The Four Million

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The girl looked at him calmly, and then smiled.

"Fainted, didn't I?" she asked, weakly. "Well, who wouldn't? You try
going without anything to eat for three days and see!"

"Himmel!" exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. "Wait till I come back."

He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he
was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it.
With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the
restaurant. On the table he laid them--bread and butter, cold meats,
cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and
one of red-hot tea.

"This is ridiculous," said Rudolf, blusteringly, "to go without eating.
You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready." He
helped her to a chair at the table and asked: "Is there a cup for the
tea?" "On the shelf by the window," she answered. When he turned again
with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon
a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a
woman's unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured
the cup full of milk. "Drink that first" he ordered, "and then you shall
have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you shall
have a pickle to-morrow. And now, if you'll allow me to be your guest
we'll have supper."

He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl's eyes and
brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty
ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young
man's presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing--not
as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great stress
gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human. But
gradually, with the return of strength and comfort, came also a sense of
the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him her little
story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at every day--the
shop girl's story of insufficient wages, further reduced by "fines" that
go to swell the store's profits; of time lost through illness; and then
of lost positions, lost hope, and--the knock of the adventurer upon the
green door.

But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in
"Junie's Love Test."

"To think of you going through all that," he exclaimed.

"It was something fierce," said the girl, solemnly.

"And you have no relatives or friends in the city?"

"None whatever."

"I am all alone in the world, too," said Rudolf, after a pause.

"I am glad of that," said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased the
young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.

Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.

"I'm awfully sleepy," she said, "and I feel so good."

Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. "I'll say good-night. A long night's
sleep will be fine for you."

He held out his hand, and she took it and said "good-night." But her
eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that
he answered it with words.

"Oh, I'm coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting along. You
can't get rid of me so easily."

Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much less
important than the fact that he had come, she asked: "How did you come
to knock at my door?"

He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden
jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous
as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would
never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which
she had been driven by her great distress.

"One of our piano tuners lives in this house," he said. "I knocked at
your door by mistake."

The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her
smile.

At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him.
And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back,
ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations.
Every door that he found in the house was painted green.

Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was still
there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.

"Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?" he
asked.

In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid
advertisement of his master's profession.

"Dar it is, boss," he said, pointing down the street. "But I 'spect you
is a little late for de fust act."

Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre
the blazing electric sign of its new play, "The Green Door."

"I'm informed dat it's a fust-rate show, sah," said the negro. "De agent
what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute a few
of his cards along with de doctah's. May I offer you one of de doctah's
cards, sah?"

At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass
of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he
buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp
post on the corner:

"All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way
for me to find her."

Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf
Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.





FROM THE CABBY'S SEAT


The cabby has his point of view. It is more single-minded, perhaps, than
that of a follower of any other calling. From the high, swaying seat
of his hansom he looks upon his fellow-men as nomadic particles, of no
account except when possessed of migratory desires. He is Jehu, and you
are goods in transit. Be you President or vagabond, to cabby you are
only a Fare, he takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles your vertebrae
and sets you down.

When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with legal
rates you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you have left
your pocketbook behind you are made to realise the mildness of Dante's
imagination.

It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby's singleness of purpose
and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom's peculiar
construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an
unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant
leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin,
you sit like a rat in a trap--you, before whom butlers cringe on solid
land--and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic
sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.

Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents. You are
a cargo at sea, and the "cherub that sits up aloft" has Davy Jones's
street and number by heart.

One night there were sounds of revelry in the big brick tenement-house
next door but one to McGary's Family Cafe. The sounds seemed to emanate
from the apartments of the Walsh family. The sidewalk was obstructed by
an assortment of interested neighbours, who opened a lane from time to
time for a hurrying messenger bearing from McGary's goods pertinent to
festivity and diversion. The sidewalk contingent was engaged in comment
and discussion from which it made no effort to eliminate the news that
Norah Walsh was being married.

In the fulness of time there was an eruption of the merry-makers to
the sidewalk. The uninvited guests enveloped and permeated them, and
upon the night air rose joyous cries, congratulations, laughter and
unclassified noises born of McGary's oblations to the hymeneal scene.

