The Four Million
beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”
“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not
arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well,
anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”
Jim looked about the room curiously.
“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and
gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you.
Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden
serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall
I put the chops on, Jim?”
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della.
For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some
inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or
a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would
give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that
was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the
table.
“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think
there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that
could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package
you may see why you had me going a while at first.”
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an
ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to
hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of
all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had
worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise
shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful
vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had
simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of
possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have
adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up
with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him
eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash
with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have
to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I
want to see how it looks on it.”
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands
under the back of his head and smiled.
“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a
while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get
the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”
The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought
gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving
Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones,
possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And
here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two
foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other
the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise
of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were
the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest.
Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFÉ
At midnight the café was crowded. By some chance the little table at
which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at
it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons.
And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a
theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We
hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find
travellers instead of cosmopolites.
I invoke your consideration of the scene—the marble-topped tables, the
range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies
dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus
of taste, economy, opulence or art; the sedulous and largess-loving
_garçons_, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the
composers; the _mélange_ of talk and laughter—and, if you will, the
Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe
cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a
sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was truly Parisian.
My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from
next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new “attraction”
there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his
conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took
the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly,
contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino
cherry in a _table d’hôte_ grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the
equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones,
he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he
would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you
on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at
Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak
swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho
ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he
would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and
how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the
_chuchula_ weed. You would have addressed a letter to “E. Rushmore
Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,” and have mailed
it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.
I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since
Adam, and I listened to his worldwide discourse fearful lest I should
discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his
opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities,
countries and continents as the winds or gravitation.
And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with
glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and
dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is
pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that “the men
that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their
cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.” And whenever they walk
“by roaring streets unknown” they remember their native city “most
faithful, foolish, fond; making her mere-breathed name their bond upon
their bond.” And my glee was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling
napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who had no
narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all,
would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the
inhabitants of the Moon.
Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan
by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing to me the
topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a
medley. The concluding air was “Dixie,” and as the exhilarating notes
tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands
from almost every table.
It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be
witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons
of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have
conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to
cafés at nightfall. This applause of the “rebel” air in a Northern city
does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain,
many years’ generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners
at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the
Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have
made the South rather a “fad” in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp
softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman’s
in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the
war, you know.
When “Dixie” was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up from
somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his
soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the
vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.
The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us
mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young man
acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I
hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I
had.
“Would you mind telling me,” I began, “whether you are from—”
The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was jarred into
silence.
“Excuse me,” said he, “but that’s a question I never like to hear
asked. What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a
man by his post-office address? Why, I’ve seen Kentuckians who hated
whiskey, Virginians who weren’t descended from Pocahontas, Indianians
who hadn’t written a novel, Mexicans who didn’t wear velvet trousers
with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen,
spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow-minded
Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on
the street to watch a one-armed grocer’s clerk do up cranberries in
paper bags. Let a man be a man and don’t handicap him with the label of
any section.”
“Pardon me,” I said, “but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one.
I know the South, and when the band plays ‘Dixie’ I like to observe. I
have formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special
violence and ostensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of
either Secaucus, N.J., or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and
the Harlem River, this city. I was about to put my opinion to the test
by inquiring of this gentleman when you interrupted with your
own—larger theory, I must confess.”
And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident
that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.
“I should like to be a periwinkle,” said he, mysteriously, “on the top
of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo.”
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.
“I’ve been around the world twelve times,” said he. “I know an Esquimau
in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a
goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food
puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another
in Yokohama all the year around. I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a
tea-house in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell ’em how to cook my eggs
in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It’s a mighty little old world. What’s
the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the
old manor house in the dale, or Euclid avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s
Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan’s Flats or any place? It’ll
be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or
ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.”
“You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,” I said admiringly. “But it also
seems that you would decry patriotism.”
“A relic of the stone age,” declared Coglan, warmly. “We are all