“Oh, Doddy!” she burst out, “I’m in an awful situation. “The Duke went out of the house an hour ago. None of the maids saw him go. He just wandered out. You must find him. He’s probably lost — lost and nobody knows him.” Mirabel wrung her hands in entrancing despair. “Oh, I shall die if he’s lost — and it so hot. He’ll have a sunstroke surely or a — moonstroke. Go and find him. We’ve telephoned the police, but it won’t do any good. Hurry up! Do! oh, Doddy, I’m so nervous.”
“Doddy” put his hands in his pockets, sighed, put his hat on his head and sighed again. Then he turned towards the door. Mirabel, her face anxious, followed him.
“Bring him right up here if you find him. Oh Doddy you’re a life-saver.” The life-saver sighed again and walked quickly through the portal. On the door-step he paused.
“Well, of all outrageous things! To hunt for a French Duke in New York. This is outrageous. Where shall I go? What will I do.” He paused at the door-step and then, following the crowd, strode toward Broadway. “Now let me see. I must have a plan of action. I can’t go up and ask everybody I meet if he’s the Duke of — — — , well of, well — I can’t remember his name. I don’t know what he looks like. He probably can’t talk English. Oh, curses on the nobility.”
He strode aimlessly, hot and muddled. He wished he had asked Mirabel the Duke’s name and personal appearance, but it was now too late. He would not convict himself of such a blunder. Reaching Broadway he suddenly bethought himself of a plan of action.
“I’ll try the restaurants.” He started down towards Sherry’s and had gone but half a block when he had an inspiration. The Duke’s picture was in some evening paper, and his name, too.
He bought a paper and sought for the picture with no result. He tried again and again. On his seventh paper he found it: “The Duke of Matterlane Visits American Millionaire.”
The Duke, a man with side whiskers and eye-glasses stared menacingly at him from the paper. Garland heaved a sigh of relief, took a long look at the likeness and stuck the paper into his pocket.
“Now to business,” he muttered, wiping his drenched brow, “Duke or die.”
Five minutes later he entered Sherry’s, where he sat down and ordered ginger ale. There was the usual summer night crowd, listless, flushed, and sunburned. There was the usual champagne and ice that seemed hotter than the room; but there was no Duke. He sighed, rose, and visited Delmonico’s, Martin’s, at each place consuming a glass of ginger ale.
“I’ll have to cut out the drinking,” he thought, “or I’ll be inebriated by the time I find his royal nuisance.”
On his weary trail, he visited more restaurants and more hotels, ever searching; sometimes thinking he saw an oasis and finding it only a mirage. He had consumed so much ginger ale that he felt a swaying sea-sickness as he walked; yet he plodded on, hotter and hotter, uncomfortable, and, as Alice in Wonderland would have said, uncomfortabler. His mind was grimly and tenaciously set on the Duke’s face. As he walked along, from hotel to cafe, from cafe to restaurant, the Duke’s whiskers remained glued firmly to the insides of his brains. It was half past eight by the City Hall clock when he started on his quest. It was now quarter past ten, hotter, sultrier and stuffier than ever. He had visited every important place of refreshment. He tried the drug stores. He went to four theatres and had the Duke paged, at a large bribe. His money was getting low, his spirits were lower still; but his temperature soared majestically and triumphantly aloft.
Finally, passing through an alley which had been recommended to him as a short cut, he saw before him a man lighting a cigarette. By the flickering match he noticed the whiskers. He stopped dead in his tracks, afraid that it might not be the Duke. The man lit another cigarette. Sure enough, the sideburns, eyeglasses and the whole face proved the question without a doubt.
Garland walked towards the man. The man looked back at him and started to walk in the opposite direction. Garland started to run; the man looked over his shoulder and started to run also. Garland slowed down. The man slowed down. They emerged upon Broadway in the same relative position and the man started north. Forty feet behind, in stolid determination, walked Garland without his hat. He had left it in the alley.
