The Four Million
dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things
to eat that strangely twisted the girls’ jaws when they tried to tell
about them. No doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue
pongee suit in a window that she knew—by saving twenty cents a week
instead of ten, in—let’s see—Oh, it would run into years! But there was
a second-hand store in Seventh Avenue where—
Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood
there with a spurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas.
“A gentleman’s downstairs to see you,” she said. “Name is Mr. Wiggins.”
By such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had to take him
seriously.
Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then she
stopped still, and bit her underlip hard. While looking in her mirror
she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a
long slumber. She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad,
beautiful, stern eyes—the only one there was to approve or condemn what
she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful
reproach on his handsome, melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his
wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on the dresser.
Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady.
“Tell him I can’t go,” she said dully. “Tell him I’m sick, or
something. Tell him I’m not going out.”
After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed,
crushing her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener
was her only friend. He was Dulcie’s ideal of a gallant knight. He
looked as if he might have a secret sorrow, and his wonderful moustache
was a dream, and she was a little afraid of that stern yet tender look
in his eyes. She used to have little fancies that he would call at the
house sometime, and ask for her, with his sword clanking against his
high boots. Once, when a boy was rattling a piece of chain against a
lamp-post she had opened the window and looked out. But there was no
use. She knew that General Kitchener was away over in Japan, leading
his army against the savage Turks; and he would never step out of his
gilt frame for her. Yet one look from him had vanquished Piggy that
night. Yes, for that night.
When her cry was over Dulcie got up and took off her best dress, and
put on her old blue kimono. She wanted no dinner. She sang two verses
of “Sammy.” Then she became intensely interested in a little red speck
on the side of her nose. And after that was attended to, she drew up a
chair to the rickety table, and told her fortune with an old deck of
cards.
“The horrid, impudent thing!” she said aloud. “And I never gave him a
word or a look to make him think it!”
At nine o’clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers and a little pot of
raspberry jam out of her trunk, and had a feast. She offered General
Kitchener some jam on a cracker; but he only looked at her as the
sphinx would have looked at a butterfly—if there are butterflies in the
desert.
“Don’t eat it if you don’t want to,” said Dulcie. “And don’t put on so
many airs and scold so with your eyes. I wonder if you’d be so superior
and snippy if you had to live on six dollars a week.”
It was not a good sign for Dulcie to be rude to General Kitchener. And
then she turned Benvenuto Cellini face downward with a severe gesture.
But that was not inexcusable; for she had always thought he was Henry
VIII, and she did not approve of him.
At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the
dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It’s an awful
thing to go to bed with a good-night look at General Kitchener, William
Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. This story
really doesn’t get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later—sometime
when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling
lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the
other way; and then—
As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of
prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and
asked if I belonged with them.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Why,” said he, “they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid ’em
five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?”
“Not on your immortality,” said I. “I’m only the fellow that set fire
to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.”
THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK
Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, sat on his favourite
bench in the park. The coolness of the September night quickened the
life in him like a rare, tonic wine. The benches were not filled; for
park loungers, with their stagnant blood, are prompt to detect and fly
home from the crispness of early autumn. The moon was just clearing the
roofs of the range of dwellings that bounded the quadrangle on the
east. Children laughed and played about the fine-sprayed fountain. In
the shadowed spots fauns and hamadryads wooed, unconscious of the gaze
of mortal eyes. A hand organ—Philomel by the grace of our stage
carpenter, Fancy—fluted and droned in a side street. Around the
enchanted boundaries of the little park street cars spat and mewed and
the stilted trains roared like tigers and lions prowling for a place to
enter. And above the trees shone the great, round, shining face of an
illuminated clock in the tower of an antique public building.
Prince Michael’s shoes were wrecked far beyond the skill of the
carefullest cobbler. The ragman would have declined any negotiations
concerning his clothes. The two weeks’ stubble on his face was grey and
brown and red and greenish yellow—as if it had been made up from
individual contributions from the chorus of a musical comedy. No man
existed who had money enough to wear so bad a hat as his.
Prince Michael sat on his favourite bench and smiled. It was a
diverting thought to him that he was wealthy enough to buy every one of
those close-ranged, bulky, window-lit mansions that faced him, if he
chose. He could have matched gold, equipages, jewels, art treasures,
estates and acres with any Croesus in this proud city of Manhattan, and
scarcely have entered upon the bulk of his holdings. He could have sat
at table with reigning sovereigns. The social world, the world of art,
the fellowship of the elect, adulation, imitation, the homage of the
fairest, honours from the highest, praise from the wisest, flattery,
esteem, credit, pleasure, fame—all the honey of life was waiting in the
comb in the hive of the world for Prince Michael, of the Electorate of
Valleluna, whenever he might choose to take it. But his choice was to
sit in rags and dinginess on a bench in a park. For he had tasted of
the fruit of the tree of life, and, finding it bitter in his mouth, had
stepped out of Eden for a time to seek distraction close to the
unarmoured, beating heart of the world.
