 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
"O RUSSET WITCH!"
Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight
Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just
around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh
Street. The Moonlight Quill is, or rather was,
a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted
dark. It was spotted interiorly with red and
orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less
by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than
by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted
through all the day, swung overhead. It was truly a
mellow bookshop. The words "Moonlight Quill" were
worked over the door in a sort of serpentine embroidery.
The windows seemed always full of something that had
passed the literary censors with little to spare; volumes
with covers of deep orange which offer their titles on
little white paper squares. And over all there was the
smell of the musk, which the clever, inscrutable Mr.
Moonlight Quill ordered to be sprinkled about—the smell
half of a curiosity shop in Dickens' London and half of
a coffee-house on the warm shores of the Bosphorus.
From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked
bored old ladies in black and young men with dark circles
under their eyes if they "cared for this fellow" or
were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels
with Arabs on the cover, or books which gave Shakespeare's
newest sonnets as dictated psychically to Miss
Sutton of South Dakota? he sniffed. As a matter of
fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee
at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day
the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.
After he had crawled over the window display to pull
said good-bye to the mysterious Mr. Moonlight Quill
and the lady clerk, Miss McCracken, and the lady
stenographer, Miss Masters, he went home to the girl,
Caroline. He did not eat supper with Caroline. It
is unbelievable that Caroline would have considered
eating off his bureau with the collar buttons dangerously
near the cottage cheese, and the ends of Merlin's necktie
just missing his glass of milk—he had never asked her
to eat with him. He ate alone. He went into Braegdort's
delicatessen on Sixth Avenue and bought a box
of crackers, a tube of anchovy paste, and some oranges,
or else a little jar of sausages and some potato salad and
a bottled soft drink, and with these in a brown package
he went to his room at Fifty-something West Fifty-eighth
Street and ate his supper and saw Caroline.
Caroline was a very young and gay person who lived
with some older lady and was possibly nineteen. She
was like a ghost in that she never existed until evening.
She sprang into life when the lights went on in her apartment
at about six, and she disappeared, at the latest,
about midnight. Her apartment was a nice one, in a
nice building with a white stone front, opposite the south
side of Central Park. The back of her apartment faced
the single window of the single room occupied by the
single Mr. Grainger.
He called her Caroline because there was a picture
that looked like her on the jacket of a book of that name
down at the Moonlight Quill.
Now, Merlin Grainger was a thin young man of
twenty-five, with dark hair and no mustache or beard
or anything like that, but Caroline was dazzling and
light, with a shimmering morass of russet waves to take
the place of hair, and the sort of features that remind you
of kisses—the sort of features you thought belonged to
picture, didn't. She dressed in pink or blue usually,
but of late she had sometimes put on a slender black
gown that was evidently her especial pride, for whenever
she wore it she would stand regarding a certain place
on the wall, which Merlin thought must be a mirror.
She sat usually in the profile chair near the window, but
sometimes honored the chaise longue by the lamp, and
often she leaned 'way back and smoked a cigarette with
posturings of her arms and hands that Merlin considered
very graceful.
At another time she had come to the window and stood
in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had
lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most
transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning
the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid
impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer
cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage
cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly
did he reach out for the window cord that he tipped the
cottage cheese into his lap with his free hand—and the
milk was cold and the sugar made spots on his trousers,
and he was sure that she had seen him after all.
Sometimes there were callers—men in dinner coats,
who stood and bowed, hat in hand and coat on arm, as
they talked to Caroline; then bowed some more and
followed her out of the light, obviously bound for a play
or for a dance. Other young men came and sat and
smoked cigarettes, and seemed trying to tell Caroline
something—she sitting either in the profile chair and
watching them with eager intentness or else in the
chaise longue by the lamp, looking very lovely and youthfully
inscrutable indeed.
Merlin enjoyed these calls. Of some of the men he
approved. Others won only his grudging toleration,
caller, a man with black hair and a black goatee and a
pitch-dark soul, who seemed to Merlin vaguely familiar,
but whom he was never quite able to recognize.
Now, Merlin's whole life was not "bound up with this
romance he had constructed"; it was not "the happiest
hour of his day." He never arrived in time to rescue
Caroline from "clutches"; nor did he even marry her.
A much stranger thing happened than any of these, and
it is this strange thing that will presently be set down
here. It began one October afternoon when she walked
briskly into the mellow interior of the Moonlight Quill.
It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end
of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray
in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze
was crying down the streets, whisking along battered
newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were
pricking out all the windows—it was so desolate that
one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in
the dark green and gray heaven, and felt that now surely
the farce was to close, and presently all the buildings
would collapse like card houses, and pile up in a dusty,
sardonic heap upon all the millions who presumed to
wind in and out of them.
At least these were the sort of musings that lay heavily
upon the soul of Merlin Grainger, as he stood by the window
putting a dozen books back in a row, after a cyclonic
visit by a lady with ermine trimmings. He looked out
of the window full of the most distressing thoughts—of
the early novels of H. G. Wells, of the book of Genesis,
of how Thomas Edison had said that in thirty years
there would be no dwelling-houses upon the island, but
only a vast and turbulent bazaar; and then he set the
last book right side up, turned—and Caroline walked
coolly into the shop.
She was dressed in a jaunty but conventional walking
costume—he remembered this when he thought about
it later. Her skirt was plaid, pleated like a concertina;
her jacket was a soft but brisk tan; her shoes and spats
were brown and her hat, small and trim, completed her
like the top of a very expensive and beautifully filled
candy box.
Merlin, breathless and startled, advanced nervously
toward her.
"Good-afternoon—" he said, and then stopped—why,
he did not know, except that it came to him that something
very portentous in his life was about to occur,
and that it would need no furbishing but silence, and the
proper amount of expectant attention. And in that
minute before the thing began to happen he had the
sense of a breathless second hanging suspended in time:
he saw through the glass partition that bounded off the
little office the malevolent conical head of his employer,
Mr. Moonlight Quill, bent over his correspondence.
He saw Miss McCracken and Miss Masters as two
patches of hair drooping over piles of paper; he saw the
crimson lamp overhead, and noticed with a touch of
pleasure how really pleasant and romantic it made the
book-store seem.
Then the thing happened, or rather it began to happen.
Caroline picked up a volume of poems lying loose
upon a pile, fingered it absently with her slender white
hand, and suddenly, with an easy gesture, tossed it upward
toward the ceiling, where it disappeared in the
crimson lamp and lodged there, seen through the illuminated
silk as a dark, bulging rectangle. This
pleased her—she broke into young, contagious laughter,
in which Merlin found himself presently joining.
