Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Still thrilled, almost buoyant, he walked on, passing the high-piled masonry of the branch Post-Office and the Central Palace on his left. Against high stars the twin Power-House chimneys stood outlined in steel; on the right endless blocks of brown-stone dwellings stretched northward, some already converted into shops where print-sellers, dealers in old books, and here and there antiquaries, had constructed show-windows.

  Firemen lounged outside the Eighth Battalion quarters; here and there a grocer’s or wine-seller’s windows remained illuminated where those who were neither well-to-do nor very poor passed to and fro with little packages which seemed a burden under the sultry skies.

  At last, ahead, the pseudo-oriental towers of a synagogue varied the flat skyline, and a moment later he could see the New Thought Laundry, the Tonsorial Drawing Rooms, the Undertaker’s discreetly illuminated windows, and finally the bay-window of his own recent Real-Estate office, now transmogrified into the Dankmere Galleries of Old Masters, Fayre and Quarren, proprietors.

  The window appeared to be brilliantly illuminated behind the drawn curtains; and Quarren, surprised and vexed, concluded that the little Englishman was again entertaining. So it perplexed and astonished him to find the Earl sitting on the front steps, his straw hat on the back of his head, smoking. At the same moment from within the house a confused and indescribable murmur was wafted to his ears as though many people were applauding.

  “What on earth is going on inside?” he asked, bewildered.

  “You told me over the telephone that Karl Westguard might have the gallery for this evening,” said the Englishman calmly. “So I let him have it.”

  “What did he want of it? Who has he got in there?” — demanded Quarren as another ripple of applause sounded from within.

  Dankmere thought a moment: “I really don’t know the audience, Quarren — they’re not a very fragrant lot.”

  “What audience? Who are they?”

  “You Americans would call them a ‘tough-looking bunch — except Westguard and Bleecker De Groot and Mrs. Caldera — —”

  “Cyrille Caldera and De Groot! What’s that silly old Dandy doing down here?”

  “Diffusing sweetness and light among the unwashed; telling them that there are no such things as classes, that wealth is no barrier to brotherhood, that the heart of Fifth Avenue beats as warmly and guilelessly as the heart of Essex Street, and that its wealth-burdened inhabitants have long desired to fraternise with the benchers in Paradise Park.”

  “Who put Westguard up to this?” asked Quarren, aghast.

  “De Groot. Karl is writing a levelling novel calculated to annihilate caste. The Undertaker next door furnished the camp-chairs; the corner grocer the collation; Westguard, Mrs. Caldera, and Bleecker De Groot the mind-food. Go in and look ’em over.”

  The front door was standing partly open; the notes of a piano floated through; a high and soulful tenor voice was singing “Perfumes of Araby,” but Quarren did not notice any as he stepped inside.

  “A high and soulful tenor was singing ‘Perfumes of Araby.’”

  Not daring to leave his suit-case in the hallway he kept on along the passage to the extension where the folding doors were locked. Here he deposited his luggage, locked the door, then walked back to the front parlour and, unobserved, slipped in, seating himself among the battered derelicts of the rear row.

  A thin, hirsute young man had just finished scattering the perfumes of Araby; other perfumes nearly finished Quarren; but he held his ground and gazed grimly at an improvised platform where sat in a half-circle and in full evening dress, Karl Westguard, Cyrille Caldera and Bleecker De Groot. Also there was a table supporting a Calla lily.

  Westguard was saying very earnestly: “The world calls me a novelist. I am not! Thank Heaven, I aspire to something loftier. I am not a mere scribbler of fiction; I am a man with a message — a plain, simple, earnest, warm-hearted humanitarian who has been roused to righteous indignation by the terrible contrast in this miserable city between wealth and poverty — —”

  “That’s right,” interrupted a hoarse voice; “it’s all a con game, an’ the perlice is into it, too!”

  “T’hell wit te bulls! Croak ‘em!” observed another gentleman thickly.

  Westguard, slightly discountenanced by the significant cheers which greeted this sentiment, introduced Bleecker De Groot; and the rotund old Beau came jauntily forward, holding out both immaculate hands with an artlessly comprehensive gesture calculated to make the entire East Side feel that it was reposing upon his beautifully laundered bosom.

  “Ah, my friends!” cried De Groot, “if you could only realise how great is the love for humanity within my breast! — If you could only know of the hours and days and even weeks that I have devoted to solving the problems of the poor!

  “And I have solved them — every one. And this is the answer!” — grasping dauntlessly at a dirty hand and shaking it— “this!” seizing another— “and this, and this! And now I ask you, what is this mute answer which I have given you?”

  “De merry mitt,” said a voice, promptly. Mr. De Groot smiled with sweetness and indulgence.

  “I apprehend your quaint and trenchant vernacular,” he said. “It is the ‘merry mitt’ — the ‘glad glove,’ the ‘happy hand’! Fifth Avenue clasps palms with Doyers Street — —”

  “Ding!” said a weary voice, “yer in wrong, boss. It’s nix f’r the Tongs wit us gents. We transfer to Avenue A.”