For eight blocks they continued, the man behind being the pacemaker. Then the Duke spoke quietly to a policeman and when Garland, lost in an obsession of pursuit, was grabbed by the arm by a blue-coated Gorgas, he saw ahead of him the Duke start to run. In a frenzy he struck at the policeman and stunned him. He ran on and in three blocks he had made up what he had lost. For five more blocks the Duke continued, glancing now and then over his shoulder. On the sixth block he stopped. Garland approached him with steady step. He of the side whiskers was standing under a lamp post. Garland came up and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Your Grace.”
“What’s dat?” said the Duke, with an unmistakable east-side accent. Garland was staggered.
“I’ll grace you,” continued the side burns aggressively. “I saw you was a swell and I’d a dropped you bad only I’m just out of jail myself. Now listen here. I’ll give you two seconds to get scarce. Go on, beat it.”
Garland beat it. Crestfallen and broken-hearted he walked away and set off for Mirabel’s. He would at least make a decent ending to a miserable quest. A half an hour later he rang the bell, his clothes hanging on him like a wet bathing suit.
Mirabel came to the door cool and fascinating.
“Oh Doddy,” she exclaimed. “Thank you so much. Dukey,” and she held up a small white poodle which she had in her arms, “came back ten minutes after you left. He had just followed the mail man.”
Garland sat down on the step.
“But the Duke of Matterlane?”
“Oh,” said Mirabel, “he comes tomorrow. You must come right over and meet him.”
“Im afraid I can’t,” said Garland, rising feebly, “previous engagement.” He paused, smiled faintly and set off across the sultry moon-lit pavement.
LITTLE MINNIE MCCLOSKEY
A story for girls
Editor’s Note — Not since Little Women have we had so moving a picture of girlhood hopes and dreams.
It was midnight in Miss Pickswinger’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies (country location, hot and cold water, wrestling, bull-baiting and other outdoor sports; washing, ironing, and Bulgarian extra). A group of girls had gathered in a cozy room. There was going to be a midnight feast. Oh, goody! There was but little light, for, fearing to turn on the acetylene, they had built a bonfire on the table, and one girl was appointed to feed the faint flames with false hair and legs which she wrenched quietly from the chairs and tables. A saddle of venison for their little supper was turning over and over on a spit in the cooking stove in the corner, and the potatoes were boiling noiselessly in the steam radiator. Perched like a little queen on the armchair sat Louise Sangfroid the hostess, on the mantle-piece lay Mary Murgatroid in red and white striped pajamas while balancing on the molding sat Minnie McCloskey in a nightshirt of yaeger flannel. Other girls sat around the room, two on a trunk which they had ingeniously improvised as a chair, one on an empty case of beer and three on a heap of broken glass and tin cans in the corner.
Girls will be girls! Ah, me! They would have their little frolic; a cask of Haig and Haig, stolen from Miss Pickswinger’s private stock, was behind the door and the mischievous girls had almost finished it.
Minnie McCloskey was the school drudge; she was working for her education. At three every morning she rose, made the beds, washed the dishes, branded the cattle, cut the grass, and did many other tasks. She was known affectionately to her companions as “Piggy” McCloskey (all the girls had nicknames. How they got them no one knew. Amy Gulps was called “Fatty,” perhaps because she was fat; Mary Munks was called “Red” conceivably because she had red hair. Phoebe Cohop was called “Boils” possibly because — (but enough, let us continue).
“Girls,” said Bridget Mulcahey, a petite little French girl, whose f
ather had been shot at Soissons (for deserting), “let’s play a prank.”
A chorus of ohs! and ahs! and girlish giggles greeted this suggestion.
“What shall we do?” asked Gumpsa LePage.
“Something exciting,” said Bridget, “let’s hang Miss Pickswinger.” All assented enthusiastically except Minnie McCloskey.
