The Four Million
explain is contrary to her nature as I believe it to be. Tell her that
I have thus, to a certain degree, disobeyed her injunctions, in the
hope that she may yet be inclined to see justice done. Go, and tell her
that.”
The young man dropped a half-dollar into the boy’s hand. The boy looked
at him for a moment with bright, canny eyes out of a dirty, intelligent
face, and then set off at a run. He approached the lady on the bench a
little doubtfully, but unembarrassed. He touched the brim of the old
plaid bicycle cap perched on the back of his head. The lady looked at
him coolly, without prejudice or favour.
“Lady,” he said, “dat gent on de oder bench sent yer a song and dance
by me. If yer don’t know de guy, and he’s tryin’ to do de Johnny act,
say de word, and I’ll call a cop in t’ree minutes. If yer does know
him, and he’s on de square, w’y I’ll spiel yer de bunch of hot air he
sent yer.”
The young lady betrayed a faint interest.
“A song and dance!” she said, in a deliberate sweet voice that seemed
to clothe her words in a diaphanous garment of impalpable irony. “A new
idea—in the troubadour line, I suppose. I—used to know the gentleman
who sent you, so I think it will hardly be necessary to call the
police. You may execute your song and dance, but do not sing too
loudly. It is a little early yet for open-air vaudeville, and we might
attract attention.”
“Awe,” said the boy, with a shrug down the length of him, “yer know
what I mean, lady. ’Tain’t a turn, it’s wind. He told me to tell yer
he’s got his collars and cuffs in dat grip for a scoot clean out to
’Frisco. Den he’s goin’ to shoot snow-birds in de Klondike. He says yer
told him not to send ’round no more pink notes nor come hangin’ over de
garden gate, and he takes dis means of puttin’ yer wise. He says yer
refereed him out like a has-been, and never give him no chance to kick
at de decision. He says yer swiped him, and never said why.”
The slightly awakened interest in the young lady’s eyes did not abate.
Perhaps it was caused by either the originality or the audacity of the
snow-bird hunter, in thus circumventing her express commands against
the ordinary modes of communication. She fixed her eye on a statue
standing disconsolate in the dishevelled park, and spoke into the
transmitter:
“Tell the gentleman that I need not repeat to him a description of my
ideals. He knows what they have been and what they still are. So far as
they touch on this case, absolute loyalty and truth are the ones
paramount. Tell him that I have studied my own heart as well as one
can, and I know its weakness as well as I do its needs. That is why I
decline to hear his pleas, whatever they may be. I did not condemn him
through hearsay or doubtful evidence, and that is why I made no charge.
But, since he persists in hearing what he already well knows, you may
convey the matter.
“Tell him that I entered the conservatory that evening from the rear,
to cut a rose for my mother. Tell him I saw him and Miss Ashburton
beneath the pink oleander. The tableau was pretty, but the pose and
juxtaposition were too eloquent and evident to require explanation. I
left the conservatory, and, at the same time, the rose and my ideal.
You may carry that song and dance to your impresario.”
“I’m shy on one word, lady. Jux—jux—put me wise on dat, will yer?”
“Juxtaposition—or you may call it propinquity—or, if you like, being
rather too near for one maintaining the position of an ideal.”
The gravel spun from beneath the boy’s feet. He stood by the other
bench. The man’s eyes interrogated him, hungrily. The boy’s were
shining with the impersonal zeal of the translator.
“De lady says dat she’s on to de fact dat gals is dead easy when a
feller comes spielin’ ghost stories and tryin’ to make up, and dat’s
why she won’t listen to no soft-soap. She says she caught yer dead to
rights, huggin’ a bunch o’ calico in de hot-house. She side-stepped in
to pull some posies and yer was squeezin’ de oder gal to beat de band.
She says it looked cute, all right all right, but it made her sick. She
says yer better git busy, and make a sneak for de train.”
The young man gave a low whistle and his eyes flashed with a sudden
thought. His hand flew to the inside pocket of his coat, and drew out a
handful of letters. Selecting one, he handed it to the boy, following
it with a silver dollar from his vest-pocket.
“Give that letter to the lady,” he said, “and ask her to read it. Tell
her that it should explain the situation. Tell her that, if she had
mingled a little trust with her conception of the ideal, much heartache
might have been avoided. Tell her that the loyalty she prizes so much
has never wavered. Tell her I am waiting for an answer.”
The messenger stood before the lady.
“De gent says he’s had de ski-bunk put on him widout no cause. He says
he’s no bum guy; and, lady, yer read dat letter, and I’ll bet yer he’s
a white sport, all right.”
The young lady unfolded the letter; somewhat doubtfully, and read it.
Dear Dr. Arnold: I want to thank you for your most kind and opportune
aid to my daughter last Friday evening, when she was overcome by an
attack of her old heart-trouble in the conservatory at Mrs. Waldron’s
reception. Had you not been near to catch her as she fell and to render
proper attention, we might have lost her. I would be glad if you would
call and undertake the treatment of her case.
Gratefully yours,
Robert Ashburton.
The young lady refolded the letter, and handed it to the boy.
“De gent wants an answer,” said the messenger. “Wot’s de word?”
The lady’s eyes suddenly flashed on him, bright, smiling and wet.
“Tell that guy on the other bench,” she said, with a happy, tremulous
laugh, “that his girl wants him.”
THE FURNISHED ROOM
Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of
the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side.
Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to
furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in
heart and mind. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry
their _lares et penates_ in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a
picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers,
should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but
it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the
wake of all these vagrant guests.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red
mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean
hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and
forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow
depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a
housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that
had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy
with edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
“Come in,” said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her
throat seemed lined with fur. “I have the third floor back, vacant
since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?”
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no
particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod
noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn.
It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank,
sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to
the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At
each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants
had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and
tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but
it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them
forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished
pit below.
“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It’s
a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in
it last summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute.
The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three
months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls—you may
have heard of her—Oh, that was just the stage names—right there over
the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is
here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody
likes. It never stays idle long.”
“Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young man.
“They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with
the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people
never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they
goes.”
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he
said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The
room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the
housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question
that he carried at the end of his tongue.
“A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a
one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely.
A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and
a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”
“No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change
as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call
that one to mind.”
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the
inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers,
agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres
from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find
what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find
her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great,
water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous
quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its
upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of
pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the
specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected
gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a
couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two
windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a
corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in
speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to
him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical
islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the
gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from
house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding
Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline
was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew
like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate
flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne
them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a
medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the
little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests
developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of
the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny