The Four Million
beautiful, Mr. Rockwall? I’m glad William A. Brady wasn’t onto 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
check. “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-by, Kelly.”
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 matinee.
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 any
one 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’hôte_ (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’oeuvre” to “not responsible
for overcoats and umbrellas.”
Schulenberg became a naturalised 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 crosstown 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 to 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 entrées, figuring only
with Russian turnips among the roasts. The gracious spirit of spring
pervaded the entire menu. Lamb, that lately capered on the greening
hillsides, was becoming exploited with the sauce that commemorated its
gambols. The song of the oyster, though not silenced, was _dimuendo 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 midges 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 Marechal
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 6 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-indorsed
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.