"It stayed up!" she cried merrily. "It stayed up,
didn't it?" To both of them this seemed the height of
bookshop, and Merlin was glad to find that her voice
was rich and full of sorcery.
"Try another," he found himself suggesting—"try a
red one."
At this her laughter increased, and she had to rest her
hands upon the stack to steady herself.
"Try another," she managed to articulate between
spasms of mirth. "Oh, golly, try another!"
"Try two."
"Yes, try two. Oh, I'll choke if I don't stop laughing.
Here it goes."
Suiting her action to the word, she picked up a red
book and sent it in a gentle hyperbola toward the
ceiling, where it sank into the lamp beside the first. It
was a few minutes before either of them could do more
than rock back and forth in helpless glee; but then by
mutual agreement they took up the sport anew, this
time in unison. Merlin seized a large, specially bound
French classic and whirled it upward. Applauding his
own accuracy, he took a best-seller in one hand and a
book on barnacles in the other, and waited breathlessly
while she made her shot. Then the business waxed fast
and furious—sometimes they alternated, and, watching,
he found how supple she was in every movement;
sometimes one of them made shot after shot, picking up
the nearest book, sending it off, merely taking time to
follow it with a glance before reaching for another.
Within three minutes they had cleared a little place on
the table, and the lamp of crimson satin was so bulging
with books that it was near breaking.
"Silly game, basket-ball," she cried scornfully as a
book left her hand. "High-school girls play it in hideous
bloomers."
"Idiotic," he agreed.
She paused in the act of tossing a book, and replaced
it suddenly in its position on the table.
"I think we've got room to sit down now," she said
gravely.
They had; they had cleared an ample space for two.
With a faint touch of nervousness Merlin glanced toward
Mr. Moonlight Quill's glass partition, but the three
heads were still bent earnestly over their work, and it
was evident that they had not seen what had gone on
in the shop. So when Caroline put her hands on the
table and hoisted herself up Merlin calmly imitated
her, and they sat side by side looking very earnestly at
each other.
"I had to see you," she began, with a rather pathetic
expression in her brown eyes.
"I know."
"It was that last time," she continued, her voice
trembling a little, though she tried to keep it steady.
"I was frightened. I don't like you to eat off the dresser.
I'm so afraid you'll—you'll swallow a collar button."
"I did once—almost," he confessed reluctantly, "but
it's not so easy, you know. I mean you can swallow
the flat part easy enough or else the other part—that
is, separately—but for a whole collar button you'd
have to have a specially made throat." He was astonishing
himself by the debonnaire appropriateness of his
remarks. Words seemed for the first time in his life
to run at him shrieking to be used, gathering themselves
into carefully arranged squads and platoons, and being
presented to him by punctilious adjutants of paragraphs.
"That's what scared me," she said. "I knew you
had to have a specially made throat—and I knew, at
least I felt sure, that you didn't have one."
He nodded frankly.
"I haven't. It costs money to have one—more
money unfortunately than I possess."
He felt no shame in saying this—rather a delight in
making the admission—he knew that nothing he could
say or do would be beyond her comprehension; least
of all his poverty, and the practical impossibility of ever
extricating himself from it.
Caroline looked down at her wrist watch, and with a
little cry slid from the table to her feet.
"It's after five," she cried. "I didn't realize. I have
to be at the Ritz at five-thirty. Let's hurry and get
this done. I've got a bet on it."
With one accord they set to work. Caroline began
the matter by seizing a book on insects and sending it
whizzing, and finally crashing through the glass partition
that housed Mr. Moonlight Quill. The proprietor
glanced up with a wild look, brushed a few pieces of
glass from his desk, and went on with his letters. Miss
McCracken gave no sign of having heard—only Miss
Masters started and gave a little frightened scream before
she bent to her task again.
But to Merlin and Caroline it didn't matter. In a
perfect orgy of energy they were hurling book after book
in all directions, until sometimes three or four were in
the air at once, smashing against shelves, cracking the
glass of pictures on the walls, falling in bruised and torn
heaps upon the floor. It was fortunate that no customers
happened to come in, for it is certain they would never
have come in again—the noise was too tremendous, a
noise of smashing and ripping and tearing, mixed now
and then with the tinkling of glass, the quick breathing
of the two throwers, and the intermittent outbursts of
laughter to which both of them periodically surrendered.
At five-thirty Caroline tossed a last book at the lamp,
and so gave the final impetus to the load it carried. The
splattering of white and color to the already littered
floor. Then with a sigh of relief she turned to Merlin
and held out her hand.
"Good-by," she said simply.
"Are you going?" He knew she was. His question
was simply a lingering wile to detain her and extract
for another moment that dazzling essence of light he
drew from her presence, to continue his enormous satisfaction
in her features, which were like kisses and, he
thought, like the features of a girl he had known back in
1910. For a minute he pressed the softness of her hand
—then she smiled and withdrew it and, before he could
spring to open the door, she had done it herself and was
gone out into the turbid and ominous twilight that
brooded narrowly over Forty-seventh Street.
I would like to tell you how Merlin, having seen how
beauty regards the wisdom of the years, walked into the
little partition of Mr. Moonlight Quill and gave up his
job then and there; thence issuing out into the street a
much finer and nobler and increasingly ironic man. But
the truth is much more commonplace. Merlin Grainger
stood up and surveyed the wreck of the bookshop, the
ruined volumes, the torn silk remnants of the once beautiful
crimson lamp, the crystalline sprinkling of broken
glass which lay in iridescent dust over the whole interior
—and then he went to a corner where a broom was kept
and began cleaning up and rearranging and, as far as he
was able, restoring the shop to its former condition. He
found that, though some few of the books were uninjured,
most of them had suffered in varying extents.
The backs were off some, the pages were torn from others,
still others were just slightly cracked in the front, which,
as all careless book returners know, makes a book unsalable,
and therefore second-hand.
Nevertheless by six o'clock he had done much to repair
the damage. He had returned the books to their
original places, swept the floor, and put new lights in
the sockets overhead. The red shade itself was ruined
beyond redemption, and Merlin thought in some trepidation
that the money to replace it might have to come
out of his salary. At six, therefore, having done the
best he could, he crawled over the front window display
to pull down the blind. As he was treading delicately
back, he saw Mr. Moonlight Quill rise from his desk,
put on his overcoat and hat, and emerge into the shop.
He nodded mysteriously at Merlin and went toward the
door. With his hand on the knob he paused, turned
around, and in a voice curiously compounded of ferocity
and uncertainty, he said:
"If that girl comes in here again, you tell her to behave."
With that he opened the door, drowning Merlin's
meek "Yessir" in its creak, and went out.
