 6. The Poet and the Peasant. The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communion with nature all his life, wrote a poem, and took it to an editor. It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams. When a poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a beef steak dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment, Two Artificial. Several of us met over spaghetti in Duchess County, Quianti, and swallowed indignation with slippery forkfuls. And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a well-arrived writer of fiction, a man who had trod on asphalt all his life, and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes, except with sensations of disgust from the windows of express trains. Conant wrote a poem and called it The Doe in the Brook. It was a fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet, who had strayed with Amorolis only as far as the florist's windows, and whose sole ornithological discussion had been carried on with the waiter. Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to the same editor. But this has very little to do with the story. Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferry boat, and loped slowly up 42nd Street. The invader was a young man, with light blue eyes, a hanging lip, and hair the exact color of the little orphans, afterward discovered to be the Earl's daughter, in one of Mr. Blaney's plays. His trousers were a quarter-roy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the quarter-roy's. He looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear-holes, its shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise. Description of it is an impossible task. A Boston man would not have carried his lunch and law-books to his office in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay, the rustic's letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the gold-brick men. Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw the raw stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall buildings. At this they ceased to smile and even to look at him. It had been done so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see what Coney attraction, or brand of chewing-gum, he might be thus dinning into his memory. But for the most part he was ignored. Even the news-boys looked bored when he scampered like a circus clown out of the way of cabs and street-cars. At Eighth Avenue stood Bunko Harry with his dyed mustache and shiny, good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be pained at the sight of an actor overdoing his part. He edged up to the countryman, who had stopped to open his mouth at a jewelry store window and shook his head. "'Too thick, pal,' he said critically. "'Too thick by a couple of inches.' "'I don't know what your lay is, but you've got the properties too thick. That hay? Now, why, they don't even allow that on Proctor's circuit any more.' "'I don't understand you, mister,' said the green one. "'I am not looking for any circus. I've just run down from Ulster County to look at the town, being that the hay ends overwith. Gosh, but it's a whopper. I thought Pakepsi was some pumpkins, but this here town is five times as big.'" "'Oh, well,' said Bunko Harry, raising his eyes. "'I didn't mean to butt in. You don't have to tell. I thought you ought to tone down a little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at your graft, whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow.' "'I wouldn't mind having a glass of log or beer,' acknowledged the other. They went to a café frequented by men with smooth faces and shifty eyes, and sat at their drinks. "'I'm glad I've come across you, mister,' said Hadox. "'How would you like to play a game or two of seven up? I've got the curds.'" He fished them out of Noah's valise, a rare inimitable deck, greasy with bacon suppers, and grimy with the soil of cornfields. Bunko Harry laughed loud and briefly. "'Not for me, sport,' he said firmly. "'I don't go against that makeup of yours for ascent. But I still say you've overdone it. The rubes haven't dressed like that since seventy-nine. I doubt a few could work Brooklyn for a key-winding watch with that layout.'" "'Oh, you didn't think I ain't got the money,' boasted Hadox. He drew forth a tightly-rolled mass of bills, as large as a teacup, and laid it on the table. "'Got that for my share of grandmother's farm,' he announced. "'There's nine hundred and fifty dollars in that roll. Thought I'd come to the city and look around for a likely business to go into.'" Bunko Harry took up the roll of money and looked at it with almost respect in his smiling eyes. "'I've seen worse,' he said critically. "'But you'll never do it in them clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a straw hat with a colored band, and talk a good deal about Pittsburgh and freight differentials, and drink sherry for breakfast in order to work off phony stuff like that.'" "'What's his line?' asked two or three shifty-eyed men of Bunko Harry, after Hadox had gathered up his impugned money and departed. "'The queer, I guess,' said Harry. "'Or else he's one of Jerome's men, or some guy with a new graft. He's too much hay-seed. Maybe that is—I wonder now. Oh, no. It couldn't have been real money.'" Hadox wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he dived into a dark groggery on a side street and bought beer. At first sight of him, their eyes brightened, but when his insistent and exaggerated rusticity became apparent, their expressions changed to wary suspicion. Hadox swung his valise across the bar. "'Keep that awhile for me, mister,' he said, chewing at the end of a virulent clay-bank cigar. "'I'll be back after I knock around a spell, and keep your eye on it, for there's nine hundred and fifty dollars inside it. Though maybe you wouldn't think so to look at me.'" Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band-piece, and Hadox was off for it, his coattail buttons flopping in the middle of his back. "'Divvy, Mike,' said the men, hanging upon the bar, winking openly at one another. "'Honest now,' said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. "'You don't think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain't no J. One of McAdoo's come on squad, I guess. He's a shine if he made himself up. There ain't no parts of the country now where they dress like that, since they run rural-free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he's got nine fifty in that valise, it's a ninety-eight-cent water-berry that's stopped at ten minutes to ten.'" When Hadox had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse, he returned for his valise, and then down Broadway he gallivanted, calling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still, and evermore, Broadway rejected him, with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the gags that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra-rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield, and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorsily rural, that even a shell-game man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it. Hadox seated himself upon a flight of stone steps, and once more exhumed his roll of yellow backs from the valise. The outer one, a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy. Son, said he, run somewhere and get this changed for me. I'm mighty nigh out of chicken-feed. I guess you'll get a nickel if you'll hurry up. A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy's face. I'll watch your tink. Go on, get your funny bill changed yourself. There ain't no farm clothes you got on. Go on with your stage money. On a corner, lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-house. He saw Hadox, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous. Mr., said the rural one, I've heard of places in this here town where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card at Keno. I got nine hundred and fifty dollars in this valise, and I come down from Old Allster to see the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on about nine or ten dollars? I'm going to have some sport, and then maybe I'll buy out of business of some kind. The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left forefinger nail. Jeez it, old man, he murmured reproachfully. The central office must be bug-housed to send you out looking like such a gilly. You couldn't get within two blocks of a sidewalk-crap game in them, Tony-pastor-props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it be skadoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace. Rebuffed once again by the great city that is so swift to detect artificialities, Hadox sat upon the curb and presented his thoughts to hold a conference. It's my clothes, said he, turned if it ain't. They think I'm a hayseed and won't have nothing to do with me. Nobody never made fun of this hat in Allster County. I guess if you want folks to notice you in New York you must dress up like they do. So haylocks went shopping in the bazaars, where men spaked through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape-line ecstatically over the bulge in his inside pocket where we posed a red nubbin of corn with an even number of rows, and messengers bearing parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on Broadway within the lights of long acre. At nine o'clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk whom Allster County would have foresworn. Bright tan were his shoes. His hat the latest block. His light gray trousers were deeply creased. A gay blue silk handkerchief flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant English walking coat. His collar might have gray-stayed laundry window. His blonde hair was trimmed close. The wisp of hay was gone. For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of a boulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his evening pleasures. And then he turned down the gay bright street with the easy and graceful tread of a millionaire. But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes in the city had enveloped him in their field of vision. A stout man with gray eyes picked two of his friends with the lift of his eyebrows from the row of loungers in front of the hotel. The juiciest jay I've seen in six months, said the man with gray eyes, come along. It was half past eleven when a man galloped into the west forty-seven street police station with the story of his wrongs. Nine hundred and fifty dollars, he gasped, all my share of Grand Mother's Farm. The desk sergeant rung from him the name of Jabez Bultung, of Locust Valley Farm, Ulster County, and then began to take descriptions of the strong-armed gentleman. When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he was received over the head of the office boy into the inner office that is decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown. When I read the first line of the dough in the brook, said the editor, I knew it to be the work of one whose life had been heart to heart with nature. The finished art of the line did not blind me to that fact. To use a somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a wild, free child of the woods and fields were to dawn the garb of fashion and walk down Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man would show. Thanks, said Conant. I suppose the check will be round on Thursday, as usual? The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can take your choice of stay on the farm or don't write poetry. End of Story 6. The Poet and the Peasant. Story 7 of Strictly Business. More Stories of the Four Million by O. Henry. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Story 7. The Robe of Peace. Mysteries follow one another so closely in a great city that the reading public and the friends of Johnny Bell Chambers have ceased to marvel at his sudden and unexplained disappearance nearly a year ago. This particular mystery has now been cleared up, but the solution is so strange and incredible to the mind of the average man that only a select few who were in close touch with Bell Chambers will give it full credence. Johnny Bell Chambers, as is well known, belonged to the intrinsically inner circle of the elite. Without any of the ostentation of the fashionable ones, who endeavored to attract notice by eccentric display of wealth and show, he was offee in everything that gave deserved luster to his high position in the ranks of society. Especially did he shine in the matter of dress. In this he was the despair of imitators. Always correct, exquisitely groomed, and possessed of an unlimited wardrobe, he was conceded to be the best dressed man in New York, and, therefore, in America. There was not a tailor in Gotham who would not have deemed it a precious boon to have been granted the privilege of making Bell Chambers close without a cent of pay. As he wore them they would have been a priceless advertisement. Trousers were his special passion. Here nothing but perfection would he notice. He would have worn a patch as quickly as he would have overlooked a wrinkle. He kept a man in his apartments always busy pressing his ample supply. His friend said that three hours was the limit of time that he would wear these garments without exchanging. Bell Chambers disappeared very suddenly. For three days his absence brought no alarm to his friends, and then they began to operate the usual methods of inquiry. All of them failed. He had left absolutely no trace behind. Then the search for a motive was instituted, but none was found. He had no enemies. He had no debts. There was no woman. There were several thousand dollars in his bank to his credit. He had never showed any tendency toward mental eccentricity. In fact, he was of a particularly calm and well-balanced temperament. Every means of tracing the vanished man was made use of, but without avail. It was one of those cases, more numerous in late years, where men seemed to have gone out like a flame of a candle, leaving not a trail of smoke as a witness. In May, Tom Iers and Lancelot Gilliam, two of Bell Chambers' old friends, went for a little run on the other side. While pottering around in Italy and Switzerland, they happened, one day, to hear of a monastery in the Swiss Elps that promised something outside of the ordinary tourist beguiling attractions. The monastery was almost inaccessible to the average sightseer, being on an extremely rugged and precipitous spur of the mountains. The attractions it possessed, but did not advertise, were, first, an exclusive and divine cordial made by the monks that was said to far surpass Benedictine and Chartreuse. Next, a huge brass bell so purely and accurately cast that it had not ceased sounding since it was first rung three hundred years ago. Finally, it was asserted that no Englishman had ever set foot within its walls. Iers and Gilliam decided that these three reports called for investigation. It took them two days, with the aid of two guides, to reach the monastery of St. Gondra. It stood upon a frozen, windswept crag, with the snow piled about it in treacherous, drifting masses. They were hospitably received by the brothers, whose duty it was to entertain the infrequent guest. They drank of the precious cordial, finding it rarely potent and reviving. They listened to the great ever-echoing bell, and learned that they were pioneer travelers, in those gray stone walls, over the Englishman, whose restless feet have trodden nearly every corner of the earth. At three o'clock on the afternoon they arrived, the two young Gothamites stood with good brother Christopher in the great cold hallway of the monastery, to watch the monks march past on their way to the refectory. They came slowly, pacing by twos, with their heads bowed, treading noiselessly with sandled feet upon the rough stone flags. As the procession slowly filed past, Iers suddenly gripped Gilliam by the arm. Look, he whispered eagerly, at the one just opposite you now, the one on this side, with his hand at his waist. If that isn't Johnny Bell Chambers, then I never saw him. Gilliam saw, and recognized, the lost glass of fashion. What to do, he said, wonderingly, is old Bell doing here? Tommy, it surely can't be he. Never heard of Bell having a turn for the religious. Fact is, I've heard him say things when a foreign hand didn't seem to tie up just right. That would bring him up for court-martial before any church. It's Bell, without a doubt, said Iers firmly, or I'm pretty badly in need of an oculus. But think of Johnny Bell Chambers, the royal high chancellor of swelltogs and the Mahatma of pink tees, up here in cold storage, doing penance, in a snuff-colored bathrobe. I can't get it straight in my mind. Let's ask the jolly old boy that's doing the honors. Brother Christopher was appealed to for information. By that time the monks had passed into the refectory. He could not tell to which one they referred. Bell Chambers? Ah, the brothers of St. Gondro. Abandoned their wordly names when they took the vows. Did the gentleman wish to speak with one of the brothers? If they would come to the refectory and indicate the one they wished to see, the reverend Abbott in authority would, doubtless, permit it. Iers and Gilliam went into the dining-hall and pointed out to Brother Christopher the man they had seen. Yes, it was Johnny Bell Chambers. They saw his face plainly now, as he sat among the dingy brothers, never looking up, eating broth from a coarse-brown bowl. Permission to speak to one of the brothers was granted to the two travelers by the Abbott, and they waited in a reception room for him to come. When he did come, treading softly in his sandals, both Iers and Gilliam looked at him in perplexity and astonishment. It was Johnny Bell Chambers, but he had a different look. Upon his smooth-shaven face was an expression of ineffable peace, of rapturous attainment, of perfect and complete happiness. His form was proudly erect, his eyes shown with a serene and gracious light. He was as neat and well-groomed as in the old New York days, but how differently he was clad. Now he seemed clothed in but a single garment, a long robe of rough brown cloth, gathered by a cord at the waist, and falling in straight, loose folds nearly to his feet. He shook hands with his visitors with his old ease and grace of manner. If there was any embarrassment in that meeting, it was not manifested by Johnny Bell Chambers. The room had no seats. They stood to converse. "'Plan to see you, old man,' said Iers, somewhat awkwardly. "'Wasn't expecting to find you up here. Not a bad idea, though, after all. Society's an awful sham. Must be a relief to shake the giddy world and retire to, er, contemplation and, er, prayer and hymns and those things.' "'Oh, cut that, Tommy,' said Bell Chambers cheerfully. "'Don't be afraid that I'll pass around the plate. I go through these thing-a-bobs with the rest of these old boys because they are the rules. I'm Brother Ambrose here, you know. I'm given just ten minutes to talk to you fellows. That's rather a new design and waistcoat you have on, isn't it, Gilliam? Are they wearing those things on Broadway now?' "'It's the same old Johnny,' said Gilliam joyfully. "'What a devil! I mean, why? Oh, confound it! What did you do it for, old man?' "'Peel the bathrobe,' pleaded Iers, almost tearfully, and go back with us, the old crowd to go wild to see you. This isn't your line, Bell. I know half a dozen girls that wore the willow on the quiet when you shook us in that unaccountable way. And in your resignation, or get a dispensation or whatever you have to do to get a release from this ice factory. You'll get Qatar here, Johnny, and—my God, you haven't any socks on!' Bell Chambers looked down at his sandaled feet and smiled. "'You fellows don't understand,' he said, soothingly. "'It's nice of you to want me to go back. But the old life will never know me again. I have reached here the goal of all my ambitions. I am entirely happy and contented. Here I shall remain for the remainder of my days. You see this robe that I wear?' Bell Chambers caressingly touched the straight-hanging garment. At last I found something that will not bag at the knees. I have attained, at that moment, the deep boom of the great brass bell reverberated through the monastery. It must have been a summons to immediate devotions. For Brother Ambrose bowed his head, turned, and left the chamber without another word. A slight wave of his hand as he passed through the stone doorway seemed to say a farewell to his old friends. They left the monastery without seeing him again. And this is the story that Tommy Iers and Lancelot Gilliam brought back with them from their latest European tour. End of Story 7 The Robe of Peace Story 8 of Strictly Business More Stories of the Four Million by O. Henry This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Warren Coddy, Gurney, Illinois Story 8 The Girl and the Graft The other day I ran across my old friend, Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a conscientious crafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything, from speculating in town lots on the great staked plains to selling wooden toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to a pulp. Now and then, when Pogue has made a good haul, he comes to New York for a rest. He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and thou in the wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure to him as sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft. Give me, says Pogue, a big city for my vacation, especially New York. I'm not much fond of New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only place in the globe where I don't find any. While in the Metropolis, Pogue can always be found at one of two places. One is a little second-hand bookshop on Fourth Avenue, where he reads books about his hobbies, Mahometanism, and taxidermy. I found him at the other, his hall bedroom in 18th Street, where he sat in his stalking feet, trying to pluck the banks of the wall-bash out of a small zither. Four years he has practiced this tune without arriving near enough to cast the longest trout line to the water's edge. On the dresser lay a blued steel colts for thirty-five, and a tight roll of tens and twenties, large enough around to belong to the Spring Rattlesnake story class. A chamber made with a room-cleaning air fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized by the stalking feet, aghast at the colts, yet powerless, with her metropolitan instincts, to remove herself beyond the magic influence of the yellow-hued roll. I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No one could be franker or more candid in his conversation. Beside his expression, the cry of Henry James for lactial nourishment at the age of one month would have seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram. He told me stories of his profession with pride, for he considered it an art, and I was curious enough to ask him whether he had known any women who followed it. Ladies, said Pogue with Western chivalry. Well, not to any great extent. They don't amount to much in special lines of craft, because they're all so busy in general lines. What? Why, they have to. Who's got the money in the world? The men. Did you ever know a man to give a woman a dollar without any consideration? A man will shell out his dust to another man free and easy and grotesque. But if he drops a penny in one of the machines run by the Madame Eve's Daughters Amalgamated Association, and the pineapple chewing gum don't fall out when he pulls the lever, you can hear him kick to the superintendent four blocks away. Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go up against. He's the low grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay. Two times out of five she's salted. She can't put in crushers and costly machinery. He'd notice them and be on to the game. They have to pan out what they get, and it hurts their tender hands. Some of them are natural sluice troughs and can carry out thousand dollars to the ton. The dry eyed ones have to depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo walk, cowhide whips ability to cook, sentimental juries, conversational powers, silk underskirts, ancestry rouge, anonymous letters, violet sachet powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms, carbolic acid, moonlight, cold cream, and the evening newspapers. You are outrageous, Ferg, I said. Surely there is none of this graft, as you call it, in a perfect and harmonious matrimonial union. Well, said Pogue, nothing that would justify you every time in calling police headquarters and ordering out the reserves in a vaudeville manager on a dead run. But it's this way. Suppose you're a Fifth Avenue millionaire, soaring high on the right side of copper and cappers. You come home at night and bring a nine million dollar diamond brooch to the lady who's staked you for a claim. You hand it over. She says, oh, George, and looks to see if it's packed. She comes up and kisses you. You've waited for it, you get it. All right, it's graft. But I'm telling you about Artemisia Bly. She was from Kansas, and she suggested corn in all of its phases. Her hair was as yellow as the silk. Her form was as tall and graceful as a stalk in the low grounds during a wet summer. Her eyes were as big and startling as bunions, and green was her favorite color. On my last trip into the cool recesses of your sequestered city, I met a human named Valkross. He was worth, well, that is, he had a million. He told me he was in business on the street. A sidewalk merchant, says