These thoughts strayed dreamily through the mind of Prince Michael, as
he smiled under the stubble of his polychromatic beard. Lounging thus,
clad as the poorest of mendicants in the parks, he loved to study
humanity. He found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his
station and all the grosser sweets of life had given him. It was his
chief solace and satisfaction to alleviate individual distress, to
confer favours upon worthy ones who had need of succour, to dazzle
unfortunates by unexpected and bewildering gifts of truly royal
magnificence, bestowed, however, with wisdom and judiciousness.
And as Prince Michael’s eye rested upon the glowing face of the great
clock in the tower, his smile, altruistic as it was, became slightly
tinged with contempt. Big thoughts were the Prince’s; and it was always
with a shake of his head that he considered the subjugation of the
world to the arbitrary measures of Time. The comings and goings of
people in hurry and dread, controlled by the little metal moving hands
of a clock, always made him sad.
By and by came a young man in evening clothes and sat upon the third
bench from the Prince. For half an hour he smoked cigars with nervous
haste, and then he fell to watching the face of the illuminated clock
above the trees. His perturbation was evident, and the Prince noted, in
sorrow, that its cause was connected, in some manner, with the slowly
moving hands of the timepiece.
His Highness arose and went to the young man’s bench.
“I beg your pardon for addressing you,” he said, “but I perceive that
you are disturbed in mind. If it may serve to mitigate the liberty I
have taken I will add that I am Prince Michael, heir to the throne of
the Electorate of Valleluna. I appear incognito, of course, as you may
gather from my appearance. It is a fancy of mine to render aid to
others whom I think worthy of it. Perhaps the matter that seems to
distress you is one that would more readily yield to our mutual
efforts.”
The young man looked up brightly at the Prince. Brightly, but the
perpendicular line of perplexity between his brows was not smoothed
away. He laughed, and even then it did not. But he accepted the
momentary diversion.
“Glad to meet you, Prince,” he said, good humouredly. “Yes, I’d say you
were incog. all right. Thanks for your offer of assistance—but I don’t
see where your butting-in would help things any. It’s a kind of private
affair, you know—but thanks all the same.”
Prince Michael sat at the young man’s side. He was often rebuffed but
never offensively. His courteous manner and words forbade that.
“Clocks,” said the Prince, “are shackles on the feet of mankind. I have
observed you looking persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a
tyrant, its numbers are false as those on a lottery ticket; its hands
are those of a bunco steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your
ruin. Let me entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to
cease to order your affairs by that insensate monitor of brass and
steel.”
“I don’t usually,” said the young man. “I carry a watch except when
I’ve got my radiant rags on.”
“I know human nature as I do the trees and grass,” said the Prince,
with earnest dignity. “I am a master of philosophy, a graduate in art,
and I hold the purse of a Fortunatus. There are few mortal misfortunes
that I cannot alleviate or overcome. I have read your countenance, and
found in it honesty and nobility as well as distress. I beg of you to
accept my advice or aid. Do not belie the intelligence I see in your
face by judging from my appearance of my ability to defeat your
troubles.”
The young man glanced at the clock again and frowned darkly. When his
gaze strayed from the glowing horologue of time it rested intently upon
a four-story red brick house in the row of dwellings opposite to where
he sat. The shades were drawn, and the lights in many rooms shone dimly
through them.
“Ten minutes to nine!” exclaimed the young man, with an impatient
gesture of despair. He turned his back upon the house and took a rapid
step or two in a contrary direction.
“Remain!” commanded Prince Michael, in so potent a voice that the
disturbed one wheeled around with a somewhat chagrined laugh.
“I’ll give her the ten minutes and then I’m off,” he muttered, and then
aloud to the Prince: “I’ll join you in confounding all clocks, my
friend, and throw in women, too.”
“Sit down,” said the Prince calmly. “I do not accept your addition.
Women are the natural enemies of clocks, and, therefore, the allies of
those who would seek liberation from these monsters that measure our
follies and limit our pleasures. If you will so far confide in me I
would ask you to relate to me your story.”
The young man threw himself upon the bench with a reckless laugh.
“Your Royal Highness, I will,” he said, in tones of mock deference. “Do