Merlin stood there for a moment, deciding wisely
not to worry about what was for the present only a
possible futurity, and then he went into the back of the
shop and invited Miss Masters to have supper with him
at Pulpat's French Restaurant, where one could still
obtain red wine at dinner, despite the Great Federal
Government. Miss Masters accepted.
"Wine makes me feel all tingly," she said.
Merlin laughed inwardly as he compared her to Caroline,
or rather as he didn't compare her. There was no
comparison.
II
Mr. Moonlight Quill, mysterious, exotic, and oriental
in temperament was, nevertheless, a man of decision.
And it was with decision that he approached the problem
equal to the original cost of his entire stock—a step
which for certain private reasons he did not wish to take
—it would be impossible for him to continue in business
with the Moonlight Quill as before. There was but one
thing to do. He promptly turned his establishment
from an up-to-the-minute book-store into a second-hand
bookshop. The damaged books were marked down from
twenty-five to fifty per cent, the name over the door
whose serpentine embroidery had once shone so insolently
bright, was allowed to grow dim and take on the
indescribably vague color of old paint, and, having a
strong penchant for ceremonial, the proprietor even
went so far as to buy two skull-caps of shoddy red felt,
one for himself and one for his clerk, Merlin Grainger.
Moreover, he let his goatee grow until it resembled the
tail-feathers of an ancient sparrow and substituted for
a once dapper business suit a reverence-inspiring affair
of shiny alpaca.
In fact, within a year after Caroline's catastrophic
visit to the bookshop the only thing in it that preserved
any semblance of being up to date was Miss Masters.
Miss McCracken had followed in the footsteps of Mr.
Moonlight Quill and become an intolerable dowd.
For Merlin too, from a feeling compounded of loyalty
and listlessness, had let his exterior take on the semblance
of a deserted garden. He accepted the red felt skullcap
as a symbol of his decay. Always a young man
known as a "pusher," he had been, since the day of his
graduation from the manual training department of a
New York High School, an inveterate brusher of clothes,
hair, teeth, and even eyebrows, and had learned the
value of laying all his clean socks toe upon toe and heel
upon heel in a certain drawer of his bureau, which would
be known as the sock drawer.
These things, he felt, had won him his place in the
greatest splendor of the Moonlight Quill. It was due to
them that he was not still making "chests useful for
keeping things," as he was taught with breathless practicality
in High School, and selling them to whoever
had use of such chests—possibly undertakers. Nevertheless
when the progressive Moonlight Quill became
the retrogressive Moonlight Quill he preferred to sink
with it, and so took to letting his suits gather undisturbed
the wispy burdens of the air and to throwing his
socks indiscriminately into the shirt drawer, the underwear
drawer, and even into no drawer at all. It was not
uncommon in his new carelessness to let many of his
clean clothes go directly back to the laundry without
having ever been worn, a common eccentricity of impoverished
bachelors. And this in the face of his favorite
magazines, which at that time were fairly staggering
with articles by successful authors against the frightful
impudence of the condemned poor, such as the buying
of wearable shirts and nice cuts of meat, and the
fact that they preferred good investments in personal
jewelry to respectable ones in four per cent saving-banks.
It was indeed a strange state of affairs and a sorry
one for many worthy and God-fearing men. For the
first time in the history of the Republic almost any negro
north of Georgia could change a one-dollar bill. But
as at that time the cent was rapidly approaching the
purchasing power of the Chinese ubu and was only a
thing you got back occasionally after paying for a soft
drink, and could use merely in getting your correct
weight, this was perhaps not so strange a phenomenon
as it at first seems. It was too curious a state of things,
however, for Merlin Grainger to take the step that he
did take—the hazardous, almost involuntary step of
accepted him.
It was at Pulpat's on Saturday night and over a $1.75
bottle of water diluted with vin ordinaire that the proposal
occurred.
"Wine makes me feel all tingly, doesn't it you?"
chattered Miss Masters gaily.
"Yes," answered Merlin absently; and then, after a
long and pregnant pause: "Miss Masters—Olive—I
want to say something to you if you'll listen to me."
The tingliness of Miss Masters (who knew what was
coming) increased until it seemed that she would shortly
be electrocuted by her own nervous reactions. But her
"Yes, Merlin," came without a sign or flicker of interior
disturbance. Merlin swallowed a stray bit of air that
he found in his mouth.
"I have no fortune," he said with the manner of
making an announcement. "I have no fortune at all."
Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy
and beautiful.
"Olive," he told her, "I love you."
"I love you too, Merlin," she answered simply.
"Shall we have another bottle of wine?"
"Yes," he cried, his heart beating at a great rate.
"Do you mean—"
"To drink to our engagement," she interrupted
bravely. "May it be a short one!"
"No!" he almost shouted, bringing his fist fiercely
down upon the table. "May it last forever!"
"What?"
"I mean—oh, I see what you mean. You're right.
May it be a short one." He laughed and added, "My
error."
After the wine arrived they discussed the matter
thoroughly.
"We'll have to take a small apartment at first," he
said, "and I believe, yes, by golly, I know there's a
small one in the house where I live, a big room and a
sort of a dressing-room-kitchenette and the use of a
bath on the same floor."
She clapped her hands happily, and he thought how
pretty she was really, that is, the upper part of her face—
from the bridge of the nose down she was somewhat out
of true. She continued enthusiastically:
"And as soon as we can afford it we'll take a real swell
apartment, with an elevator and a telephone girl."
"And after that a place in the country—and a car."
"I can't imagine nothing more fun. Can you?"
Merlin fell silent a moment. He was thinking that
he would have to give up his room, the fourth floor rear.
Yet it mattered very little now. During the past year and
a half—in fact, from the very date of Caroline's visit to
the Moonlight Quill—he had never seen her. For a week
after that visit her lights had failed to go on—darkness
brooded out into the areaway, seemed to grope blindly
in at his expectant, uncurtained window. Then the
lights had appeared at last, and instead of Caroline and
her callers they showed a stodgy family—a little man
with a bristly mustache and a full-bosomed woman
who spent her evenings patting her hips and rearranging
bric-à-brac. After two days of them Merlin had
callously pulled down his shade.
No, Merlin could think of nothing more fun than rising
in the world with Olive. There would be a cottage in
a suburb, a cottage painted blue, just one class below
the sort of cottages that are of white stucco with a
green roof. In the grass around the cottage would be
rusty trowels and a broken green bench and a baby-carriage
with a wicker body that sagged to the left.
And around the grass and the baby-carriage and the
the arms of Olive, a little stouter, the arms of her neoOlivian
period, when, as she walked, her cheeks would
tremble up and down ever so slightly from too much
face-massaging. He could hear her voice now, two
spoons' length away:
"I knew you were going to say this to-night, Merlin.
