The Four Million
going without anything to eat for three days and see!”
“Himmel!” exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. “Wait till I come back.”
He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he
was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it.
With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the
restaurant. On the table he laid them—bread and butter, cold meats,
cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and
one of red-hot tea.
“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without eating.
You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He
helped her to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the
tea?” “On the shelf by the window,” she answered. When he turned again
with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon
a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a
woman’s unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured
the cup full of milk. “Drink that first” he ordered, “and then you
shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you
shall have a pickle to-morrow. And now, if you’ll allow me to be your
guest we’ll have supper.”
He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl’s eyes and
brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty
ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young
man’s presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing—not
as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great
stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human.
But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort, came also a
sense of the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him
her little story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at
every day—the shop girl’s story of insufficient wages, further reduced
by “fines” that go to swell the store’s profits; of time lost through
illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and—the knock of the
adventurer upon the green door.
But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in
“Junie’s Love Test.”
“To think of you going through all that,” he exclaimed.
“It was something fierce,” said the girl, solemnly.
“And you have no relatives or friends in the city?”
“None whatever.”
“I am all alone in the world, too,” said Rudolf, after a pause.
“I am glad of that,” said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased
the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.
Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.
“I’m awfully sleepy,” she said, “and I feel so good.”
Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. “I’ll say good-night. A long night’s
sleep will be fine for you.”
He held out his hand, and she took it and said “good-night.” But her
eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that
he answered it with words.
“Oh, I’m coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting along. You
can’t get rid of me so easily.”
Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much
less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: “How did you
come to knock at my door?”
He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden
jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous
as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would
never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which
she had been driven by her great distress.
“One of our piano tuners lives in this house,” he said. “I knocked at
your door by mistake.”
The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her
smile.
At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him.
And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back,
ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations.
Every door that he found in the house was painted green.
Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was
still there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.
“Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?” he
asked.
In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid
advertisement of his master’s profession.
“Dar it is, boss,” he said, pointing down the street. “But I ’spect you
is a little late for de fust act.”
Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre
the blazing electric sign of its new play, “The Green Door.”
“I’m informed dat it’s a fust-rate show, sah,” said the negro. “De
agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute
a few of his cards along with de doctah’s. May I offer you one of de
doctah’s cards, sah?”
At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass
of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he
buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp
post on the corner:
“All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way
for me to find her.”
Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf
Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.
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 fellow-men 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
vertebrae 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 pocketbook behind you are made to realise 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 tenement-house
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 fulness of time there was an eruption of the merry-makers 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 curb 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 fares; 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-waggon 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 mizzenmast of his craft as safe as a Steeple Jack
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 ’crosstown.
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. Some one 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