Chapter V: Part 5

In the front room sat a man who wasn’t as old as he looked, but whose apparent age was caused by ten hours a day in an attempt to make a living for himself. For twenty years he had been ground down by fate, and at the end of it all he had nothing, and he was in debt to the world for exactly three score of years.

Now at the last mile post he had come face to face with a tragedy.

In one calloused hand he held a telegram. In the other was the photograph of a girl--good looking in a way, saucy, blue-eyed and blonde. It had been taken in theatrical costume and that told half of the story. The other half was in the telegram.

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and read again:

“Your daughter died in the hospital here to-day; please advise as to the disposition of the remains.”

It bore date of a Southern city, and was signed by the manager of a barn-storming company of show people.

If you read the newspapers you must have read part of the story. You will read the rest of it here--the part that wasn’t told, because an ordinary chorus girl isn’t of sufficient importance to take up more than a very little space in the prints, unless, of course, she does something so violently tragic and sensational that she rises above the common herd and becomes at once a figure of almost national importance, like the young woman who once tried to shoot a senator, or the one who danced nude before a select company of young spendthrifts, or the one who made $50,000 in stocks with the kind assistance of a “gentleman friend.”

Just four months before, the old man’s daughter had been working in a big dry goods store--a mill that grinds pretty fine sometimes--and one day she attracted the attention of a man who was putting a show out on the Southern tour. He saw talent in her, or at least he thought he did, but if the truth were to be told he fell in love with her, and came to the conclusion that she would make a better traveling companion than anyone he had seen so far--this season. He had a code of morals that was iron clad, but wouldn’t stand investigating. In his eyes they were all cattle, and like cattle he graded them.

But this isn’t going to be a moral story, because it is the truth.

If you want morality nowadays you will have to go to fiction, where the man always marries the girl and they live happily ever after. It sounds nice and leaves a sweet taste in the mouth, but it is a long cry from the truth except in a few rare cases.

So here’s the picture, about as commonplace as it can be made.

A girl with visions of the stage, a dream of a life of ease and luxury, imagining that some day she will be a performer of merit; a violent hatred of the unending routine of the store, and ready at a moment’s notice to turn her back on the old man in the flat.

Isn’t that the way?

Bring them into the world, care for them and nurse them. Worry over their little troubles, deny yourself that they may have more; sacrifice everything for their happiness, and then at the critical moment when they might become a comfort instead of a care, presto! along comes a man with a line of talk that would make a cat on a back yard fence take to cover, and away they go, saying good-by if they happen to think of it, and forgetting that there are such things in the world as obligation or gratitude.

But this isn’t really what I started to say. You see, I have a brother who is a minister, and I am under the impression that he is teaching me bad habits--that is, if it is a bad habit to sit down and preach about a lot of things that are wrong when you would probably do the same things you condemn in others. It’s a case of don’t do as I do, but do as I say.

It’s a cinch to tell other people to do the right thing, but it’s another thing to be on the level yourself.

After that little digression I’ll show you this girl on the road singing choruses with the bunch, and just a bit swell-headed because she was in a position to call the manager by his first name. That didn’t help her with the rest of the crowd any, and they called her names when they were where she couldn’t hear them, while at the same time there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t have changed places with her in a holy minute.

She had one or two fights on her hands, but she always won out.

The manager found out she had a figure that would have been worth a place in the front row of the merry-merry of Weber and Fields when that firm was at its best. Here was a chance that a good, clever, astute fellow like him couldn’t very well overlook, and he proceeded to have her taught a few dances of the kind that are not sanctioned in polite society, or even on the stage, or which make any pretence to being legitimate. He was working on the principle that all is grist that comes to the mill, and he was also looking ahead.

There are, as a rule, a pretty gay lot of boys in those Southern towns, and they are not averse to paying a good bit of money for a show after the show, especially if it is the kind that is forbidden. If the sensuous dance of the Nautch girl can be imitated in all of its windings, twistings and quiverings by a shapely American girl whose disregard for clothing amounts to almost contempt--that is, on certain occasions--there is enough money to make it an object not only for the performer but the manager.

“I am going to put you up against a proposition that will make the hit of your life,” was the way he started it.

“That’s me,” she said; “what is it?”

“Why, do a stunt in the altogether for the sports.” Then he took a couple of extra puffs at his cigar to keep his nerve up.

“The altogether--what’s that?”

She had an idea what it was, but she wanted to get it straight.

“Oh, it’s all the rage down here--you dance without much clothes on. All the girls are wild to get some of the money, but there’s nothing doing with them, for your figure will make them look like a lot of kippered herrings that’s been smoked for a week. You see, we’re in this business for the coin, and we might as well get it and get it quick. If we don’t there’ll be a thousand others after it. It’s a case of take it or leave it and it’s up to you. How about it?”