I could see—"
She could see. Ah—suddenly he wondered how much
she could see. Could she see that the girl who had come
in with a party of three men and sat down at the next
table was Caroline? Ah, could she see that? Could
she see that the men brought with them liquor far more
potent than Pulpat's red ink condensed threefold . . . ?
Merlin stared breathlessly, half-hearing through an
auditory ether Olive's low, soft monologue, as like a persistent
honey-bee she sucked sweetness from her memorable
hour. Merlin was listening to the clinking of
ice and the fine laughter of all four at some pleasantry—
and that laughter of Caroline's that he knew so well
stirred him, lifted him, called his heart imperiously
over to her table, whither it obediently went. He could
see her quite plainly, and he fancied that in the last year
and a half she had changed, if ever so slightly. Was
it the light or were her cheeks a little thinner and her
eyes less fresh, if more liquid, than of old? Yet the
shadows were still purple in her russet hair; her mouth
hinted yet of kisses, as did the profile that came sometimes
between his eyes and a row of books, when it was
twilight in the bookshop where the crimson lamp presided
no more.
And she had been drinking. The threefold flush in
her cheeks was compounded of youth and wine and fine
cosmetic—that he could tell. She was making great
amusement for the young man on her left and the portly
her, for the latter from time to time uttered the shocked
and mildly reproachful cackles of another generation.
Merlin caught the words of a song she was intermittently
singing—
Don't cross the bridge 'til you're there—"
The portly person filled her glass with chill amber.
A waiter after several trips about the table, and many
helpless glances at Caroline, who was maintaining a
cheerful, futile questionnaire as to the succulence of this
dish or that, managed to obtain the semblance of an
order and hurried away. . . .
Olive was speaking to Merlin—
"When, then?" she asked, her voice faintly shaded
with disappointment. He realized that he had just
answered no to some question she had asked him.
"Oh, sometime."
"Don't you—care?"
A rather pathetic poignancy in her question brought
his eyes back to her.
"As soon as possible, dear," he replied with surprising
tenderness. "In two months—in June."
"So soon?" Her delightful excitement quite took her
breath away.
"Oh, yes, I think we'd better say June. No use
waiting."
Olive began to pretend that two months was really
too short a time for her to make preparations. Wasn't
he a bad boy! Wasn't he impatient, though! Well,
she'd show him he mustn't be too quick with her. Indeed
he was so sudden she didn't exactly know whether
she ought to marry him at all.
"June," he repeated sternly.
Olive sighed and smiled and drank her coffee, her
little finger lifted high above the others in true refined
fashion. A stray thought came to Merlin that he would
like to buy five rings and throw at it.
"By gosh!" he exclaimed aloud. Soon he would be
putting rings on one of her fingers.
His eyes swung sharply to the right. The party of
four had become so riotous that the head-waiter had
approached and spoken to them. Caroline was arguing
with this head-waiter in a raised voice, a voice so clear
and young that it seemed as though the whole restaurant
would listen—the whole restaurant except Olive Masters,
self-absorbed in her new secret.
"How do you do?" Caroline was saying. "Probably
the handsomest head-waiter in captivity. Too much
noise? Very unfortunate. Something'll have to be
done about it. Gerald"—she addressed the man on her
right—"the head-waiter says there's too much noise.
Appeals to us to have it stopped. What'll I say?"
"Sh!" remonstrated Gerald, with laughter. "Sh!"
and Merlin heard him add in an undertone: "All the
bourgeoisie will be aroused. This is where the floorwalkers
learn French."
Caroline sat up straight in sudden alertness.
"Where's a floorwalker?" she cried. "Show me a
floorwalker." This seemed to amuse the party, for they
all, including Caroline, burst into renewed laughter.
The head-waiter, after a last conscientious but despairing
admonition, became Gallic with his shoulders and
retired into the background.
Pulpat's, as every one knows, has the unvarying respectability
of the table d'hôte. It is not a gay place
in the conventional sense. One comes, drinks the red
wine, talks perhaps a little more and a little louder than
It closes up at nine-thirty, tight as a drum; the policeman
is paid off and given an extra bottle of wine for the
missis, the coat-room girl hands her tips to the collector,
and then darkness crushes the little round tables
out of sight and life. But excitement was prepared for
Pulpat's this evening—excitement of no mean variety.
A girl with russet, purple-shadowed hair mounted to
her table-top and began to dance thereon.
"Sacré nom de Dieu! Come down off there!" cried the
head-waiter. "Stop that music!"
But the musicians were already playing so loud that
they could pretend not to hear his order; having once
been young, they played louder and gayer than ever, and
Caroline danced with grace and vivacity, her pink,
filmy dress swirling about her, her agile arms playing in
supple, tenuous gestures along the smoky air.
A group of Frenchmen at a table near by broke into
cries of applause, in which other parties joined—in a
moment the room was full of clapping and shouting;
half the diners were on their feet, crowding up, and on
the outskirts the hastily summoned proprietor was
giving indistinct vocal evidences of his desire to put an
end to this thing as quickly as possible.
". . . Merlin!" cried Olive, awake, aroused at
last; "she's such a wicked girl! Let's get out—now!"
The fascinated Merlin protested feebly that the check
was not paid.
"It's all right. Lay five dollars on the table. I
despise that girl. I can't bear to look at her." She was
on her feet now, tugging at Merlin's arm.
Helplessly, listlessly, and then with what amounted
to downright unwillingness, Merlin rose, followed Olive
dumbly as she picked her way through the delirious
clamor, now approaching its height and threatening to
took his coat and stumbled up half a dozen steps into
the moist April air outside, his ears still ringing with the
sound of light feet on the table and of laughter all about
and over the little world of the café. In silence they
walked along toward Fifth Avenue and a bus.
It was not until next day that she told him about the
wedding—how she had moved the date forward: it was
much better that they should be married on the first of
May.
III
And married they were, in a somewhat stuffy manner,
under the chandelier of the flat where Olive lived with
her mother. After marriage came elation, and then,
gradually, the growth of weariness. Responsibility descended
upon Merlin, the responsibility of making his
thirty dollars a week and her twenty suffice to keep
them respectably fat and to hide with decent garments
the evidence that they were.
It was decided after several weeks of disastrous and
well-nigh humiliating experiments with restaurants that
they would join the great army of the delicatessen-fed,
so he took up his old way of life again, in that he stopped
every evening at Braegdort's delicatessen and bought potatoes
in salad, ham in slices, and sometimes even stuffed
tomatoes in bursts of extravagance.