Close to the curb stood Jerry O'Donovan's cab. Night-hawk was Jerry
called; but no more lustrous or cleaner hansom than his ever closed its
doors upon point lace and November violets. And Jerry's horse! I am
within bounds when I tell you that he was stuffed with oats until one of
those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about
having expressmen arrested, would have smiled--yes, smiled--to have seen
him.

Among the shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of
Jerry's high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his
nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of
millionaires and by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned green
coat, admired in the vicinity of McGary's. It was plain that Jerry had
usurped the functions of his cab, and was carrying a "load." Indeed, the
figure may be extended and he be likened to a bread-waggon if we admit
the testimony of a youthful spectator, who was heard to remark "Jerry
has got a bun."

From somewhere among the throng in the street or else out of the thin
stream of pedestrians a young woman tripped and stood by the cab. The
professional hawk's eye of Jerry caught the movement. He made a lurch
for the cab, overturning three or four onlookers and himself--no! he
caught the cap of a water-plug and kept his feet. Like a sailor shinning
up the ratlins during a squall Jerry mounted to his professional seat.
Once he was there McGary's liquids were baffled. He seesawed on the
mizzenmast of his craft as safe as a Steeple Jack rigged to the flagpole
of a skyscraper.

"Step in, lady," said Jerry, gathering his lines. The young woman
stepped into the cab; the doors shut with a bang; Jerry's whip cracked
in the air; the crowd in the gutter scattered, and the fine hansom
dashed away 'crosstown.

When the oat-spry horse had hedged a little his first spurt of speed
Jerry broke the lid of his cab and called down through the aperture in
the voice of a cracked megaphone, trying to please:

"Where, now, will ye be drivin' to?"

"Anywhere you please," came up the answer, musical and contented.

"'Tis drivin' for pleasure she is," thought Jerry. And then he suggested
as a matter of course:

"Take a thrip around in the park, lady. 'Twill be ilegant cool and
fine."

"Just as you like," answered the fare, pleasantly.

The cab headed for Fifth avenue and sped up that perfect street. Jerry
bounced and swayed in his seat. The potent fluids of McGary were
disquieted and they sent new fumes to his head. He sang an ancient
song of Killisnook and brandished his whip like a baton.

Inside the cab the fare sat up straight on the cushions, looking to
right and left at the lights and houses. Even in the shadowed hansom
her eyes shone like stars at twilight.

When they reached Fifty-ninth street Jerry's head was bobbing and his
reins were slack. But his horse turned in through the park gate and
began the old familiar nocturnal round. And then the fare leaned back,
entranced, and breathed deep the clean, wholesome odours of grass and
leaf and bloom. And the wise beast in the shafts, knowing his ground,
struck into his by-the-hour gait and kept to the right of the road.

Habit also struggled successfully against Jerry's increasing torpor. He
raised the hatch of his storm-tossed vessel and made the inquiry that
cabbies do make in the park.

"Like shtop at the Cas-sino, lady? Gezzer r'freshm's, 'n lish'n the
music. Ev'body shtops."

"I think that would be nice," said the fare.

They reined up with a plunge at the Casino entrance. The cab doors flew
open. The fare stepped directly upon the floor. At once she was caught
in a web of ravishing music and dazzled by a panorama of lights and
colours. Some one slipped a little square card into her hand on which
was printed a number--34. She looked around and saw her cab twenty yards
away already lining up in its place among the waiting mass of carriages,
cabs and motor cars. And then a man who seemed to be all shirt-front
danced backward before her; and next she was seated at a little table by
a railing over which climbed a jessamine vine.

There seemed to be a wordless invitation to purchase; she consulted
a collection of small coins in a thin purse, and received from them
license to order a glass of beer. There she sat, inhaling and absorbing
it all--the new-coloured, new-shaped life in a fairy palace in an
enchanted wood.

At fifty tables sat princes and queens clad in all the silks and gems of
the world. And now and then one of them would look curiously at Jerry's
fare. They saw a plain figure dressed in a pink silk of the kind that is
tempered by the word "foulard," and a plain face that wore a look of
love of life that the queens envied.

Twice the long hands of the clocks went round, Royalties thinned from
their _al fresco_ thrones, and buzzed or clattered away in their
vehicles of state. The music retired into cases of wood and bags of
leather and baize. Waiters removed cloths pointedly near the plain
figure sitting almost alone.