He stiffened her up so she was willing to make good. He told her she had enough curves to make the Venus de Medici look like a barn door, and that she was a peach with the original bloom on, all of which she believed because it was pleasant for her to hear, and was getting a bit stuck on herself. It was a modern case of showing Eve all over again where the golden apple grew, and inducing her to reach up and get it.

The first trick was to come off at Memphis, Tenn., where a lot of hot sports wanted something so full of ginger that they would have put ice on the backs of their necks to keep the temperature down below the 100 mark. A committee of two called on him at the stage entrance, and after declaring themselves asked him if he had anybody with the outfit who could make good. After the preliminary skirmish it settled down to a question of price, and the matter was soon arranged, and half an hour later Daddy’s girl got the tip that she was expected to be on the job when the clock struck twelve, with a carriage to and from the hotel as a compliment to her superb figure.

No good hardened old pelter would have halted at this hurdle, and would have gone at it with a keen relish, but you must know that this was the first season out for this girl, and when it came to the time that she was to let go all that kept her from appearing in the costume that Mother Eve is supposed to have worn in the Garden of Eden, she promptly lost her nerve.

“I don’t think I can do this thing, Jim,” she remarked to the manager as they were leaving the theatre together. “It didn’t seem so bad at first, but now I don’t quite like the idea of it. I never did anything like this before, you know.”

“Of course I know,” he answered quickly, “but you want the money, don’t you? Do you want to be a piker all your life? Why, you’ll get more for a stunt like this than you can make in a month doing anything else. Just think of that.”

He was keen enough to see, however, that she was inclined to quit at any moment, but there was no proposition an old seasoned campaigner like him couldn’t handle, and when they went into the hotel cafe together he had framed things up to his own satisfaction.

“I’m going to blow you to a bottle of wine to-night, and while we’re waiting for it we’ll have a cocktail.”

He figured on dulling her sense of morality with drinks, and he went at it in the most businesslike manner possible.

Before the wine a cocktail with a cherry, then another cocktail. Three pints of extra dry, most of which she lapped up simply because it was champagne and was expensive, and then she was in a mood that was at once mellow and reckless.

“Come on,” he said, when the last drop had been drained. “Come on, the wagon is waiting and if you make a hit you won’t need to bother about those new dresses you wanted last week, for here is where you get next to a real gold mine. Why, there ain’t a girl in the show that wouldn’t go to the deuce to get this chance.”

She assented, but through it all she had a hazy idea that it was wrong and that she ought to back out. But just think of almost three pints of wine seething and bubbling inside of her while she is trying to discriminate between right and wrong. I tell you it’s impossible, for when the corks pop often enough it’s hell let loose, and a girl has to protect herself in the breakaway every time, with the odds against her.

And now, a big room, carpeted, with palms on pedestals here and there, giving it an air of luxury, and a platform at one end. Fifty men, young and old, seated in chairs that were lined up like a regiment were waiting expectantly. The smoke from many cigars and cigarettes filled the air, and the monologue man who was trying to interest them with funny stories knew he was up against it and that he was only filling in time until the big show should be ready. He told everything he knew, but never a smile was cracked, and when he came to a finish he walked off angrily.

The three musicians began a new tune with mournful cadences, but with a swing that suggested sinuous movements. The two violins wailed out the minor chords, and the piano trailed the bass. Somewhere from behind came the sharp snap of a man’s fingers and the lights went down and the theme of the music was changed.

“The Dance of the Dawn, gentlemen,” came a voice from out of the darkness and the fifty straightened up in their seats expectantly.

A shape crept out upon the stage and moved in time to the music. Then the lights gradually began to go up a little at a time until at last the face and figure of the dancer were visible. She was clad in transparent gauze, with Turkish trousers and a bolero to match, and her swayings were artistic and graceful. But there was no reason in them. They were mechanical and lifeless. She moved by instinct and intuition and the impression the dance sought to convey was lost. The manager himself worked the cymbals which punctuated the finish of each measure, and at the final crash the stage was once more shrouded in darkness.

Lights up and then the second announcement:

“The Dance of Nature.”

That soothing music was born in the brain of a Calcutta idealist who knew how to put the tip of his finger on the pulse of the senses. Three second-rate performers ground it out, but with all their mediocrity they couldn’t kill its charm, even though they dulled it somewhat.

Here was the real thing at last, and fifty pairs of eyes were glistening in anticipation.

The moment’s wait seemed like an hour, and then a girl’s voice broke what seemed to be a spell:

“Oh, I can’t, Jim, I can’t.”

