must have been prophetic, for on that same evening the
wildwood discharged upon us Milly’s preordained confiscator—our fee to
adjustment and order. But Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the burden of
the visitation.
We were at our supper of beef stew and dried apples when he trotted in
as if on the heels of a dog team, and made one of the mess at our
table. With the freedom of the camps he assaulted our ears and claimed
the fellowship of men lost in the wilds of a hash house. We embraced
him as a specimen, and in three minutes we had all but died for one
another as friends.
He was rugged and bearded and wind-dried. He had just come off the