Then he would trudge homeward, enter the dark hallway,
and climb three rickety flights of stairs covered
by an ancient carpet of long obliterated design. The
hall had an ancient smell—of the vegetables of 1880, of
the furniture polish in vogue when "Adam-and-Eve"
Bryan ran against William McKinley, of portières an
ounce heavier with dust, from worn-out shoes and lint
from dresses turned long since into patch-work quilts.
and made poignant at each landing by the aura of contemporary
cooking, then, as he began the next flight,
diminishing into the odor of the dead routine of dead
generations.
Eventually would occur the door of his room, which
slipped open with indecent willingness and closed with
almost a sniff upon his "Hello, dear! Got a treat for
you to-night."
Olive, who always rode home on the bus to "get a
morsel of air," would be making the bed and hanging up
things. At his call she would come up to him and give
him a quick kiss with wide-open eyes, while he held her
upright like a ladder, his hands on her two arms, as
though she were a thing without equilibrium, and would,
once he relinquished hold, fall stiffly backward to the
floor. This is the kiss that comes in with the second
year of marriage, succeeding the bridegroom kiss (which
is rather stagey at best, say those who know about such
things, and apt to be copied from passionate movies).
Then came supper, and after that they went out for a
walk, up two blocks and through Central Park, or sometimes
to a moving picture, which taught them patiently
that they were the sort of people for whom life was ordered,
and that something very grand and brave and
beautiful would soon happen to them if they were docile
and obedient to their rightful superiors and kept away
from pleasure.
Such was their day for three years. Then change
came into their lives: Olive had a baby, and as a result
Merlin had a new influx of material resources. In the
third week of Olive's confinement, after an hour of nervous
rehearsing, he went into the office of Mr. Moonlight
Quill and demanded an enormous increase in
salary.
"I've been here ten years," he said; "since I was
nineteen. I've always tried to do my best in the interests
of the business."
Mr. Moonlight Quill said that he would think it over.
Next morning he announced, to Merlin's great delight,
that he was going to put into effect a project long premeditated—he
was going to retire from active work in
the bookshop, confining himself to periodic visits and
leaving Merlin as manager with a salary of fifty dollars
a week and a one-tenth interest in the business. When
the old man finished, Merlin's cheeks were glowing and
his eyes full of tears. He seized his employer's hand and
shook it violently, saying over and over again:
"It's very nice of you, sir. It's very white of you.
It's very, very nice of you."
So after ten years of faithful work in the store he had
won out at last. Looking back, he saw his own progress
toward this hill of elation no longer as a sometimes
sordid and always gray decade of worry and failing enthusiasm
and failing dreams, years when the moonlight
had grown duller in the areaway and the youth had
faded out of Olive's face, but as a glorious and triumphant
climb over obstacles which he had determinedly
surmounted by unconquerable will-power. The optimistic
self-delusion that had kept him from misery was
seen now in the golden garments of stern resolution.
Half a dozen times he had taken steps to leave the Moonlight
Quill and soar upward, but through sheer faintheartedness
he had stayed on. Strangely enough he
now thought that those were times when he had exerted
tremendous persistence and had "determined" to fight
it out where he was.
At any rate, let us not for this moment begrudge
Merlin his new and magnificent view of himself. He
had arrived. At thirty he had reached a post of importance.
invested every penny in his pocket in the most tremendous
feast that Braegdort's delicatessen offered, and
staggered homeward with the great news and four gigantic
paper bags. The fact that Olive was too sick to
eat, that he made himself faintly but unmistakably ill
by a struggle with four stuffed tomatoes, and that most
of the food deteriorated rapidly in an iceless ice-box all
next day did not mar the occasion. For the first time
since the week of his marriage Merlin Grainer lived
under a sky of unclouded tranquillity.
The baby boy was christened Arthur, and life became
dignified, significant, and, at length, centered. Merlin
and Olive resigned themselves to a somewhat secondary
place in their own cosmos; but what they lost in personality
they regained in a sort of primordial pride.
The country house did not come, but a month in an
Asbury Park boarding-house each summer filled the
gap; and during Merlin's two weeks' holiday this excursion
assumed the air of a really merry jaunt—especially
when, with the baby asleep in a wide room opening technically
on the sea, Merlin strolled with Olive along the
thronged board-walk puffing at his cigar and trying to
look like twenty thousand a year.
With some alarm at the slowing up of the days and
the accelerating of the years, Merlin became thirty-one,
thirty-two—then almost with a rush arrived at that
age which, with all its washing and panning, can only
muster a bare handful of the precious stuff of youth: he
became thirty-five. And one day on Fifth Avenue he
saw Caroline.
It was Sunday, a radiant, flowerful Easter morning
and the avenue was a pageant of lilies and cutaways
and happy April-colored bonnets. Twelve o'clock: the
great churches were letting out their people—St. Simon's,
doors like wide mouths until the people pouring forth
surely resembled happy laughter as they met and
strolled and chattered, or else waved white bouquets at
waiting chauffeurs.
In front of the Church of the Epistles stood its twelve
vestrymen, carrying out the time-honored custom of
giving away Easter eggs full of face-powder to the
church-going débutantes of the year. Around them
delightedly danced the two thousand miraculously
groomed children of the very rich, correctly cute and
curled, shining like sparkling little jewels upon their
mothers' fingers. Speaks the sentimentalist for the
children of the poor? Ah, but the children of the rich,
laundered, sweet-smelling, complexioned of the country,
and, above all, with soft, in-door voices.
Little Arthur was five, child of the middle class. Undistinguished,
unnoticed, with a nose that forever
marred what Grecian yearnings his features might have
had, he held tightly to his mother's warm, sticky hand,
and, with Merlin on his other side, moved upon the
home-coming throng. At Fifty-third Street, where
there were two churches, the congestion was at its thickest,
its richest. Their progress was of necessity retarded
to such an extent that even little Arthur had not the
slightest difficulty in keeping up. Then it was that
Merlin perceived an open landaulet of deepest crimson,
with handsome nickel trimmings, glide slowly up to
the curb and come to a stop. In it sat Caroline.
She was dressed in black, a tight-fitting gown trimmed
with lavender, flowered at the waist with a corsage of
orchids. Merlin started and then gazed at her fearfully.
For the first time in the eight years since his
marriage he was encountering the girl again. But a girl
no longer. Her figure was slim as ever—or perhaps
adolescence, had gone the way of the first blooming
of her cheeks. But she was beautiful; dignity was
there now, and the charming lines of a fortuitous nine-and-twenty;
and she sat in the car with such perfect
appropriateness and self-possession that it made him
breathless to watch her.
Suddenly she smiled—the smile of old, bright as that
very Easter and its flowers, mellower than ever—yet
somehow with not quite the radiance and infinite promise
of that first smile back there in the bookshop nine
years before. It was a steelier smile, disillusioned
and sad.