“You’ve got to, it’s too late to back out now.”

“I won’t, I tell you, not for anybody.”

The next instant the nude figure of the girl was catapulted out upon the platform--a figure which dropped to its knees and then tumbled over on its face and lay there in a quivering heap sobbing violently.

A tall man with snow-white mustache rose slowly from his seat in the second row. He turned around to face the rest, and then said, as calmly as if he were in his own house:

“Gentlemen, I protest; this must not go on. It is disgraceful.”

He picked up his hat and coat and started for the door.

In five minutes the room was empty. The girl had been pulled back of the scenes by a cursing manager, but she might as well have been dumb for all she heard.

“You’re a mutt,” he was saying; “here you’ve had your chance and quit, and you’ve made a sucker out of me, too. I can’t look any of those people in the face again.”

Of course, he didn’t consider where she figured.

Then he walked out and left her there with a skirt wrapped around her as her only covering.

The janitor found her when he came to turn out the lights.

She was partly dressed then, and shivering. He helped her finish dressing, and then he went out to get her a drink to warm her up a bit.

Later she wandered out and got another drink to make her forget and still another that her mind might be blank.

At daybreak she was in the hospital in a state of coma from which nothing could rouse her. She never came back again, and when the call-boy in the theatre in the next town was calling out: “Fifteen minutes--first act,” she died.

Yet his friends say the manager is one of the best fellows in the business.

THE MONOLOGUE GIRL’S STORY

It was after the show that there were four of us sitting at the round table in the back room of The Dutchman’s on Third avenue. It’s a pretty good place, that self-same back room, and the big steins of beer are pretty good, too, with a heaping plate of pretzels always on the side and a sandwich to be had by pressing the button.

There was Al Fostell, the German comedian, who ought to have been in the legitimate long ago; Harry Ferguson, famous for his impersonation of _Happy Hooligan_; Harry’s wife, Lulu Beeson, the Star of Texas, and so great a dancer that she has a Richard K. Fox medal about as long as her arm, which any beskirted performer can get by beating her at the soft shoe buck; and one other, whom I shall simply designate as The Girl, because, even though she plays a star part in this, she doesn’t want to be known to the general public.

The Girl was brilliant, versatile and clever. She took it into her head to become a dancer once, and among other things she learned the fandango. She went to Mexico with a troupe and danced that famous measure in a way that made them cheer her to the echo. She played faro bank and won enough to keep her in clothes for a year.

The talk had drifted on marriage and Fostell started things.

“I have been married a good many years, more than I care to tell,” he said, “and I have been trying to induce my daughter to call me uncle so they won’t get on to me. I claim that a performer’s domestic life can be just as pure and happy as that of a business man. I agree that there is a lot of immorality in the profession, but you’ll always find a lot of outsiders helping things along. There are times when we seem to be targets for the whole world to shoot at.”

“In my opinion,” put in Ferguson, “the performers who are in the business to make a living on their merits are for the most part decent people whose lives are an open book. The women of the chorus of the big shows on Broadway--the kind who haven’t a line to speak and who couldn’t speak it if they had--are responsible in the main for all of these sweeping charges of immorality. Our children are born in the shadow of the theatre, and a great part of their lives are spent in the green rooms and dressing rooms. We try to do the best we can by them and bring them up properly.”

Then The Girl, who can tell stories and sing in a most charming way, and who for that reason has a salary that is worth considering, broke in:

“You men with wives sit back and talk of morality and all that sort of thing and you don’t know what it means. You two are lucky because you have married good women who look after your interests and bring your children up as best they can under the circumstances. You only see things from the viewpoint of the male animal, who is used to being waited on and catered to. The average man says, ‘I am handsome,’ ‘I am great,’ ‘I am distinguished,’ or ‘I am the real one,’ as the case may be. He sees a girl whose appearance catches his fancy and straightway he must have her. He likes her and that settles it. It makes no difference whether or not she likes him--her feelings are not to be considered. He is the one. If his passion is a strong one he pursues her to the finish and hounds her. If she still holds out he becomes actuated by a motive of revenge and so he sets out to try to injure her, to prevent her from making a living that she may feel the pinch of poverty. He uses all the influence at his command to crush and humiliate her, and then he taunts her.

“Boys, I’ve been through the mill and I know what I’m talking about. I’m a kid no longer, and I wouldn’t marry the best man on earth, nor tie myself up to him for either a definite or an indefinite length of time. No double acts for me, but monologues from now on until I get my 23.

“Let me tell you something you never heard before.