“‘Fraid cat,” sneered the others, “‘fraid you’ll get punished.”
“No,” said Minnie, “but think of all she’s done for me.”
They struck her savagely with chairs, locked her in and rushed off. There was but one chance. Minnie quickly braided a rope out of rugs, lowered herself from the window, quickly weaved another rope out of grass, raised herself to Miss Pickswinger’s window. They were not there. There was yet time to outwit them. Suddenly she gasped in horror.
*****
A moment later the rollicking crowd of girls was confronted in front of Miss Pickswinger’s door by a slender figure. It was Minnie.
“You cannot pass,” she said sternly.
“Do you mean to say we cannot hang Miss Pickswinger if we wish?” cried Louise, indignantly.
Minnie shivered with emotion and sneezed with emotion. Then she spoke.
“There is no need. She has gotten one of her bedroom slippers in her mouth and choked to death.”
The girls rushed off shouting “Holiday” and striking each other, playfully on the head with stones, but Minnie, in the room above, threw herself down upon the heap of glass in the corner and sobbed as if her heart would break.
THE OLD FRONTIERSMAN
A story of the frontier
It was the middle of the forest. A figure might have been noticed crawling along, sniffing at the ground. It was Old Davy Underbush, the frontiersman and b’ar hunter. He was completely invisible and inaudible. The only way you could perceive him was by the sense of smell.
He was dressed as a frontiersman (cf. “what the men will wear,” theatre programs of 1776.) On his feet he wore moccasins made from the skin of the wood weasel. Around his legs were coonskin spats which ran into his trousers made of sheepskin; these extended to the waist. He wore a belt made of an old rattlesnake and a long bearskin coat. Around his head was wrapped a fishskin hat. At his hip hung horrible trophies of Indian warfare. One scalp of Object the Ojibway still wet with Oleaqua hung there beside the pompadour of Eardrum the Iroquois and the cowlick of Bootblack the Blackfoot. By his side walked “Tres Bien,” his trusty Eskimo cheese-hound.
He carried a muzzle loading shotgun, an old horse-pistol, and a set of razors. He was on the trail of Sen-Sen the Seneca and Omlette the Omega. They had come into the clearing and drunk all the fire-water from the fire-water factory. As they left they had, in the usual Indian manner, carved their initials on each tree they passed and it was by this that the astute old frontiersman had been sent out to track them.
It was now too dark to read the initials plainly and Davy often got them mixed up with those of other savages who had passed that way before. For three weeks the old b’ar hunter had followed them, living on the berries from the bushes and sometimes when no berries were to be found, snatching great handfuls of grass and dry leaves and devouring them.
As he crawled along he was thinking. If he did not find the redskins soon he would have to eat his moccasins. His scarred brow was knit with worry.
All around him were the noises of the forest; the long sad “Hoo” of the Huron, the plaintive sigh of the Sioux, and the light cackle of the Apache. Suddenly a new sound broke the stillness. It was the dry harsh cawing of the Seneca. Davy ran forward noiselessly. He was careful to make no sound. He ran with his feet completely off the ground toleave no clue for the watchful redmen. Sure enough the savages were in a little clearing in the forest playing on their primitive musical instruments. Sen-Sen the Seneca sat playing “The Last Rose of Summer” on an old comb wrapped in tissue paper and Omlette the Omega accompanied him on the snare Tom-Tom. The old frontiersman burst in on them waving his gun at them and threatening their scalps with one of his tempered razors.
The fight which ensued was furious.
The savages pulled his coat over his ears and hit him on the head with their bows and arrows. One would kneel behind Davy and the other would push the old frontiersman over him. Sen-Sen combed all the hair of his sheepskin trousers the wrong way and frantic with pain the old bar hunter fought on.
Finally Omlette the Omega withdrew to a distance and taking a station behind the old frontiersman let fly an arrow at him which passed through his sheepskin trousers and pierced his catskin underwear. The old b’ar hunter expired.