But it was soft enough and smile enough to make a
pair of young men in cutaway coats hurry over, to pull
their high hats off their wetted, iridescent hair; to bring
them, flustered and bowing, to the edge of her landaulet,
where her lavender gloves gently touched their gray
ones. And these two were presently joined by another,
and then two more, until there was a rapidly swelling
crowd around the landaulet. Merlin would hear a
young man beside him say to his perhaps well-favored
companion:
"If you'll just pardon me a moment, there's some one
I have to speak to. Walk right ahead. I'll catch up."
Within three minutes every inch of the landaulet,
front, back, and side, was occupied by a man—a man
trying to construct a sentence clever enough to find its
way to Caroline through the stream of conversation.
Luckily for Merlin a portion of little Arthur's clothing
had chosen the opportunity to threaten a collapse, and
Olive had hurriedly rushed him over against a building
for some extemporaneous repair work, so Merlin was
able to watch, unhindered, the salon in the street.
The crowd swelled. A row formed in back of the first,
from a black bouquet, sat Caroline enthroned in her
obliterated car, nodding and crying salutations and
smiling with such true happiness that, of a sudden, a
new relay of gentlemen had left their wives and consorts
and were striding toward her.
The crowd, now phalanx deep, began to be augmented
by the merely curious; men of all ages who could not
possibly have known Caroline jostled over and melted
into the circle of ever-increasing diameter, until the lady
in lavender was the centre of a vast impromptu auditorium.
All about her were faces—clean-shaven, bewhiskered,
old, young, ageless, and now, here and there, a woman.
The mass was rapidly spreading to the opposite curb,
and, as St. Anthony's around the corner let out its
box-holders, it overflowed to the sidewalk and crushed
up against the iron picket-fence of a millionaire across
the street. The motors speeding along the avenue were
compelled to stop, and in a jiffy were piled three, five,
and six deep at the edge of the crowd; auto-busses, top-heavy
turtles of traffic, plunged into the jam, their
passengers crowding to the edges of the roofs in wild
excitement and peering down into the centre of the
mass, which presently could hardly be seen from the
mass's edge.
The crush had become terrific. No fashionable audience
at a Yale-Princeton football game, no damp mob
at a world's series, could be compared with the panoply
that talked, stared, laughed, and honked about the
lady in black and lavender. It was stupendous; it was
terrible. A quarter mile down the block a half-frantic
policeman called his precinct; on the same corner a
frightened civilian crashed in the glass of a fire-alarm
and sent in a wild pæan for all the fire-engines of the
a hysterical old maid telephoned in turn for the prohibition
enforcement agent, the special deputies on Bolshevism,
and the maternity ward of Bellevue Hospital.
The noise increased. The first fire-engine arrived,
filling the Sunday air with smoke, clanging and crying
a brazen, metallic message down the high, resounding
walls. In the notion that some terrible calamity had
overtaken the city, two excited deacons ordered special
services immediately and set tolling the great bells of St.
Hilda's and St. Anthony's, presently joined by the jealous
gongs of St. Simon's and the Church of the Epistles.
Even far off in the Hudson and the East River the sounds
of the commotion were heard, and the ferry-boats and
tugs and ocean liners set up sirens and whistles that
sailed in melancholy cadence, now varied, now reiterated,
across the whole diagonal width of the city from Riverside
Drive to the gray water-fronts of the lower East
Side. . . .
In the centre of her landaulet sat the lady in black
and lavender, chatting pleasantly first with one, then
with another of that fortunate few in cutaways who had
found their way to speaking distance in the first rush.
After a while she glanced around her and beside her
with a look of growing annoyance.
She yawned and asked the man nearest her if he
couldn't run in somewhere and get her a glass of water.
The man apologized in some embarrassment. He could
not have moved hand or foot. He could not have
scratched his own ear. . . .
As the first blast of the river sirens keened along the
air, Olive fastened the last safety-pin in little Arthur's
rompers and looked up. Merlin saw her start, stiffen
slowly like hardening stucco, and then give a little gasp
of surprise and disapproval.
"That woman," she cried suddenly. "Oh!"
She flashed a glance at Merlin that mingled reproach
and pain, and without another word gathered up little
Arthur with one hand, grasped her husband by the
other, and darted amazingly in a winding, bumping canter
through the crowd. Somehow people gave way before
her; somehow she managed to retain her grasp on
her son and husband; somehow she managed to emerge
two blocks up, battered and dishevelled, into an open
space, and, without slowing up her pace, darted down a
side-street. Then at last, when uproar had died away
into a dim and distant clamor, did she come to a walk
and set little Arthur upon his feet.
"And on Sunday, too! Hasn't she disgraced herself
enough?" This was her only comment. She said it
to Arthur, as she seemed to address her remarks to Arthur
throughout the remainder of the day. For some curious
and esoteric reason she had never once looked at
her husband during the entire retreat.
IV
The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve
before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing
merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of
ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel
colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing
and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the
merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence, as never,
surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters
of youth. For most men and women these thirty years
are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat
first from a front with many shelters, those myriad
amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less,
when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our
whom we are anæsthetic; ending up at last in a solitary,
desolate strong point that is not strong, where the
shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard
as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for
death.
At forty, then, Merlin was no different from himself
at thirty-five; a larger paunch, a gray twinkling near
his ears, a more certain lack of vivacity in his walk.
His forty-five differed from his forty by a like margin,
unless one mention a slight deafness in his left ear.
But at fifty-five the process had become a chemical
change of immense rapidity. Yearly he was more and
more an "old man" to his family—senile almost, so far
as his wife was concerned. He was by this time complete
owner of the bookshop. The mysterious Mr.
Moonlight Quill, dead some five years and not survived
by his wife, had deeded the whole stock and store to
him, and there he still spent his days, conversant now
by name with almost all that man has recorded for three
thousand years, a human catalogue, an authority upon
tooling and binding, upon folios and first editions, an
accurate inventory of a thousand authors whom he could
never have understood and had certainly never read.
At sixty-five he distinctly doddered. He had assumed
the melancholy habits of the aged so often portrayed
by the second old man in standard Victorian comedies.
He consumed vast warehouses of time searching for mislaid
spectacles. He "nagged" his wife and was nagged
in turn. He told the same jokes three or four times a
year at the family table, and gave his son weird, impossible
directions as to his conduct in life. Mentally and
materially he was so entirely different from the Merlin
Grainger of twenty-five that it seemed incongruous that
he should bear the same name.
He worked still in the bookshop with the assistance
of a youth, whom, of course, he considered very idle,
indeed, and a new young woman, Miss Gaffney. Miss
McCracken, ancient and unvenerable as himself, still
kept the accounts. Young Arthur was gone into Wall
Street to sell bonds, as all the young men seemed to be
doing in that day. This, of course, was as it should be.