“One night I went down to the Battery and sat on the sea wall there for hours looking at the water smashing away at the rocks. It was moonlight and almost bright enough to read a paper. I had enough to think of while I was sitting there and I thought it, too. I know what it is to have a whirring sound in your brain, for I had it then. I was trying to get up enough courage to throw myself overboard, for I really wanted to die. I had seen all of life and of men that I wanted and had enough. I had been driven by a man from the place where I lived to the jumping-off spot as coldly, and calmly, and deliberately as a drover would direct the course of a steer to the abattoir. He had made living impossible for me.

“Those noises in my head had reached that stage where they were like the sound of the L road trains going past your windows at night when you’re trying to sleep, but the stronger they grew the less they annoyed me, and the idea came to me that if I wished hard enough death would come very easy.

“You know that old act of mine where I used to imitate a woman who had gone insane from grief at being abandoned by her lover? You know what a hit it always made. Well, it’s nothing like the real thing. Heart-breaking grief in its highest form is quiet. It doesn’t want the limelight or stage center, but a dark corner and seclusion. It wants to be left alone.

“The next thing I remember was someone saying to me ‘Come out of here; what are you trying to do--drown yourself?’

“And there I was in the water up to my waist with a policeman holding me by the arm. He turned me around so that I faced the wall again and we walked back to where he helped me up. Then he took me, all dripping and so cold that I had no feeling at all, to the station house, where I was charged, under a most absurd law, with attempted suicide. They were humane enough to send for an ambulance and I was taken to the hospital and fixed up so I could appear in court the next morning. The man was there--the man with his sneering smile and his air of well-fed comfort. He had come down to look me over. He probably wanted to see the girl who had refused nearly everything that money could get, simply because she was not for sale and couldn’t be bought like a new scarf or a hat of the latest mode. He also wanted to parade his prosperity before my misery, probably that before anything else. Even he must have pitied me because of my position, and he edged over to where I was and whispered:

“‘It isn’t too late yet, and I want to help you.’

“‘You mean that you want to get me out of here?’ I asked.

“‘Yes,’ he said eagerly, ‘I want to get you out.’

“‘Well, if I were you,’ I told him, ‘I wouldn’t take any chances because if I get out of here and you ever speak to me again I will do the very best I can to kill you.’

“He shrank back as if he had been stung, and so great was his terror that I almost laughed at him. Then he turned and walked away.

“That is the curtain of my story. I could begin at the beginning and make it a long one, but what’s the use? I could make a romance of it, or even a tragedy, and now that I am my sane self I could even make it a comedy. I could go over the list of things he promised me and what he promised to do for me, and you would think he had all the wealth of the Bank of England at his back, but his mind ran in a groove so narrow and his manner was so offensive that the only thing that kept him in the human being class was the fact that his nostrils were not shaped like those of a swine, and that instead of grunting he used language that was fairly intelligible. But for once he was toppled from his self-built pedestal and he crashed down in the wreck of his own self-conceit. Men like that make the world seem immoral and immoral in fact, and a few such as he would degrade the noblest profession in the world. Egotists and atheists, believing in nothing save self, they taint a community like a plague.

“Bring us some more beer, Billy, for I’m going home. I’m tired and dead to the world.”

“I wouldn’t like to be the man you hated,” said Ferguson.

“My boy, I can neither hate nor love, I am simply numb. I have had seven proposals of marriage, both in the profession and out of it, but there was nothing doing. I am absolutely emotionless. I ask no favors on account of my sex and I owe my allegiance to no man. But I am watching my tormentor growing gradually old. I see him once in a while, you know, and I am keeping track of him. It’s my one joy in life. The gray has come into his hair and it is turning white and the wrinkles are spreading themselves over his face like avenging fingers. I know he is not really happy, although he pretends to be, and some day, in some luxurious apartment, he’ll lie dying. A million dollars will not give him one more breath nor would a hundred millions add one more day to his existence, and when he is very close to that gate which always opens inward and from which there is no retreat and I really know that he is going, then I will laugh; not the kind of a laugh you know, boys, but the kind of a laugh that follows a soul across the border line of death and which keeps echoing for ages.”

“Did you ever play the part of _Ophelia_?” I asked.

“No, but I could.”

And we all believed her.

A TWISTED LOVE AFFAIR

This is the story of a wooing that went astray.

There are many such stories floating around, and they are all good, if they could only be told. But there is the trouble, for, like family skeletons, they are sunk so deep in the cellar or locked up so securely in the closet that there is no getting to them, even for a minute.