The savages fried him for dinner but found, to their disappointment that he was all dark meat owing to his lifelong exposure to the sun.
THE SPIRE AND THE GARGOYLE
I
The night mist fell. From beyond the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them so that the dreaming peaks seemed still in lofty aspiration toward the stars. Figures that dotted the daytime like ants now brushed along as ghosts in and out of the night. Even the buildings seemed infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by a hundred faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter hour and one of the squares of light in an east campus recitation hall was blotted out for an instant as a figure emerged. It paused and resolved itself into a boy who stretched his arms wearily, and advancing threw himself down full length on the damp grass by the sun-dial. The cool bathed his eyes and helped to force away the tiresome picture of what he had just left, a picture that, in the two strenuous weeks of examinations now just over, had become indelibly impressed upon his memory — a room with the air fairly vibrating with nervous tension, silent with presence of twenty boys working desperately against time, searching every corner of tired brains for words and figures which seemed forever lost. The boy out on the grass opened his eyes and looked back at the three pale blurs which marked the windows of the examination room. Again he heard:
“There will be fifteen minutes more allowed for this examination.” There had followed silence broken by the snapping of verifying watches and the sharp frantic race of pencils. One by one the seats had been left vacant and the little preceptor with the tired look had piled the booklets higher. Then the boy had left the room to the music of three last scratching pencils.
In his case it all depended on this examination. If he passed it he would become a sophomore the following fall; if he failed, it meant that his college days faded out with the last splendors of June. Fifty cut recitations in his first wild term had made necessary the extra course of which he had just taken the examination. Winter muses, unacademic and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, had stolen hours from the dreary stretches of February and March. Later, time had crept insidiously through the lazy April afternoons and seemed so intangible in the long Spring twilights. So June found him unprepared. Evening after evening the senior singing, drifting over the campus and up to his window, drew his mind for an instant to the unconscious poetry of it and he, goading on his spoiled and over-indulged faculties, bent to the revengeful books again. Through the careless shell that covered his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and almost reverent liking for the gray walls and gothic peaks and all they symbolized in the store of the ages of antiquity.
In view of his window a tower sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher till its uppermost end was half invisible against the morning skies. The transiency and relative unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of a sort of apostolic succession had first impressed themselves on him in contrast with this spire. In a lecture or in an article or in conversation, he had learned that Gothic architecture with its upward trend was peculiarly adapted to colleges, and the symbolism of this idea had become personal to him. Once he had associated the beauty of the campus night with the parades and singing crowds that streamed through it, but in the last m
onth the more silent stretches of sward and the quiet halls with an occasional late-burning scholastic light held his imagination with a stronger grasp — and this tower in full view of his window became the symbol of his perception. There was something terribly pure in the slope of the chaste stone, something which led and directed and called. To him the spire became an ideal. He had suddenly begun trying desperately to stay in college.
“Well, it’s over,” he whispered aloud to himself, wetting his hands in the damp, and running them through his hair. “All over.”
He felt an enormous sense of relief. The last pledge had been duly indited in the last book, and his destiny lay no longer in his own hands, but in those of the little preceptor, whoever he was: the boy had never seen him before — and the face, — he looked like one of the gargoyles that nested in dozens of niches in some of the buildings. His glasses, his eyes, or his mouth gave a certain grotesque upward slant to his whole cast of feature, that branded him as of gargoyle origin, or at least gargoyle kinship. He was probably marking the papers. Perhaps, mused the boy, a bit of an interview, an arrangement for a rereading in case of the ever possible failure would be — to interrupt his thought the light went out in the examination room and a moment later three figures edged along the path beside him while a fourth struck off south towards the town. The boy jumped to his feet and, shaking himself like a wet spaniel, started after the preceptor. The man turned to him sharply as he murmured a good evening and started trudging along beside.
“Awful night,” said the boy.
The gargoyle only grunted.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 358
