The Four Million
license to order a glass of beer. There she sat, inhaling and absorbing
it all—the new-coloured, 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 _al fresco_ 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 oat-fed 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
gray-moustached 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.
AN UNFINISHED STORY
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, Dulce.”
Dulcie hurried 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 night-blooming 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 licorice drops—the
kind that made your cheek look like the toothache, and last as long.
The licorice 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 lemon-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 week-days 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 twenty-five 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 shop-girl and tell you to
an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more
nourishing than marshmallows 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-slightly-soiled 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