How these two met or where they met is of no material difference, and here is where a romantic touch might be introduced. The truth is that they came face to face with each other on the boardwalk at Atlantic City. He had been up to old Vienna while she had taken in the show on the Pier. A dozen or more of those high steins of Pilsner had made him a bit reckless, and that was his only excuse. She was lonely, and that was hers. It’s a great combination, like guncotton and a match. All right apart, but let them meet and the result is pyrotechnical. When they were twenty feet apart there was a sudden flash of lightning of the vivid brand they have on the Jersey shore, followed by a crash of thunder heavy enough to make a cigar store Indian step down and crawl under his pedestal. Then a few drops of rain about the size of a quarter, and a general scurrying for shelter.

The man whistled for a covered rolling chair, and the girl with eyes shut and head down ran directly into his arms.

She recoiled like a rubber ball that has been thrown up against a brick wall, while he felt to see if his watch was still fast in the mooring at his vest.

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” and she gathered up her skirts as she prepared for another flight.

“Don’t mention it,” he answered with admiration, “but I think you could beat Jeffries if you were trained down a bit.”

“Sir!”

“Now don’t sir me; it’s raining and that blanket of yours won’t stand water. I’ve an option on the only chair in sight. It’s yours; help yourself, and if you don’t mind I’ll go as far as my hotel. Are you on the job?”

“I don’t think----” she began severely, when the lightning broke out again and interrupted her.

“You don’t have to think,” he said. “Jump in and keep out of the wet. People don’t think at Atlantic City; they get on the job quick,” and he motioned the walking delegate with the perambulator to move up.

“All right,” she said, resignedly.

“Of course it’s all right, for you get home dry while I have a chance to meet a good fellow. Now let’s introduce. My name is Ben. There’s another part to it, but it don’t make any difference here. What’s yours?”

“You don’t lose any time, do you?”

“Never was known to so far. Come on, what is it?”

“Bess,” she answered.

“Bess; great; sounds like a sport. Not hard to say and rhymes with ‘bless’ and ‘yes’ and a lot of other words. Now, Bess, you and I are going to have one little drink just to celebrate. You know the old saying--wet out and wet in. The wise gink who’s pushing this van is heading me back to where I came from, I see; Old Vienna. I wonder if he gets a commission? Just because I like you, and because your hair matches my tie I’ll blow you to anything you like from a second-story stein up to a bottle--large or small, according to your capacity. How about it?”

“I suppose you think because you got me in this absurd wicker basket before I could call a policeman and have you arrested for insulting me that any proposition you make from now on will not be objected to. Perhaps, because I made the fatal mistake of being alone on the walk at night, you, too, have made a mistake.”

“I never make mistakes, but this time I overlooked the fact that I am hungry. So we’ll get the large bottle and something to eat on the side and between drinks we’ll tell each other the story of our past lives, and we’ll make a bet on whose is the best.”

Half an hour later they were like a couple of chums who had known each other for years, and she was calling him Ben as if she had been raised with him.

That was not quite a year ago, and it is only introduced in order that the story might be told from the very beginning.

A thousand trifling things happen in life which often turn the tide or change the course of events. A man, because his watch is a few minutes late, misses a train which is wrecked and thus saves his life; again he goes down one street instead of another, for no reason that he knows of, and avoids a catastrophe or misses an opportunity; he goes here instead of there and something occurs which changes the course of his path from that point on to the grave. Call it fate if you like, but whatever it is it is inevitable and inexorable, and no human will has been found that is strong enough to resist it. It is like the call of “Hands up” coming from the desperado with a revolver. There is no alternative. In some cases it is impulse, a seventh sense, or pure luck--good or bad--according to results, or even intuition. The wise man says that what is to be will be and trails along in contentment. Others fight it out and come forth beaten in the end.

The two of this story came back to New York hopelessly in love with each other, and at that time, so far as I know, it wasn’t the commercial love of the twentieth century, ready to switch and change as soon as the sun went under the first cloud. They met two, three and four times a week, first in one place and then in another, and they knocked about town like a pair of happy-go-lucky Bohemians with the rent paid a year in advance.

“Some day,” he said to her once, “when I am quite free to do as I like I’m going to marry you, and then all of this running to cover like a pair of rabbits chased by a brown ferret that you can’t see will stop.”

“How do you know that I would marry you even if you wanted it?” she asked.

“We’ll argue that point when the time comes,” was the answer.

“Now that we’ve known each other for so long a time--at least it seems long to me--I’ve a confession to make to you. I ought to have told you before, but it isn’t too late now.”

“Save your confession as I’m saving mine,” he said. “I never knew these past life stories to do any good, for both men and women make mistakes, and they ought to do with them as the doctors do with their failures--bury them.”

“But we are doing wrong now.”