I, sarcastic. Exactly, says he, senior partner of a paving concern. I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him on Broadway one night, when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco, and place. He was all silk hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him, you would have only looked yourself in the face. I looked like a cross between Count Tolstoy and the June Lobster. I was out of luck. I had, but let me lay my eyes on that dealer again. Valkross stopped and talked to me a few minutes, and then he took me to a high toned restaurant to eat dinner. There was music and then some Beethoven and Bordele sauce, and cussing in French, and frangipangie and some hoteur, and cigarettes. When I am flush, I know them places. I declare I must have looked as bad as a magazine artist, sitting there without any money and my hair all rumbled like I was booked to read a chapter from Elsie's School Days at a Brooklyn Bohemian smoker. But Valkross treated me like a bear hunter's guide. He wasn't afraid of hurting the waiter's feelings. Mr. Pogue, he explains to me, I am using you. Go on, says I, I hope you don't wake up. And then he tells me, you know, the kind of man he was. He was a New Yorker. His whole ambition was to be noticed. He wanted to be conspicuous. He wanted people to point him out and bow to him, and tell others who he was. He said it had been the desire of his life always. He didn't have but a million, so he couldn't attract attention by spending money. He said he tried to get into public notice one time by planting a little public square on the east side with garlic for free use of the poor. But Carnegie heard of it and covered it over at once with a library in the Gaelic language. Three times he had jumped in the way of automobiles. But the only result was five broken ribs and a notice in the papers that an unknown man five feet ten with four amalgam filled teeth supposed to be the last of the famous red leery gang had been run over. Ever try the reporters, I asked him. Last month, says Mr. Valkross, my expenditure for lunches to reporters was $124 and eighty cents. Get anything out of that, I asked. That reminds me, says he, at eight dollars and fifty cents for pepsin. Yes, I got indigestion. How am I supposed to push along your scramble for prominence, I inquires. Contrast? Something of that sort tonight, says Valkross. It grieves me, but I'm forced to resort to eccentricity. And here he drops his napkin in his soup and rises up and bows to a gent who is devastating a potato under a palm across the room. The police commissioner, says my climber, gratified. Friend, says I in a hurry, have ambitions, but don't kick a rung out of your ladder. When you use me as a stepping stone to salute the police, you spoil my appetite on the grounds that I may be degraded and incriminated. Be thoughtful. At the Quaker City squab and casserole, the idea about Artemisia Bly comes to me. Suppose I can manage to get you in the papers, says I, a column or two every day in all of them, in your picture and most of them for a week. How much would it be worth to you? Ten thousand dollars, says Valkross, warm in a minute, but no murder, says he, and I won't wear pink pants at a coutillion. I wouldn't ask you to, says I. This is honorable, stylish, and unfeminate. Tell the waiter to bring a demi-toss and some other beans, and I will disclose to you the opus moderandi. We close the deal an hour later in the Rococo Rouge at Noise Room. I telegraphed that night to miss Artemisia in Salina. She took a couple of photographs and an autograph letter to an elder in the fourth Presbyterian Church in the morning, and got some transportation and eighty dollars. She stopped in Topeka, long enough to trade a flashlight interior in the Valentine, to the vice president of a trust company, for a mileage book and a package of five dollar notes, with two hundred and fifty dollars scrawled on the band. The fifth evening after she got my wire, she was waiting, all decollete and dressed up, for me and Valkross to take her to dinner in one of these New York Feminine apartment houses, where a man can't get in unless he plays bazook and smokes depilatory powder cigarettes. She's a stunner, says Valkross, when he saw her. They'll give her a two-column cut, for sure. This was the scheme the three of us concocted. It was business straight through. Valkross was to rush, misplie, with all the style and display and emotion he could, for a month. Of course, that amounted to nothing as far as his ambitions were concerned. The sight of a man in a white tie and patent leather pumps pouring greenbacks through the large end of a cornucopia, to purchase nutriment and heart-cease for tall willowy blondes in New York, is as common a sight as blue turtles in delirium tremens. But he was to write her love letters, the worst kind of love letters, such as your wife publishes after you are dead, every day. At the end of the month he was to drop her, and she would bring suit for one hundred thousand dollars, for breach of promise. Miss Artemisia was to get ten thousand dollars. If she won the suit, that was all, and if she lost, she was to get it anyhow. There was a signed contract to that effect. Sometimes they had me out with them, but not often. I couldn't keep up to their style. She used to pull out his notes and criticize them like bills of lading. Say you, she'd say, what do you call this, letter to a hardware merchant from his nephew on learning that his haunt has nettle rash? You Eastern Duffers know as much about writing love letters as a Kansas grasshopper does about tugboats. My dear Miss Bly, wouldn't that put on pink icing and a little red sugar bird on your bridal cake? How long do you expect to hold an audience in a courtroom with that kind of stuff? You want to get down to business and call me Tweetolums, babe, and honeysuckle, and sign yourself Mama's own big, bad, puggy, wuggy boy. If you want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs, get sappy. After that, Valkross dipped his pen in the indelible Tabasco, his notes read like something or other in the original. I could see a jury sitting up and women tearing one another's hats to hear him read. And I could see piling up for Mr. Valkross as much notoriousness as Archbishop Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese on salad ever enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at the prospects. They agreed on a night and I stood on Fifth Avenue outside a solemn restaurant and watched him. A process server walked in and handed Valkross the papers at his table. Everybody looked at him and he looked as proud as Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five cents cigar for I knew the ten thousand dollars was as good as ours. About two hours later somebody knocked at my door. There stood Valkross and Miss Artemisia and she was clinging, yes, sir, clinging to his arm. And they tells me they'd been out and got married. And they articulated some trivial cadences about love and such and they laid down a bundle on the table and said good night and left. And that's why I say, concluded Ferguson Pogue, that a woman is too busy occupied with her natural vocation and instinctive graft such as given her for self-preservation and amusement to make any great success in special lines. What was in the bundle that they left, I asked, with my usual curiosity. Why? said Ferguson. There was a Sculper's railroad ticket as far as Kansas City and two pairs of Mr. Valkross's old pants. End of story eight. The girl and the graft. Story nine of Strictly Business. More stories of the four million by O. Henry. This sleeper box recording is in the public domain. Recording by Warren Coddy, Gurney, Illinois. Story nine. The call of the tame. When the inauguration was accomplished, the proceedings were made smooth by the presence of the Rough Riders, it is well known that a herd of those competent and loyal ex-warriors paid a visit to the big city. The newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks the old broad brimmed hats and leather belts that they wear to North Beach fish fries and mixed with the visitors. No damage was done beyond the employment of the wonderful plural tender feet in each of the scribe's stories. The Westerners mildly contemplated the skyscrapers as high as the third story, yawned at Broadway, hunched down in the big chairs and hotel corridors, and altogether looked as bored and dejected as a member of the ancient and honorable artillery, separated during a sham battle from his ballot. Out of the