Jerry's fare rose, and held out her numbered card simply:

"Is there anything coming on the ticket?" she asked.

A waiter told her it was her cab check, and that she should give it to
the man at the entrance. This man took it, and called the number. Only
three hansoms stood in line. The driver of one of them went and routed
out Jerry asleep in his cab. He swore deeply, climbed to the captain's
bridge and steered his craft to the pier. His fare entered, and the cab
whirled into the cool fastnesses of the park along the shortest homeward
cuts.

At the gate a glimmer of reason in the form of sudden suspicion seized
upon Jerry's beclouded mind. One or two things occurred to him. He
stopped his horse, raised the trap and dropped his phonographic voice,
like a lead plummet, through the aperture:

"I want to see four dollars before goin' any further on th' thrip. Have
ye got th' dough?"

"Four dollars!" laughed the fare, softly, "dear me, no. I've only got a
few pennies and a dime or two."

Jerry shut down the trap and slashed his oat-fed horse. The clatter
of hoofs strangled but could not drown the sound of his profanity.
He shouted choking and gurgling curses at the starry heavens; he cut
viciously with his whip at passing vehicles; he scattered fierce and
ever-changing oaths and imprecations along the streets, so that a late
truck driver, crawling homeward, heard and was abashed. But he knew his
recourse, and made for it at a gallop.

At the house with the green lights beside the steps he pulled up. He
flung wide the cab doors and tumbled heavily to the ground.

"Come on, you," he said, roughly.

His fare came forth with the Casino dreamy smile still on her plain
face. Jerry took her by the arm and led her into the police station. A
gray-moustached sergeant looked keenly across the desk. He and the cabby
were no strangers.

"Sargeant," began Jerry in his old raucous, martyred, thunderous tones
of complaint. "I've got a fare here that--"

Jerry paused. He drew a knotted, red hand across his brow. The fog set
up by McGary was beginning to clear away.

"A fare, sargeant," he continued, with a grin, "that I want to
inthroduce to ye. It's me wife that I married at ould man Walsh's this
avening. And a divil of a time we had, 'tis thrue. Shake hands wid th'
sargeant, Norah, and we'll be off to home."

Before stepping into the cab Norah sighed profoundly.

"I've had such a nice time, Jerry," said she.





AN UNFINISHED STORY


We no longer groan and heap ashes upon our heads when the flames of
Tophet are mentioned. For, even the preachers have begun to tell us
that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that
the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction. This is
a pleasing hypothesis; but there lingers yet some of the old, goodly
terror of orthodoxy.

There are but two subjects upon which one may discourse with a free
imagination, and without the possibility of being controverted. You may
talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say. Both
Morpheus and the bird are incompetent witnesses; and your listener dare
not attack your recital. The baseless fabric of a vision, then, shall
furnish my theme--chosen with apologies and regrets instead of the more
limited field of pretty Polly's small talk.

I had a dream that was so far removed from the higher criticism that it
had to do with the ancient, respectable, and lamented bar-of-judgment
theory.

Gabriel had played his trump; and those of us who could not follow suit
were arraigned for examination. I noticed at one side a gathering of
professional bondsmen in solemn black and collars that buttoned behind;
but it seemed there was some trouble about their real estate titles; and
they did not appear to be getting any of us out.

A fly cop--an angel policeman--flew over to me and took me by the left
wing. Near at hand was a group of very prosperous-looking spirits
arraigned for judgment.

"Do you belong with that bunch?" the policeman asked.

"Who are they?" was my answer.

"Why," said he, "they are--"

But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should
occupy.

Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging, or stuffed
peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they keep in
department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six dollars per
week. The remainder was credited to her and debited to somebody else's
account in the ledger kept by G---- Oh, primal energy, you say, Reverend
Doctor--Well then, in the Ledger of Primal Energy.

During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars per
week. It would be instructive to know how she lived on that amount.
Don't care? Very well; probably you are interested in larger amounts.
Six dollars is a larger amount. I will tell you how she lived on six
dollars per week.

One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat-pin within an
eighth of an inch of her _medulla oblongata_, she said to her chum,
Sadie--the girl that waits on you with her left side:

"Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy."

"You never did!" exclaimed Sadie admiringly. "Well, ain't you the lucky
one? Piggy's an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places.
He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have
swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You'll have a swell time,
Dulce."