  Mr. De Groot merely smiled indulgently. “The rich,” he said, “are not really happy.” His plump, highly coloured features altered; presently a priceless tear glimmered in his monocle eye; and he brushed it away with a kind of noble pity for his own weakness.

  “Dear, dear friends,” he said tremulously, “believe me — oh, believe me that the rich are not happy! Only the perspiring labourer knows what is true contentment. The question of poverty is a great social question. With me it is a religion. Oh, I could go on forever on this subject, dear friends, and talk on and on and on — —”

  Emotion again checked him — or perhaps he had lost the thread of his discourse — or possibly he had attained its limit — but he filled it out by coming down from the platform and shaking hands so vigorously that the gardenia in his lapel presently fell out.

  Cyrille Caldera rose, fresh and dainty and smiling, and discoursed single-tax and duplex tenements, getting the two subjects mixed but not minding that. Also she pointed at the Calla lily and explained that the lily was the emblem of purity. Which may have had something to do with something or other.

  Then Westguard arose once more and told them all about the higher type of novel he was writing for humanity’s sake, and became so interested and absorbed in his own business that the impatient shuffling of shabby feet on the floor alone interrupted him.

  “Has anybody,” inquired De Groot, sweetly, “any vital question to ask — any burning inquiry of deeper, loftier import, which has perhaps long remained unanswered in his heart?”

  A gentleman known usually as “Mike the Mink” arose and indicated with derisive thumb a picture among the Dankmere collection, optimistically attributed to Correggio:

  “Is that Salome, mister?” he inquired with a leer.

  De Groot looked at the canvas, slightly startled.

  “No, my dear friend; that is a picture painted hundreds of years ago by a great Italian master. It is called ‘Danaë.’ Jupiter, you know, came to her in a shower of gold — —”

  “They all have to come across with it,” remarked the Mink.

  Somebody observed that if the police caught the dago who painted it they’d pinch him.

  To make a diversion, and with her own fair hands, Cyrille Caldera summoned the derelicts to sandwiches and ginger-ale; and De Groot, dashing more unmanly moisture from his monocle, went about resolutely shaking hands, while Westguard and the hirsute young man sang “Comrades” with much feeling.

  Quarren, still unrecognised, edged his way out and rej
oined Dankmere on the front stoop. Neither made any comment on the proceedings.

  Later the derelicts, moodily replete, shuffled forth into the night, herded lovingly by De Groot, still shaking hands.

  From the corner of the street opposite, Quarren and Dankmere observed their departure, and, later, they beheld De Groot and Mrs. Caldera slip around the block and discreetly disappear into a 1912 touring-car with silver mountings and two men in livery on the box.

  Westguard, truer to his principles, took a tram and Quarren and the Earl returned to their gallery with mixed emotions, and opened every window top and bottom.

  “It’s all right in its way, I suppose,” said Quarren. “Probably De Groot means well, but there’s no conversation possible between a man who has just dined rather heavily, and a man who has no chance of dining at all.”

  “Like preaching Christ to the poor from a Fifth Avenue pulpit,” said Dankmere, vaguely.

  “How do you mean?”

  “A church on a side street would seem to serve the purpose. And the poor need the difference.”

  “I don’t know about those matters.”

  “No; I don’t either. It’s easy, cheap, and popular to knock the clergy.... Still, somehow or other, I can’t seem to forget that the disciples were poor — and it bothers me a lot, Quarren.”

  Quarren said: “Haven’t you and I enough to worry us concerning our own morals?”

  Dankmere, who had been closing up and piling together the Undertaker’s camp-chairs, looked around at the younger man.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “I said that probably you and I would find no time left to criticise either De Groot or the clergy, if we used our leisure in self-examination.”

  His lordship went on piling up chairs. When he finished he started wandering around, hands in his pockets. Then he turned out all the electric lamps, drew the bay-window curtains wide so that the silvery radiance from the arc-light opposite made the darkness dimly lustrous.

  A little breeze stirred the hair on Quarren’s forehead; Dankmere dropped into the depths of an armchair near him. For a while they sat together in darkness and silence, then the Englishman said abruptly:

  “You’ve been very kind to me.”

  Quarren glanced up surprised.

  “Why not?”

  “Because nobody else has any decent words to say to me or of me.”

  Quarren, amused, said: “How do you know that I have, Dankmere?”

  “A man knows some things. For example, most people take me for an ass — they don’t tell me so but I know it. And if they don’t take me for an ass they assume that I’m something worse — because I have a title of sorts, no money, an inclination for the stage and the people who make a living out of it.”

  “Also,” Quarren reminded him, “you are looking for a wealthy wife.”

  “God bless my soul! Am I the only chap in America who happens to be doing that?”

  “No; but you’re doing it conspicuously.”

  “You mean I’m honest about it?”

  Quarren laughed: “Anyway perhaps that’s one reason why I like you. At first I also thought it was merely stupidity.”

  Dankmere crossed his short legs and lighted his pipe:

  “The majority of your better people have managed not to know me. I’ve met a lot of men of sorts, but they draw the line across their home thresholds — most of them. Is it the taint of vaudeville that their wives sniff at, or my rather celebrated indigence?”