sight-seeing delegations of Good King Teddy's gentlemen of the Royal Bearhounds, dropped one Greenbrier Nye of Pinfeather, Arizona. The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue's rush hour swept him away from the company of his partners, True. The dust from a thousand rustling skirts filled his eyes. The mighty roar of trains rushing across the sky deafened him. The lightning flash of twice ten hundred beaming eyes confused his vision. The storm was so sudden and tremendous that Greenbrier's first impulse was to lie down and grab a root, and then he remembered that the disturbance was human and not elemental, and he backed out of it with a grin into a doorway. The reporters had written that but for the wide-brimmed hats the West was not visible upon these gauchos of the North. Heaven sharpened their eyes. The suit of black diagonal wrinkled in impossible places. The bright blue foreign hand, factory tied. The low, turned down collar, pattern of the days of Seymour and Blair, white glazed as the letters on the window of the open day and night except Sunday restaurants. The out-curve at the knees from the saddle-grip, the peculiar spread of the half-closed right thumb and fingers from the stiff hold upon the circling lasso, the deeply absorbed weather tan that the hottest sun of Cape May can never equal. The seldom-winking blue eyes that unconsciously divided the rushing crowds into fours, as though they were being counted out of a corral. The segregated loneliness and solemnity of expression, as of an emperor or of one whose horizons have not intruded upon him nearer than a day's ride, these brands of the West were set upon Greenbrier Nye. Oh yes, he wore a broad-brimmed hat, gentle reader, just like those the Madison Square Post Office mail carriers wear, when they go up to Bronx Park on Sunday afternoons. Suddenly Greenbrier Nye jumped into the drifting herd of metropolitan cattle, seized upon a man, dragged him out of the stream, and gave him a buffet upon his collarbone that sent him reeling against a wall. The victim recovered his hat with the angry look of a New Yorker who has suffered an outrage and intends to write to the trib about it. But he looked at his assailant, and knew that the blow was in consideration of love and affection after the manner of the West, which greets its friends with contumely and uproar and pounding fists, and receives its enemies in decorum and order, such as the judicious placing of the welcoming bullet demands. God in the mountains! cried Greenbrier, holding fast to the foreleg of his call. Can this be long horn merit? The other man was. Oh, look on Broadway any day for the pattern, businessman, latest rolled brim derby, good barber, business, digestion, and tailor. Greenbrier nigh, he exclaimed, grasping the hand that had smitten him. My dear fellow, so glad to see you. How did you come to? Oh, to be sure. The inaugural ceremonies. I remember you joined the Rough Riders. You must come and have luncheon with me, of course. Greenbrier pinned him sadly but firmly to the wall with a hand the size, shape, and color of a McClellan saddle. Longy, he said in a melancholy voice that disturbed traffic. What have they been doing to you? You act just like a citizen. They done made you into an inmate to the city directory. You never made no such Johnny Brandt's execration of yourself as that out on the Gila. Come and have luncheon with me. You never defined grub by any such terms of reproach in them days. I've been living in New York seven years, said Merritt. It's been eight since we punched cows together in old man Garcia's outfit. Well, let's go to a cafe anyhow. It sounds good to hear it called grub again. They picked their way through the crowd to a hotel and drifted, as by a natural law to the bar. Speak up, invited Greenbrier. A dry martini, said Merritt. Oh Lord, cried Greenbrier, and yet me and you once saw the same pink Gila monsters crawling up the walls of the same hotel in Kenyon Diablo. A dry, but let that pass. Whiskey straight, and they're on you. Merritt smiled and paid. They lunched in a small extension of the dining room that connected with the cafe. Merritt dexterously diverted his friend's choice that hovered over ham and eggs to a puree of celery, a salmon cutlet, a partridge pie, and a desirable salad. On the day, said Greenbrier, grieved and thunderous, when I can't hold but one drink before eating when I meet a friend I ain't seen in eight years, at a two by four table in a 30 cent town at one o'clock on the third day of the week. I want nine Broncos to kick me 40 times over a 640 acre section of land. Get them statistics? Right, old man. Laughed Merritt. Waiter, bring an absent frappé, and what's yours, Greenbrier? Whiskey straight, mourned Nye. Out of the neck of a bottle you used to take it, Longy. Straight out of the neck of a bottle on a galloping pony. Arizona red eye, not this ab... Oh, what's the use? They're on you. Merritt slipped the wine card under his glass. All right, I suppose you think I'm spoiled by the city. I'm as good a Westerner as you are, Greenbrier. But somehow I can't make up my mind to go back out there. New York is comfortable. Comfortable. I make a good living, and I live it. No more wet blankets and riding herd in snowstorms, and bacon and cold coffee, and blowouts once in six months for me. I reckon I'll hang out here in the future. We'll take in the theater tonight, Greenbrier, and after that we'll dine it. I'll tell you what you are, Merritt, said Greenbrier, laying one elbow in his salad, and the other in his butter. You are concentrated, a feat, unconditional, short sleeve, gotch-eared Miss Sally Walker. God made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle, and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore you have suffered as handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to New York, and putting on little shoes tied with strings, and making faces when you talk. I've seen you rope and tie a steer in forty-two and a half. If you was to see one now, you'd write to the police commissioner about it. And these flap-doodle drinks that you inoculate your system with. These little essences of cow slip with acorns in them, and paragoric flip. They ain't any ways in a scent with the cordiality of manhood. I hate to see you this way. Well, Mr. Greenbrier, said Merritt, with apology in his tone. In a way you are right. Sometimes I do feel like I was being raised on the bottle. But I tell you, New York is comfortable. Comfortable. There's something about it. The sights and the crowds, and the way it changes every day, and the very air of it that seems to tie a one-mile-long steak-rope around a man's neck, with the other end fastened somewhere about thirty-fourth Street. I don't know what it is. God knows, said Greenbrier sadly, and I know. The East has gobbled you up. You was venison, and now you're veal. You put me in mind of a japonica in a window. You've been signed, sealed, and discovered. Requisquat in hawk's signal. You make me thirsty. A green chartreuse here, said Merritt, to the waiter. Whiskey's straight, sighed Greenbrier, and they're on you. You renegade of the roundups. Guilty with an application for mercy, said Merritt. You don't know how it is, Greenbrier. It's so comfortable here that please loan me your smelling salts, pleaded Greenbrier. If I hadn't seen you once, bluff three bluffers from Mazitzal City with an empty gun in Phoenix. Greenbrier's voice died away in poor grief. Cigars! he called harshly to the waiter to hide his emotion. A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine, said Merritt. They're on you, chanted Greenbrier, struggling to conceal his contempt. At seven, they dined in the Where to Dine Well column. That evening a galaxy had assembled there. Bright shone the lights over fair women and bur, let it go, anyhow, brave men. The orchestra played charmingly. Hardly had a tip from a diner had been placed in its hands by a waiter, when it would burst forth into soniferousness. The more beer you contributed to it, the more Meyer beer it gave you, which is reciprocity. Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner. Greenbrier was his old friend, and he liked him. He persuaded him to drink a cocktail. I take the whorehound tea, said Greenbrier. For old time's sake, but I prefer whiskey straight. They're on you. Right, said Merritt. Now run your eye down that bill of fare and see if it seems to hitch on any of these items. Lay me on my lava bed, said Greenbrier with bulging eyes. All these specimens of nutriment in the grubwagon. What's this? Horse with the heaves? I pass. But look along. Here's truck for twenty roundups all spelled out in different directions. Wait till I see. The Vyans ordered. Merritt turned to the wine list. This meddock isn't bad, he suggested. You're the doc, said Greenbrier. I'd rather have whiskey straight. It's on you. Greenbrier looked around the room. The waiter brought things and took dishes away. He was observing. He saw a New York restaurant crowd enjoying itself. How was the range when you left the Gila? asked Merritt. Fine, said Greenbrier. You see that lady in the red speckled silk at that table? Well, she could warm over her beans at my campfire. Yes, the range was good. She looks as nice as a white Mustang I see once on Black River. When the coffee came, Greenbrier put one foot on the seat of the chair next to him. You said it was a comfortable town, Longie. He said meditatively. Yes, it's a comfortable town. It's different from the plains in the blue northern. What did you call that mess in the crock with the handle, Longie? Oh yes, squabs in a cash roll. They're worth the roll. That white Mustang had just such a way of turning his head and shaking his mane. Look at her, Longie. If I thought I could sell out my ranch at a fair price, I believe I'd. Gar song. He suddenly cried in a voice that paralyzed every knife and fork in the restaurant. The waiter dived toward the table. Two more of them cocktail drinks, ordered Greenbrier. Merritt looked at him and smiled significantly. They're on me, said Greenbrier, blowing a puff of smoke to the ceiling. End of story nine. The call of the tame. Story 10 of Strictly Business. More stories of the four million by O. Henry. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Warren Coddy, Gurney, Illinois. Story 10. The Unknown Quantity. The poet Longfellow, or was it Confucius, the inventor of wisdom, remarked, Life is real. Life is earnest. And things are not what they seem. As mathematics are, or is, thanks, old subscriber, the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two and Two Makes Four. Figures, unassailable sums in addition, shall be set over against whatever opposing element there may be. A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would say, ahem, young gentleman, if we assume that X plus, that is, that life is real, then things, all of which life includes, are real. Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the proposition that things are not what they seem by, but this is heresy and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph algebra. We would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued, satisfying, mysterious X. Not long before the beginning of the century, Septimus can solving an old New Yorker invented an idea. He originated the discovery that bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour crop was short and that the stock exchange was having no perceptible effect on the growing wheat, Mr. Consolving cornered the flour market. The result was that when you are my landlady, before the war she never had to turn her hand to anything, Southerners accommodated, bought a five cent loaf of bread, you laid down an additional two cents, which went to Mr. Consolving as a testimonial to his perspecacity. A second result was that Mr. Consolving quit the game with two million dollars profit or rake off. Mr. Consolving's son, Dan, was at college when the mathematical experiment in bread stuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation and found the old gentleman in a red dressing gown reading Little Dorot on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square. He had retired from business with enough extra two cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, 15 times around the earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay. Dan shook hands with his father and hurried over to Greenwich Village to see his old high school friend Kenwitz. Dan had always admired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watchmaking in his father's jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial, easy tempered, and tolerant alike of kings and rag pickers. The two foregathered joyously, being opposites. And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings, and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop. Four years later, Dan came back to Washington Square with the accumulations of a bachelor's of arts, and two years of Europe thick upon him. He took a filial look at Septimus consolving the elaborate tombstone in Greenwood, and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family lawyer. And then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire, hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue. Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington Square. Dan had not changed much. He was stalwart, and had a dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz was more serious, more intense, more learned, philosophical, and socialistic. I know about it now, said Dan, finally. I pumped it out of the eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad's collections of bonds and bootle. It amounts to two million dollars, Ken. And I am told that he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of bread at little bakeries around the corner. You studied economics, Dan, and you know all about monopolies and the masses and octopuses and the rights of laboring people. I never thought about those things before. Football and trying to be white to my fellow man for about the extent of my college curriculum. But since I came back and found out how dad made his money, I have been thinking, I'd like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give up too much money for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income for a good many yards, but I'd like to make it square with them. Is there any way it can be done, old ways and means? Kenowitz's big black eyes glowed fireily. His thin, intellectual face took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan's arm with the grip of a friend and a judge. You can't do it, he said emphatically. One of the chief punishments of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent, you find that you've lost the power to make reparation or restitution. I admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can't do anything. Those people were robbed of their precious pennies. It's too late to remedy the evil. You can't pay them back. Of course, said Dan, lighting his pipe. We couldn't haunt up every one of the duffers and hand them back the right change. There's an awful lot of them buying bread all the time. Funny tastes they have. I never cared for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with a roquefort. But we might find a few of them and chuck some of Dad's cash back where it came from. I'd feel better if I could. It seems tough for people to be held up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn't mind standing a rise in broiled lobsters or doubled crabs. Get to work and think, Ken. I want to pay back all of that money that I can. There are plenty of charities, said Kenwitz mechanically. Easy enough, said Dan in a cloud of smoke. I suppose I could give the city a park or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But I don't want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold Peter. It's the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken. The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly. Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the losses of consumers during that corner in flower? He asked. I do not, said Dan stoutly. My lawyer tells me that I have two millions. If you had a hundred millions, said Kenwitz vehemently, you couldn't repair a thousand parts of the damage that has been done. You cannot conceive of the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth. Each penny that was rung from the lean purses of the poor reacted a thousandfold to their harm. You do not understand. You do not see how hopeless is your desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance can it be done. Back up, philosopher, said Dan. The penny has no sorrow that the dollar cannot heal. Not in one instance, repeated Kenwitz. I will give you on and let us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Verrick Street. He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of flour went up, he had to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor to pay it. Boyne's business failed, and he lost his $1,000 capital, all he had in the world. Dan Consolving struck the park bench, a mighty blow with his fist. I accept the instance, he cried. Take me to Boyne. I will repay his thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery. Write your check, said Kenwitz, without moving, and then begin to write checks and payments of the train of consequences. Draw the next one for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his failure and set fire to the building from which he was about to be evicted. The loss amounted to that much. Boyne died in an asylum. Stick to the instance, said Dan. I haven't noticed any insurance companies on my charity list. Draw your next check for $100,000, went on Kenwitz. Boyne's son fell into bad ways after the bakery closed and was accused of murder. He was acquitted last week after a three years legal battle, and the state draws upon taxpayers for that much expense. Back to the bakery, exclaimed Dan impatiently. The government doesn't need to stand in the breadline. The last item of this instance is, come and I will show you, said Kenwitz, rising. The socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire baiter by nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand new watch needed cleaning and a new ratchet wheel. He conducted kinsolving southward, out of the square, and into ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid brick tenement, he led the penitent offspring of the octopus. He knocked on a door, and a clear voice called to them to enter. In that almost bare room, a young woman sat sewing at a machine. She nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream of sunlight, through the dingy window, burnished her heavy hair to the color of an ancient Tuscan's shield. She flashed a rippling smile at Kenwitz, and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry. Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last item of the instance. How many this week, Miss Mary? asked the watchmaker. A mountain of coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor. Nearly thirty dozen, said the young woman cheerfully. I've made almost four dollars. I'm improving, Mr. Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so much money. Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A little pink spot came out on her round pale cheek. Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven. Miss Boyne, he said. Let me present Mr. Kinsolving, the son of the man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do something to aid those who were inconvenienced by that act. The smile left the young woman's face. She rose and pointed her forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight. The two men went down Barrick Street, Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism and rancor and hatred of the octopus come to the surface, jived at the moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him warmly. I'm obliged to you, Ken, old man, he said vaguely, a thousand times obliged. My God, you are crazy! cried the watchmaker, dropping his spectacles for the first time in years. Two months afterward, Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway, with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the proprietor. A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her. These lows are ten cents, said the clerk. I always get them at eight cents uptown, said the lady. You need not fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home. The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused. Mr. Kenwitz cried the lady heartily. How do you do? Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside. Why, Miss Boyne, he began. Mrs. Kinsolving, she corrected, Dan and I were married a month ago. End of Story 10. The Unknown Quantity. Story 11 of Strictly Business. More Stories of the Four Million by O. Henry. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Warren Cotty, Gurney, Illinois. Story 11. The Things the Play. Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter, who had a couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses. One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking looking man, not much past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded the man. There was a story about that chap a month or two ago, said the reporter. They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh yes, I'm working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the details. But I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned in a comic write up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks somehow. Maybe you could make a one act tragedy out of it for a curtain raiser. I'll give you the details. After the performance, my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts over the Wurzberger. I see no reason, said I, when he had concluded, why that shouldn't make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn't have acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in a real theater. I'm really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players, men and women. The things the play is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare. Try it, said the reporter. I will, said I, and I did, to show him how he could have made a humorous column of it for his paper. There stands a house near Abington Square. On the ground floor there has been, for twenty-five years, a little store where toys and notions and stationery are sold. One night, twenty years ago, there was a wedding in the rooms above the store. The widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter, Helen, was married to Frank Berry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen, and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the headlines of a wholesale female murderous story from Butte, Montana. But after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as one of a series of prominent beauties and bells of the lower West Side. Frank Berry and John Delaney were prominent young bows of the same side and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats and fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up in the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen's hand. When Frank won, John shook his hand and congratulated him. Honestly, he did. After the ceremony, Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to Old Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs, the usual horde of gibbering cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress Gators and paper bags of hominy. Then there was a rattle of the fire escape. And into her room jumps the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one, and treating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any old place where there are Italian skies and Dolce Farniente. It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him. With blazing and scornful eyes, she fairly withered him by demanding whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that way. In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had possessed him departed. He bowed low and said something about irresistible impulse, and forever carry in his heart the memory of. And she suggested that he catch the first fire escape going down. I will away, said John Delaney, to the furthermost parts of the earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another's. I will to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for, for goodness sake, get out, said Helen, somebody might come in. She knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that he might give it a farewell kiss. Girls, was this choice-poon of the great little God Cupid ever vowshaped you, to have the fellow you want, hard and fast, and have the one you don't want come with a damp curl on his forehead and kneel to you in babble of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shall forever bloom in Amaranth, in his heart? To know your power and to feel the sweet security of your own happy state. To send the unlucky one, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourself as he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails are well manicured. Say, girls, it's gullupious. Don't ever let it get by you. And then, of course, how did you guess it? The door opened, and in stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings. The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen's hand, and out of the window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa-bound. A little slow music, if you please, faint violin, just a breath in the clarinet, and a touch of the cello. Imagine the scene, Frank, white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to death, bursting from him, Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her wrists and tears them from his shoulders. Once, twice, thrice, he sways her this way and the stage manager will show you how, and throws her from him to the floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from the house through the staring groups of astonished guests. And, now because it is the thing, instead of the play, the audience must stroll out into the real lobby of the world, and marry, die, grow gray, rich, poor, happy, or sad, during the intermission of twenty years, which must precede the rising of the curtain again. Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight, she could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding-comedy, but she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or mothballs, nor did she sell it to a magazine. One day a middle-aged, money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her, across the counter, to marry him. I'm really much obliged to you, said Helen cheerfully, but I married another man twenty years ago. He was more a goose than a man, but I think I love him yet. I have never seen him since about half an hour after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just writing fluid? The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace, and left a respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Making salutes, however romantic, may be overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight, beautiful and admired, and all that she seemed to have got from her lovers were approaches and adoes. Worse still, in the last one she had lost a customer, too. Business languished, and she hung out a room-to-let card. Two large rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Rumors came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode of neatness, comfort, and taste. One day came Romanti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above. The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear. So a friend had sent him to this oasis in the desert of noise. Romanti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and his artist's temperament, revealed in his light, gay, and sympathetic manner, was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abington Square. Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side of it, and then across the end of it, ascended an open stairway to the floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters. And there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed or read. Romanti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler. Next comes lodger number two, a handsome, melancholy man in the early forties, with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes. He too found the Society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of Romeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes and wooed her by respectful innuendo. From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the days of her youths romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor in that romance. And then, with a woman's reasoning, oh yes they do sometimes, she leaped over common syllogisms and theory and logic, and was sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyes love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love-requited, which is the sine qua non in the house that Jack built. But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twenty years, and then drops in again, should not expect to find his slippers laid out too conveniently near, nor a match ready-lighted for his cigar. There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly, execration. A little percutory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be trusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or suspected. And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this, sent out on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing story of, but I will not knock a brother. Let us go on with the story. One evening Romanti stopped in Helen's Hall office reception room, and told his love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist. His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the heart of a man who is a dreamer and doer combined. But before you give me an answer, he went on, before she could accuse him of suddenness. I must tell you that Romanti is the only name I have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or where I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life before that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in the street, with a wound on my head, and was brought there in an ambulance. They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the stones. There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to remember. After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I have had success. Mrs. Berry, I do not know your name except that I love you. The first time I saw you, I realized that you were the one woman in the world for me, and—oh, a lot of stuff like that. Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrill of vanity went all over her. And then she looked at Romanti in the eyes, and a tremendous throb went through her heart. She hadn't expected that throb. It took her by surprise. The musician had become a big factor in her life, and she hadn't been aware of it. Mr. Romanti, she said sorrowfully. This was not on the stage, remember? It was in the old home near Abington Square. I'm awfully sorry, but I'm a married woman. And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a heroine must do, sooner or later, either to a theatrical manager or to a reporter. Romanti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to his room. Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand. Well, she might. Three suitors had kissed it, mounted their red-roan steeds, and ridden away. In an hour entered the mysterious stranger with the haunting eyes. Helen was in the Willow Rocker, knitting a useless thing in cotton wool. He ricocheted from the stairs and stopped for a chat. Sitting across the table from her, he also poured out his narrative of love. And then he said, Helen, do you not remember me? I think I've seen it in your eyes. Can you forgive the past and remember the love that has lasted for twenty years? I wronged you deeply. I was afraid to come back to you. But my love overpowered my reason. Can you, will you, forgive me? Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of her hands in a strong and trembling clasp. There she stood, and I pity the stage that it is not a quarry seen like that, and her emotions to portray. For she stood with a divided heart. The fresh, unforgettable, virginal love for her bridegroom was hers. The treasured, sacred, honored memory of her first choice filled half her soul. She leaned to that pure feeling. Honor and faith and sweet abiding romance bound her to it. But the other half of her heart and soul was filled with something else, a later, fuller, nearer influence, and so the old fought against the new. And while she hesitated, from the room above came the soft, racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the noblest. The Dawes may peck upon one's sleeve without injury, but whoever wears his heart upon his timpanum gets it not far from the neck. This music and the musician called her, and at her side, honor, and the old love held her back. "'Forgive me,' he pleaded. "'Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say you love,' she declared, with a percatorial touch. "'How could I tell?' he begged. "'I will conceal nothing from you. That night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark street I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid nearby and saw an ambulance take him away. "'Although you married him, Helen?' "'Who are you?' cried the woman, with wide open eyes, snatching her hand away. "'Don't you remember me, Helen, the one who has always loved you best? I am John Delaney, if you can forgive.' But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs toward the music, and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for his, in each of his two existences. And as she climbed up, she sobbed, cried, and sang, "'Frank, Frank, Frank!' Three mortals, thus juggling with years as though they were billiard-balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it. End of Story 11 The Things The Play