“The boy up the farmer’s tree filling his pocket with apples is happy until he is caught. My motto is to get as many apples as you can until you hear the farmer coming and then beat it while you have the wind with you. It doesn’t require as much nerve as you think, and any time the game isn’t worth it quit. The beaten man in a fight, if he is game, always gets as much applause as the victor and sometimes a great deal more. I have seen the time when it was better to lose than to win, strange as that may seem. I don’t believe in figuring on what is to be years from now because I may be dead. There is no to-morrow in life--it is all to-day. If battles have been won, cities destroyed, empires established and colossal fortunes swept away in an hour what chance has a man--a mere atom on the earth--to speculate in futures? The typhoid germ upon an oyster, the invisible microbe of consumption eaten or breathed in with a thousand other death-dealing mites, can kill him as surely as a thunderbolt or a drop of cyanide of potassium. Upon your hands and your face at this moment are the bacteria of lockjaw only waiting for a scratch or a wound of some kind to enter your veins. Yet you do not worry about that. You see you have me talking about things I do not like and it will take at least another pint to get the taste out of my mouth. Accept my advice, if the sun is shining for you now don’t fear the coming night.”

Through all the winter he never knew where she lived or how she lived and he didn’t care, and that was because he was a philosopher, and she knew as little about him as he did about her. A future meeting was always arranged upon the heels of the previous one. Her name was Bess and his was Ben and that was sufficient.

Very queer, of course, and almost unbelievable, but true nevertheless.

And all the while the match was getting nearer to the guncotton and neither knew it. Playing with fire had come to be such a habit with these two that they didn’t fear the flames.

It was at a nice little afternoon luncheon that she became first serious and then confidential. They had reached the coffee stage--the proper time to put your elbows on the table and talk--when she said:

“Ben, I want $5,000.”

At that particular moment he was lighting a cigarette and he didn’t look up for a full minute, which is a very long while if you only know the real value of time.

“What for?” he asked, finally.

“I am married, you know. I mean you don’t know it, but I’m telling you now, and I want to get a divorce. I have been collecting evidence and I have all I want, but I shall have to get a lawyer, and I shall also have to live until the case is disposed of.”

“Why didn’t you consult me?”

“Why should I until I was ready?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Would you take the case?”

“No, but I could advise you.”

So he did, and being a very smart lawyer instead of giving her a check for the money she wanted he gave her what in his opinion was $5,000 worth of advice. You see, the substance of his love of the fall had fallen away to a shadow, and hard-headed business men don’t invest in shadows or even pay money to build a monument over a sentiment that is either dead or dying. Hearts are rarely trumps; spades have the call to-day.

“I’m going ahead anyhow,” she went on, “and I suppose when I am free that even your memory will suffer from an attack of dry rot, and that you’ll forget everything you have ever said to me--or deny it, which amounts to the same thing in the end.”

So the next day she told her story to a lawyer, not the story of Ben and the dinners, but the tales of the man to whom she was married, and when she produced certain dates and facts she was told she had the clearest kind of a clear case and that it would go through with bells on, with hubby paying the shot.

The complaint was drawn up and the papers served; and here comes the great part of this recital.

Just one week later a clean-cut, well-built young business man, of about 35, walked into Ben’s office and asked for a consultation.

“You have been recommended to me,” he began, “by a business friend of mine. I have been sued for divorce by my wife. My morals are none too good, but neither are hers. Will you take the case and defend me?”

“Yes,” said Ben, “I’ll take it,” and he called a stenographer. “Dictate your story to her and then see me to-morrow, when I will have the papers drawn up. If your counter charges amount to anything at all we can beat her--that is, if you want to beat her. As I understand it you don’t want her to get a divorce from you?”

“That’s it exactly. It isn’t that I care a rap, but I don’t care to be made a scapegoat, and I think when she knows what kind of an answer I have she’ll drop the whole case and take to the woods, which will suit me down to the ground.”

At 11 o’clock Ben saw the transcribed notes of the amanuensis and he hadn’t read more than ten lines when he jumped from his chair as though it had suddenly become red-hot.

“Miss Bates,” he called sharply, “bring me your note book.”

In she came and handed it to him.

“You’ll say nothing about this?”

“No, sir,” but there was the suggestion of a smile around the corners of her mouth.

He thrust it in his pocket and in a minute was out of the door.

There was a little luncheon date on with Bess for 12 o’clock, but he couldn’t wait. He was at the appointed place a full hour before the time, and he sat at the table glaring at the door. Exactly on the stroke of the hour she came in smiling.

“Why, Ben, what’s the matter? You look as though you had been struck by a blizzard.”

“I have. Read that,” and he handed two typewritten sheets to her. “You’ll have to drop that case of yours, and drop it quick, too. Your husband had the nerve to retain me to defend him; and in his counter charges he names me as your co-respondent, and I’m damned if he hasn’t got every move we ever made pat and to the minute. He’s been on to everything.”