  “Both, Dankmere — and then some.”

  “Oh, I see. Many thanks for telling me. I take it you mean that it was my first wife they shy at.”

  Quarren remained silent.

  “She was a bar-maid,” remarked the Earl. “We were quite happy — until she died.”

  Quarren made a slight motion of comprehension.

  “Of course my marrying her damned us both,” observed the Earl.

  “Of course.”

  “Quite so. People would have stood for anything else.... But she wouldn’t — you may think it odd.... And I was in love — so there you are.”

  For a while they smoked in the semi-darkness without exchanging further speech; and finally Dankmere knocked out his pipe, pocketed it, and put on his hat.

  “You know,” he said, “I’m not really an ass. My tastes and my caste don’t happen to coincide — that’s all, Quarren.”

  They walked together to the front stoop.

  “When do we open shop?” asked the Earl, briskly.

  “As soon as I get the reports from our experts.”

  “Won’t business be dead all summer?”

  “We may do some business with agents and dealers.”

  “I see. You and I are to alternate as salesmen?”

  “For a while. When things start I want to rent the basement and open a department for repairing, relining and cleaning; and I’d like to be able to do some of the work myself.”

  “You?”

  “Surely. It interests me immensely.”

  “You’re welcome I’m sure,” said Dankmere drily. “But who’s to keep the books and attend to correspondence?”

  “We’ll get somebody. A young woman, who says she is well recommended, advertised in Thursday’s papers, and I wrote her from Witch-Hollow to come around Sunday morning.”

  “That’s to-morrow.”

  Quarren nodded.

  So Dankmere trotted jauntily away into the night, and Quarren locked the gallery and went to bed, certain that he was destined to dream of Strelsa. But the sleek, narrow head and slightly protruding eyes of Langly Sprowl was the only vision that peered cautiously at him through his sleep.

  The heated silence of a Sunday morning in June awoke him from a somewhat restless night. Bathed and shaved, he crept forth limply to breakfast at the Founders’ Club where he still retained a membership. There was not a soul there excepting himself and the servants — scarcely a person on the avenues and cross-streets which he traversed going and coming, only one or two old men selling Sunday papers at street-stands, an old hag gleaning in the gutters, and the sparrows.

  Clothing was a burden. He had some pongee garments which he put on, installed himself in the gallery with a Sunday paper, an iced lime julep, and a cigarette, and awaited the event of the young lady who had advertised that she knew all about book-keeping, stenography, and typewriting, and could prove it.

  “She came about noon — a pale young girl, very slim in her limp black gown.”

  She came about noon — a pale young girl, very slim in her limp black gown, and, at Quarren’s invitation, seated herself at the newly purchased desk of the firm.

  Here, at his request she took a page or two of dictation from him and typed it rapidly and accurately.

  She had her own system of book-keeping which she explained to the young man who seemed to think it satisfactory. Then he asked her what salary she expected, and she told him, timidly.

  “All right,” he said with a smile, “if it suits you it certainly suits me. Will you begin to-morrow?”

  “Whenever you wish, Mr. Quarren.”

  “Well, there won’t be very much to do for a while,” he said laughingly, “except to sit at that desk and look ornamental.”

  She flushed, then smiled and thanked him for giving her the position, adding with another blush that she would do her best.

  “Your best,” he said amiably, “will probably be exactly what we require.... Did you bring any letters?”

  She hesitated: “One,” she said gravely. She searched in her reticule, found it, and handed it to Quarren who read it in silence, then returned it to her.

  “You were stenographer in Mr. Sprowl’s private office?”

  “Yes.”

  “This letter isn’t signed by Mr. Sprowl.”

  “No, by Mr. Kyte, his private secretary.”

  “It seems you were there only six months.”

  “Six months.”

  “And before that where were
you?”

  “At home.”

  “Oh; Mr. Sprowl was your first employer!”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  The girl hesitated so long that he thought she had not understood, and was about to repeat the question when something in her pallor and in her uplifted eyes checked him.

  “I don’t know why I was sent away,” she said in a colourless voice.

  He thought for a while, then, carelessly: “I take it that there was nothing irregular in your conduct?”

  “No.”

  “You’d tell me if there was, wouldn’t you?”

  She lifted her dark eyes to his. “Yes,” she said.

  How much of an expert he was at judging faces he did not know, but he was perfectly satisfied with himself when she took her leave.

  And when Dankmere came in after luncheon he said:

  “I’ve engaged a book-keeper. Her name is Jessie Vining. She’s evidently unhappy, poor, underfed, and the prettiest thing you ever saw out of a business college. So, being unhappy, poor, underfed and pretty, I take it that she’s all to the good.”

  “It’s a generous world of men,” said Dankmere— “so I guess she is good.”

  “I’m sure of it. She was Sprowl’s private stenographer — and he sent her away.... There are three reasons why he might have dismissed her. I’ve taken my choice of them.”

  “Did he give her a letter?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Then I’ve taken my choice, too.”

  “Kyte ventured to give her a letter,” said Quarren. “I’ve heard that Kyte could be decent sometimes.”