Dulcie hurried homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks showed
the delicate pink of life's--real life's--approaching dawn. It was
Friday; and she had fifty cents left of her last week's wages.

The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The
electric lights of Broadway were glowing--calling moths from miles, from
leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and
attend the singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces like
those carved on cherry stones by the old salts in sailors' homes, turned
and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them. Manhattan,
the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead-white,
heavy-odoured petals.

Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an imitation
lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been spent
otherwise--fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten cents
for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her small store of savings;
and five cents was to be squandered for licorice drops--the kind that
made your cheek look like the toothache, and last as long. The licorice
was an extravagance--almost a carouse--but what is life without
pleasures?

Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a
furnished room and a boardinghouse. In a furnished room, other people
do not know it when you go hungry.

Dulcie went up to her room--the third floor back in a West Side
brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond
is the hardest substance known. Their mistake. Landladies know of a
compound beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it in the tips
of gas-burners; and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in vain
until one's fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not remove it;
therefore let us call it immovable.

So Dulcie lit the gas. In its one-fourth-candlepower glow we will
observe the room.

Couch-bed, dresser, table, washstand, chair--of this much the landlady
was guilty. The rest was Dulcie's. On the dresser were her treasures--a
gilt china vase presented to her by Sadie, a calendar issued by a pickle
works, a book on the divination of dreams, some rice powder in a glass
dish, and a cluster of artificial cherries tied with a pink ribbon.

Against the wrinkly mirror stood pictures of General Kitchener, William
Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one
wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O'Callahan in a Roman helmet.
Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemon-coloured child assaulting an
inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie's final judgment in art; but
it had never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers
of stolen copes; no critic had elevated his eyebrows at her infantile
entomologist.

Piggy was to call for her at seven. While she swiftly makes ready, let
us discreetly face the other way and gossip.

For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On week-days her
breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the
gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally
on veal chops and pineapple fritters at "Billy's" restaurant, at a
cost of twenty-five cents--and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York
presents so many temptations for one to run into extravagance. She had
her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents
for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening papers--show me a New
Yorker going without his daily paper!--came to six cents; and two
Sunday papers--one for the personal column and the other to read--were
ten cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes,
and--

I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles
performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen
poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie's life some of those joys
that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural,
inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney
Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. 'Tis a weary thing to count your
pleasures by summers instead of by hours.

Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving stigma
was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of-three-letters
lesson in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggy's biography.
He was fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat, and the
magnanimity of a cat. . . He wore expensive clothes; and was a
connoisseur in starvation. He could look at a shop-girl and tell you
to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more
nourishing than marshmallows and tea. He hung about the shopping
districts, and prowled around in department stores with his invitations
to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets at the end of a string
look down upon him. He is a type; I can dwell upon him no longer; my
pen is not the kind intended for him; I am no carpenter.

At ten minutes to seven Dulcie was ready. She looked at herself in the
wrinkly mirror. The reflection was satisfactory. The dark blue dress,
fitting without a wrinkle, the hat with its jaunty black feather, the
but-slightly-soiled gloves--all representing self-denial, even of food
itself--were vastly becoming.

Dulcie forgot everything else for a moment except that she was
beautiful, and that life was about to lift a corner of its mysterious
veil for her to observe its wonders. No gentleman had ever asked her
out before. Now she was going for a brief moment into the glitter and
exalted show.

The girls said that Piggy was a "spender." There would be a grand
dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things
to eat that strangely twisted the girls' jaws when they tried to tell
about them. No doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue
pongee suit in a window that she knew--by saving twenty cents a week
instead of ten, in--let's see--Oh, it would run into years! But there
was a second-hand store in Seventh Avenue where--

Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood there
with a spurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas.

"A gentleman's downstairs to see you," she said. "Name is Mr. Wiggins."

By such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had to take him
seriously.

Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then she
stopped still, and bit her underlip hard. While looking in her mirror
she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a
long slumber. She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad,
beautiful, stern eyes--the only one there was to approve or condemn
what she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful
reproach on his handsome, melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his
wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on the dresser.

Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady.

"Tell him I can't go," she said dully. "Tell him I'm sick, or something.
Tell him I'm not going out."