He looked up suddenly and a look of suspicion came over his face.

“What is this, a job? Have you two been working me?”

“You contemptible thing,” she whispered, “you have the mind of a street sweeper. How dare you talk to me like that after all our----”

Two tears came into her eyes.

“If I were a man I would fight you and you wouldn’t dare to fight back. You’d run. Do you hear that--you’d run away, because you are a coward. I could make you run away now if I wanted, because you are afraid.”

Then she turned and walked out of the place without even so much as looking behind her, and the man was left with a lot of typewritten sheets clutched in one hand and a stenographer’s note book in the other.

There was never any suit, but if you happen to New York any day during the winter months I’ll show you this couple--Bess who made a little mistake and stepped out to where the daisies grow once or twice--and her husband, who won because he was willing to wait.

It sounds like a romance, I know, but it’s all true, every word of it, for the little stenographer told me the most of it.

WEDDING RINGS AND FOOTLIGHTS

There are several titles which would cover this story with equal aptness, and one of them is The Siren Song of the Burlesque Lady. Another one that would sound well is the Corralling of the Willie Boy. In fact they would do well together--a great deal better than the lady and the boy did. I call him boy in this story, but he is really a man so far as years and stature go, that is all, and he is learning a lot every day, so much so that if he keeps on he will some day be a man in everything.

The burlesque show with which this perfect lady was a spear carrier, as well as a few other things, hit the Bowery early in the season, and opened up with a roar that could be heard many blocks. It was the same old thing only a little more so, and the line-up was composed of a bunch of husky dames who ought to have been carrying the hod instead of giving an exhibition of beef on the hoof. The roster is a very familiar one, with the beef-eaters sometimes in the background like scenery, and then again in the foreground to give the boys a good look at the tights, two or three ginger girls, who had a small amount of talent with a great amount of nerve, who did stunts in the olio, and the usual collection of Irish and Hebrew comedians, of which the least said the better. The names on the roster would look like a collection of heroines from the Waverly novels, with Pearl, Pansy and Myrtle in the lead by a couple of good lengths. It was put together according to the recipe of a well-known manager, which was this:

“The people who pay their money for these kind of shows, my boy, don’t want beauty, or brains or talent. They’d go to sleep with Sarah Bernhardt doing the death scene in ‘Camille,’ and they’d call Booth in ‘Richard the Third’ a frost. What they want is legs--good, big husky legs that can take all the wrinkles out of the biggest size of pink tights on the market. They want quantity, not quality. Give them that and you’ll get their ten, twenty and thirty every time.”

He wore big diamonds, had a bank roll the size of a Hamburger steak, and so he must have been in right. Besides he always had a bottle of wine with his meals, and he didn’t care what kind of wine it was, so long as the label was attractive; which goes to show that his money was coming in so fast that his palate couldn’t keep up with it.

On the night the Fair Maids of Gotham opened, the Willie Boy, very fly up to a certain point, but with a soft sucker part about as big as a Derby hat, planted himself in one of the front seats. He had been mixing up with sports all of his life, and as a result the corners on him were as hard as flint. His roll was divided in four parts and stowed away in four separate places for safety’s sake, and when it came to a hurry touch he was prepared to dig down into his change pocket and produce a few pennies with verdigris on them as the extent of his capital. He had a block and a counter for every proposition that came his way and when anything came off he always managed to land his percentage and ride, even though everybody else walked.

The orchestra had crushed through its preliminary canter, the lights went down, the buzz of talk let up for a moment, and as he settled himself back in his seat with a big cigar in his mouth the curtain slid up for the opening chorus. The grenadiers in front swung their legs coquettishly, and pranced about like two-legged pachyderms as they delivered the goods in the shape of a song, which stated in very wobbly and uncertain rhyme that they were very jolly, very entertaining, and that they were out for a lark and were willing to take chances. It was all very affecting, and it might have been going on yet if the star of the show, known professionally as the principal boy, hadn’t butted in like a football player when the cue, “Here comes the Prince,” was given by a perfect lady with a forty-six-inch bust. She was so thoroughly upholstered with rhinestones that she looked like some new kind of an electric light proposition on legs. Willie sized her up with the eye of a connoisseur, and he fell to wondering whether or not among all that paving of cut glass there might not be a true gem.

Suddenly, as the line in front swayed, then broke and shifted, he caught sight of a tall blonde who had been fastened to it like the tail on a kite. She wasn’t quite as wide as the rest of the bunch, but there was something about her that attracted his immediate attention.