Let old Merlin get what magic he could from his books—
the place of young King Arthur was in the countinghouse.
One afternoon at four when he had slipped noiselessly
up to the front of the store on his soft-soled slippers,
led by a newly formed habit, of which, to be fair, he
was rather ashamed, of spying upon the young man
clerk, he looked casually out of the front window, straining
his faded eyesight to reach the street. A limousine,
large, portentous, impressive, had drawn to the curb, and
the chauffeur, after dismounting and holding some sort
of conversation with persons in the interior of the car,
turned about and advanced in a bewildered fashion
toward the entrance of the Moonlight Quill. He opened
the door, shuffled in, and, glancing uncertainly at the old
man in the skull-cap, addressed him in a thick, murky
voice, as though his words came through a fog.
"Do you—do you sell additions?"
Merlin nodded.
"The arithmetic books are in the back of the store."
The chauffeur took off his cap and scratched a close-cropped,
fuzzy head.
"Oh, naw. This I want's a detecatif story." He jerked
a thumb back toward the limousine. "She seen it in
the paper. Firs' addition."
Merlin's interest quickened. Here was possibly a
big sale.
"Oh, editions. Yes, we've advertised some firsts,
title?"
"I forget. About a crime."
"About a crime. I have—well, I have `The Crimes
of the Borgias'—full morocco, London 1769, beautifully—"
"Naw," interrupted the chauffeur, "this was one fella
did this crime. She seen you had it for sale in the
paper." He rejected several possible titles with the air
of connoisseur.
" `Silver Bones,' " he announced suddenly out of a
slight pause.
"What?" demanded Merlin, suspecting that the stiffness
of his sinews were being commented on.
"Silver Bones. That was the guy that done the
crime."
"Silver Bones?"
"Silver Bones. Indian, maybe."
Merlin stroked his grizzly cheeks.
"Gees, Mister," went on the prospective purchaser,
"if you wanna save me an awful bawlin' out jes' try an'
think. The old lady goes wile if everything don't run
smooth."
But Merlin's musings on the subject of Silver Bones
were as futile as his obliging search through the shelves,
and five minutes later a very dejected charioteer wound
his way back to his mistress. Through the glass Merlin
could see the visible symbols of a tremendous uproar
going on in the interior of the limousine. The chauffeur
made wild, appealing gestures of his innocence, evidently
to no avail, for when he turned around and climbed
back into the driver's seat his expression was not a little
dejected.
Then the door of the limousine opened and gave forth
a pale and slender young man of about twenty, dressed
cane. He entered the shop, walked past Merlin, and
proceeded to take out a cigarette and light it. Merlin
approached him.
"Anything I can do for you, sir?"
"Old boy," said the youth coolly, "there are seveereal
things. You can first let me smoke my ciggy in here out
of sight of that old lady in the limousine, who happens
to be my grandmother. Her knowledge as to whether
I smoke it or not before my majority happens to be a
matter of five thousand dollars to me. The second thing
is that you should look up your first edition of the
`Crime of Sylvester Bonnard' that you advertised in
last Sunday's Times. My grandmother there happens
to want to take it off your hands."
Detecatif story! Crime of somebody! Silver Bones!
All was explained. With a faint deprecatory chuckle,
as if to say that he would have enjoyed this had life
put him in the habit of enjoying anything, Merlin doddered
away to the back of his shop where his treasures
were kept, to get this latest investment which he had
picked up rather cheaply at the sale of a big collection.
When he returned with it the young man was drawing
on his cigarette and blowing out quantities of smoke
with immense satisfaction.
"My God!" he said. "She keeps me so close to her
the entire day running idiotic errands that this happens
to be my first puff in six hours. What's the world coming
to, I ask you, when a feeble old lady in the milk-toast
era can dictate to a man as to his personal vices? I
happen to be unwilling to be so dictated to. Let's see
the book."
Merlin passed it to him tenderly and the young man,
after opening it with a carelessness that gave a momentary
jump to the book-dealer's heart, ran through
the pages with his thumb.
"No illustrations, eh?" he commented. "Well, old
boy, what's it worth? Speak up! We're willing to
give you a fair price, though why I don't know."
"One hundred dollars," said Merlin with a frown.
The young man gave a startled whistle.
"Whew! Come on. You're not dealing with somebody
from the cornbelt. I happen to be a city-bred
man and my grandmother happens to be a city-bred
woman, though I'll admit it'd take a special tax appropriation
to keep her in repair. We'll give you twenty-five
dollars, and let me tell you that's liberal. We've
got books in our attic, up in our attic with my old playthings,
that were written before the old boy that wrote
this was born."
Merlin stiffened, expressing a rigid and meticulous
horror.
"Did your grandmother give you twenty-five dollars
to buy this with?"
"She did not. She gave me fifty, but she expects
change. I know that old lady."
"You tell her," said Merlin with dignity, "that she
has missed a very great bargain."
"Give you forty," urged the young man. "Come on
now—be reasonable and don't try to hold us up—"
Merlin had wheeled around with the precious volume
under his arm and was about to return it to its special
drawer in his office when there was a sudden interruption.
With unheard-of magnificence the front door
burst rather than swung open, and admitted into the
dark interior a regal apparition in black silk and fur
which bore rapidly down upon him. The cigarette
leaped from the fingers of the urban young man and he
gave breath to an inadvertent "Damn!"—but it was
upon Merlin that the entrance seemed to have the most
remarkable and incongruous effect—so strong an effect
that the greatest treasure of his shop slipped from his
stood Caroline.
She was an old woman, an old woman remarkably
preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but
still an old woman. Her hair was a soft, beautiful
white, elaborately dressed and jewelled; her face, faintly
rouged à la grande dame, showed webs of wrinkles at
the edges of her eyes and two deeper lines in the form of
stanchions connected her nose with the corners of her
mouth. Her eyes were dim, ill natured, and querulous.
But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline's features
though in decay; Caroline's figure, if brittle and
stiff in movement; Caroline's manner, unmistakably
compounded of a delightful insolence and an enviable
self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline's voice, broken
and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did
make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and
cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.
She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette
upon the floor.
"What's that?" she cried. The words were not a
question—they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation,
confirmation, and decision. She tarried over
them scarcely an instant. "Stand up!" she said to her
grandson, "stand up and blow that nicotine out of your
lungs!"
The young man looked at her in trepidation.
"Blow!" she commanded.
He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.
"Blow!" she repeated, more peremptorily than before.
He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.
"Do you realize," she went on briskly, "that you've
forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?"
Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall
nature that he remained standing—even blew
again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no
doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.
