The Four Million
hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face. Step by step
she went up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder’s
door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss
Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to “pirouette across stage from L
to the side of the Count.” Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last
and opened the door of the skylight room.
She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the
iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in
that Erebus of the skylight room, she slowly raised her heavy eyelids,
and smiled.
For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant
through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a
pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing
the star that she had so whimsically and oh, so ineffectually named.
Miss Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation
Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she could not let it be
Gamma.
As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time
she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black
pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.
“Good-bye, Billy,” she murmured faintly. “You’re millions of miles away
and you won’t even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you
most of the time up there when there wasn’t anything else but darkness
to look at, didn’t you? . . . Millions of miles . . . Good-bye, Billy
Jackson.”
Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day, and
they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt
feathers proving of no avail, some one ran to ‘phone for an ambulance.
In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the
capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active,
confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the
steps.
“Ambulance call to 49,” he said briefly. “What’s the trouble?”
“Oh, yes, doctor,” sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that
there should be trouble in the house was the greater. “I can’t think
what can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her
to. It’s a young woman, a Miss Elsie—yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never
before in my house—”
“What room?” cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker
was a stranger.
“The skylight room. It—”
Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of
skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker
followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.
On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in
his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue,
not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that
slips down from a nail. Ever afterward there remained crumples in her
mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the
doctor said to her.
“Let that be,” she would answer. “If I can get forgiveness for having
heard it I will be satisfied.”
The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of
hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along
the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own
dead.
They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in
the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was:
“Drive like h––––l, Wilson,” to the driver.
That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning’s paper I saw a little
news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me)
to weld the incidents together.
It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who
had been removed from No. 49 East –––– street, suffering from debility
induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:
“Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case,
says the patient will recover.”
A SERVICE OF LOVE
When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.
That is our premise. This story shall draw a conclusion from it, and
show at the same time that the premise is incorrect. That will be a new
thing in logic, and a feat in story-telling somewhat older than the
great wall of China.
Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle West pulsing
with a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a picture of the town
pump with a prominent citizen passing it hastily. This effort was
framed and hung in the drug store window by the side of the ear of corn
with an uneven number of rows. At twenty he left for New York with a
flowing necktie and a capital tied up somewhat closer.
Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a pine-tree
village in the South that her relatives chipped in enough in her chip
hat for her to go “North” and “finish.” They could not see her f—, but
that is our story.
Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music
students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music,
Rembrandt’s works, pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin and Oolong.
Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other, or each of the other,
as you please, and in a short time were married—for (see above), when
one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.
Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a lonesome
flat—something like the A sharp way down at the left-hand end of the
keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their Art, and they had
each other. And my advice to the rich young man would be—sell all thou
hast, and give it to the poor—janitor for the privilege of living in a
flat with your Art and your Delia.
Flat-dwellers shall indorse my dictum that theirs is the only true
happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close—let the dresser
collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to a rowing
machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the washstand to an
upright piano; let the four walls come together, if they will, so you
and your Delia are between. But if home be the other kind, let it be
wide and long—enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras,
your cape on Cape Horn and go out by the Labrador.
Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister—you know his fame.
His fees are high; his lessons are light—his high-lights have brought
him renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock—you know his repute as
a disturber of the piano keys.
They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is every—but I
will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and defined. Joe was to
become capable very soon of turning out pictures that old gentlemen
with thin side-whiskers and thick pocketbooks would sandbag one another
in his studio for the privilege of buying. Delia was to become familiar
and then contemptuous with Music, so that when she saw the orchestra
seats and boxes unsold she could have sore throat and lobster in a
private dining-room and refuse to go on the stage.
But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat—the
ardent, voluble chats after the day’s study; the cozy dinners and
fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions—ambitions
interwoven each with the other’s or else inconsiderable—the mutual help
and inspiration; and—overlook my artlessness—stuffed olives and cheese
sandwiches at 11 p.m.
But after a while Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some
switchman doesn’t flag it. Everything going out and nothing coming in,
as the vulgarians say. Money was lacking to pay Mr. Magister and Herr
Rosenstock their prices. When one loves one’s Art no service seems too
hard. So, Delia said she must give music lessons to keep the chafing
dish bubbling.
For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils. One evening
she came home elated.
“Joe, dear,” she said, gleefully, “I’ve a pupil. And, oh, the loveliest
people! General—General A. B. Pinkney’s daughter—on Seventy-first
street. Such a splendid house, Joe—you ought to see the front door!
Byzantine I think you would call it. And inside! Oh, Joe, I never saw
anything like it before.
“My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already. She’s
a delicate thing—dresses always in white; and the sweetest, simplest
manners! Only eighteen years old. I’m to give three lessons a week;
and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I don’t mind it a bit; for when I
get two or three more pupils I can resume my lessons with Herr
Rosenstock. Now, smooth out that wrinkle between your brows, dear, and
let’s have a nice supper.”
“That’s all right for you, Dele,” said Joe, attacking a can of peas
with a carving knife and a hatchet, “but how about me? Do you think I’m
going to let you hustle for wages while I philander in the regions of
high art? Not by the bones of Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell
papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.”
Delia came and hung about his neck.
“Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is not
as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else. While I
teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily as
millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn’t think of leaving Mr. Magister.”
“All right,” said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish.
“But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn’t Art. But you’re a
trump and a dear to do it.”
“When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard,” said Delia.
“Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,” said Joe.
“And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I may
sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Delia, sweetly. “And now let’s be thankful
for Gen. Pinkney and this veal roast.”
During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe
was enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in
Central Park, and Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised
and kissed at 7 o’clock. Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times
7 o’clock when he returned in the evening.
At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid, triumphantly
tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8×10 (inches) centre table of the
8×10 (feet) flat parlour.
“Sometimes,” she said, a little wearily, “Clementina tries me. I’m
afraid she doesn’t practise enough, and I have to tell her the same
things so often. And then she always dresses entirely in white, and
that does get monotonous. But Gen. Pinkney is the dearest old man! I
wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with
Clementina at the piano—he is a widower, you know—and stands there
pulling his white goatee. ‘And how are the semiquavers and the
demisemiquavers progressing?’ he always asks.
“I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, Joe! And
those Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina has such a funny little
cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am getting
attached to her, she is so gentle and high bred. Gen. Pinkney’s brother
was once Minister to Bolivia.”
And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a five,
a two and a one—all legal tender notes—and laid them beside Delia’s
earnings.
“Sold that watercolour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,” he
announced overwhelmingly.
“Don’t joke with me,” said Delia, “not from Peoria!”
“All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen
muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle’s window and
thought it was a windmill at first. He was game, though, and bought it
anyhow. He ordered another—an oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight
depot—to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in
it.”