And here you see again the delicate tracery of the Italian hand of fate--that invisible, indefinite thing which stands always at our backs ready to move us here and there, like chessmen on a board, whether we like it or not. The male human pats himself on his shoulder and congratulates himself that he has a will and a mind of his own, but ever near him is that wraith which directs his movements, making him do this or that and go here and there. There is no force, no threat and no cajoling; it is simpler than a twist of the wrist, and the end of that winding, twisting, intersected road, with its hundreds of sharp turns here and there and its joys and sorrows, is the grave.

So look at the boy with good red blood in his veins, with a gentle, high-bred mother, a beautiful sister, and a home in which there was nothing but refining influences, sitting bolt upright now in that cheap theatre seat and gazing like one bewitched at this girl with the yellow hair, bleached to almost a frazzle, and the pale, watery blue eyes, with no figure at all and absolutely no talent, produced and spit forth from a tenement to grow up in the city’s streets like a weed to finally reach the most ordinary position in a most ordinary theatrical company, where, standing on the lowest possible level, she was satisfied. Paint, powder and rouge made her a ghastly sight, but in his eyes she was framed in an aureole and was as beautiful as a Madonna.

It was one of the things that no human being will ever be able to account for satisfactorily. Personal magnetism undoubtedly plays a part in it, as it does in many other things, but you wouldn’t think a young fellow like this would go so far out of his class unless he had a throwback strain of degeneracy imbedded somewhere in his system.

The tribe trooped off to make a change of costume and the comedians settled down to work. Then the ginger girls whooped things up a bit, and an acrobat went through the routine of stunts, while a few spasmodic outbursts of applause showed there were some people in the house who appreciated his work. But the pair of eyes owned by the young fellow in the aisle seat, third row, were looking for that blonde and nothing else.

Knowing everybody as he did, it wasn’t a difficult matter for him to get someone who knew her to wait after the show and bring them together in a rather formal way, although, in her case, that wouldn’t have been at all necessary. She had as little use for formalities as she had for conventionalities, which is not at all to be wondered at.

“Meet my friend Willie; now let’s all go out and get a drink,” was all there was to it, and ten minutes later four--two of each sex--were planted around a table in a cafe not more than a block or so from the theatre.

“Like the show?” asked the Genial Giantess, who was keen enough to smell a little love affair in the air.

“Great,” answered Willie; “it ought to get the money this season. What are you going to drink?”

“I never take anything but beer after the matinee--it hurts my voice.”

Strangely enough no one laughed, but with another girl and at another time Willie would have laughed himself almost into convulsions, for he has a keen sense of humor.

The four ate and drank at that table until it was time for the night show and then they separated, by which time Willie was so far gone that he sat throughout the evening performance while she smiled encouragingly at him from the other side of the footlights.

That is how the courtship really began.

For the rest of the week they were together all the time, and she began to realize that she had at last reached the apex of her ambition and found a man who looked like a wedding ring and a board bill proposition.

A fellow like this can have a dozen affairs and no one will question them, but when it comes to marrying there is a different story. To the outsiders it bore all the earmarks of a week’s stand at first, and as he never showed his hand no one was any the wiser, not even his most intimate friends.

A man’s declaration of love for a woman is a very beautiful thing so long as he is honest about it and keeps within his own class. The slang of the slums can be made as sincere as the most polished English. But in a case of infatuation like this--it might be called temporary insanity--it doesn’t hardly seem right there should be any ceremony. The halo of romance existed only in the mind of the boy--for the woman it was a business transaction with the obligations all on one side, so it was with a flippant air that she promised to “love, honor and obey,” and then after the briefest of brief honeymoons she went on the road with the show, while the young husband at once set about preparing a home for her when she should get ready to settle down to a life of domesticity.

At first he figured on taking her to his mother’s home, but when he told of the hurry-up wedding and showed a picture of the woman to whom he had given his name, the scene that followed forever settled the question, and he knew that his soubrette wife and his mother would never live under the same roof together.

The morals of the members of a burlesque show on the road have come to be a joke. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are very rare, though I personally know of some good women who have gone on tour through force of circumstances and have come through the ordeal morally and physically clean. I regret to be compelled to record that the Genial Giantess doesn’t belong in this class, and when the aggregation had torn thirty weeks off the calendar they came back looking like refugees from the San Francisco earthquake.

“I ain’t got a cent,” remarked the blonde on the ferryboat coming from Jersey City, “and I don’t have to have because Willie will stake me as soon as I get to New York, and besides he’s got a flat fixed up for me.”

That was the truth. He had a nice apartment for the homecoming, and while he wasn’t as much in love with her as he was when they were first married, he still felt that he had obligations and he ought to make good.

You know what I said in the beginning about fate? Well, listen.