"Young ass!" cried Caroline. "Once more, just
once more and you leave college and go to work."
This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon
the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than
was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.
"Do you think I don't know what you and your
brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me?
Well, I do. You think I'm senile. You think I'm
soft. I'm not!" She struck herself with her fist as
though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and
sinew. "And I'll have more brains left when you've
got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny day
than you and the rest of them were born with."
"But Grandmother—"
"Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it
weren't for my money might have risen to be a journeyman
barber out in the Bronx—Let me see your hands.
Ugh! The hands of a barber—you presume to be smart
with me, who once had three counts and a bona-fide duke,
not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from
the city of Rome to the city of New York." She paused,
took breath. "Stand up! Blow!"
The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously
the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age
who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed,
moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself
on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up
to Caroline.
"Found you at last," he cried. "Been looking for
you all over town. Tried your house on the 'phone and
called the Moonlight—"
Caroline turned to him irritably.
"Do I employ you for your reminiscences?" she
snapped. "Are you my tutor or my broker?"
"Your broker," confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken
somewhat aback. "I beg your pardon. I came about
that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and
five."
"Then do it."
"Very well. I thought I'd better—"
"Go sell it. I'm talking to my grandson."
"Very well. I—"
"Good-by."
"Good-by, Madame." The fur-trimmed man made
a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the
shop.
"As for you," said Caroline, turning to her grandson,
"you stay just where you are and be quiet."
She turned to Merlin and included his entire length
in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he
found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both
broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous
chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the
other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each
other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.
"It's the only way," she gasped in a sort of triumphant
malignity. "The only thing that keeps old folks like
me happy is the sense that they can make other people
step around. To be old and rich and have poor descendants
is almost as much fun as to be young and
beautiful and have ugly sisters."
"Oh, yes," chuckled Merlin. "I know. I envy you."
She nodded, blinking.
"The last time I was in here, forty years ago," she
your heels."
"I was," he confessed.
"My visit must have meant a good deal to you."
"You have all along," he exclaimed. "I thought—I
used to think at first that you were a real person—
human, I mean."
She laughed.
"Many men have thought me inhuman."
"But now," continued Merlin excitedly, "I understand.
Understanding is allowed to us old people—
after nothing much matters. I see now that on a certain
night when you danced upon a table-top you were
nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and
perverse woman."
Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than
the echo of a forgotten dream.
"How I danced that night! I remember."
"You were making an attempt at me. Olive's arms
were closing about me and you warned me to be free and
keep my measure of youth and irresponsibility. But
it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last moment.
It came too late."
"You are very old," she said inscrutably. "I did not
realize."
"Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when
I was thirty-five. You shook me with that traffic tie-up.
It was a magnificent effort. The beauty and power you
radiated! You became personified even to my wife, and
she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the
house at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music
and cocktails and a girl to make me young. But then
—I no longer knew how."
"And now you are so very old."
With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.
"Yes, leave me!" he cried. "You are old also; the
spirit withers with the skin. Have you come here only
to tell me something I had best forget: that to be old
and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be old and
rich; to remind me that my son hurls my gray failure in
my face?"
"Give me my book," she commanded harshly. "Be
quick, old man!"
Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently
obeyed. He picked up the book and handed it to her,
shaking his head when she offered him a bill.
"Why go through the farce of paying me? Once
you made me wreck these very premises."
"I did," she said in anger, "and I'm glad. Perhaps
there had been enough done to ruin me."
She gave him a glance, half disdain, half ill-concealed
uneasiness, and with a brisk word to her urban grandson
moved toward the door.
Then she was gone—out of his shop—out of his life.
The door clicked. With a sigh he turned and walked
brokenly back toward the glass partition that enclosed
the yellowed accounts of many years as well as the mellowed,
wrinkled Miss McCracken.
Merlin regarded her parched, cobwebbed face with
an odd sort of pity. She, at any rate, had had less from
life than he. No rebellious, romantic spirit cropping out
unbidden had, in its memorable moments, given her life
a zest and a glory.
Then Miss McCracken looked up and spoke to him:
"Still a spunky old piece, isn't she?"
Merlin started.
"Who?"
"Old Alicia Dare. Mrs. Thomas Allerdyce she is
now, of course; has been these thirty years."
"What? I don't understand you." Merlin sat down
suddenly in his swivel chair; his eyes were wide.
"Why, surely, Mr. Grainger, you can't tell me that
you've forgotten her, when for ten years she was the
most notorious character in New York. Why, one time
when she was the corespondent in the Throckmorton
divorce case she attracted so much attention on Fifth
Avenue that there was a traffic tie-up. Didn't you read
about it in the papers."
"I never used to read the papers." His ancient brain
was whirring.
"Well, you can't have forgotten the time she came in
here and ruined the business. Let me tell you I came
near asking Mr. Moonlight Quill for my salary, and
clearing out."
"Do you mean that—that you saw her?"
"Saw her! How could I help it with the racket
that went on. Heaven knows Mr. Moonlight Quill
didn't like it either, but of course he didn't say anything.
He was daffy about her and she could twist him around
her little finger. The second he opposed one of her whims
she'd threaten to tell his wife on him. Served him right.
The idea of that man falling for a pretty adventuress!
Of course he was never rich enough for her, even though
the shop paid well in those days."
"But when I saw her," stammered Merlin, "that is,
when I thought I saw her, she lived with her mother."
"Mother, trash!" said Miss McCracken indignantly.
"She had a woman there she called `Aunty' who was no
more related to her than I am. Oh, she was a bad one
—but clever. Right after the Throckmorton divorce
case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself
secure for life."
"Who was she?" cried Merlin. "For God's sake what
was she—a witch?"
"Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course.
In those days you couldn't pick up a paper without finding
her picture."
Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued
and stilled. He was an old man now indeed, so old that
it was impossible for him to dream of ever having been
young, so old that the glamour was gone out of the world,
passing not into the faces of children and into the persistent
comforts of warmth and life, but passing out of
the range of sight and feeling. He was never to smile
again or to sit in a long reverie when spring evenings
wafted the cries of children in at his window until gradually
they became the friends of his boyhood out there,
urging him to come and play before the last dark came
down. He was too old now even for memories.
That night he sat at supper with his wife and son, who
had used him for their blind purposes. Olive said:
"Don't sit there like a death's-head. Say something."
"Let him sit quiet," growled Arthur. "If you encourage
him he'll tell us a story we've heard a hundred
times before."
Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock.
When he was in his room and had closed the door tight
he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling.
He knew now that he had always been a fool.
"O Russet Witch!"
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by
resisting too many temptations. There was nothing
left but heaven, where he would meet only those who,
like him, had wasted earth.
| Tales of the jazz age | |