University of Virginia Library

10. X.

There I was seated in a box all alone — Miss Nancy Olden, by courtesy of the management, come to listen to the leading lady sing coon-songs, that I might add her to my collection of take-offs.

She's a fat leading lady, very fair and nearly fifty, I guess. But she's got a rollicking, husky voice in her fat throat that's sung the dollars down deep into her pockets. They say she's planted them deeper still — in the foundations of apartment houses — and that now she's the richest roly-poly on the Rialto.

Do you know, Maggie darlin', what I was saying to myself there in the box, while I watched the stage and waited for Obermuller? He said he'd drop in later, perhaps.

“Nance,” I said, “I kind of fancy that apartment sort of idea myself. They tell you, Nancy, that when you've got the artistic temperament, that that's all you'll ever have. But there's a chance — one in a hundred — for a body to get that temperament

mixed with a business instinct. It doesn't often happen. But when it does the result is — dollars. It may be, Nance — I shrewdly suspect it is a fact that you've got that marvelous mixture. Your early successes, Miss Olden, in another profession that I needn't name, would encourage the idea that you're not all heart and no head. I think, Nance, I shall have you mimic the artists during working hours and the business men when you're at play. I fancy apartment houses. They appeal to me. We'll call one `The Nancy' and another `Olden Hall' and another . . . ”

“What'll I call the third apartment house, Mr. O?” I asked aloud, as I heard the rings on the portière behind me click.

He didn't answer.

Without turning my head I repeated the question.

And yet — suddenly — before he could have answered, I knew something was wrong.

I turned. And in that moment a man took the seat beside me and another stood facing me, with his back against the portières.

“Miss Olden?” the man beside me asked.

“Yes.”

“Nance Olden, the mimic, who entertains at private houses?”

I nodded.

“You — you were at Mrs. Paul Gates' just a week ago, and you gave your specialties there?”

“Yes — yes, what is it you want?”

He was a little man, but very muscular. I could note the play of his muscles even in the slight motion he made as he turned his body so as to get between me and the audience, while he leaned toward me, watching me intently with his small, quick, blue eyes.

“We don't want to make any scene here,” he said very low. “We want to do it up as quietly as we can. There might be some mistake, you know, and then you'd be sorry. So should we. I hope you'll be reasonable and it'll be all the better for you because — ”

“What are you talk — what — ” I looked from him to the other fellow behind us.

He leaned a bit farther forward then, and pulling his coat partly open, he showed me a detective's badge. And the other man quickly did the same.

I sat back in my chair. The fat star on the stage, with her big mouth and big baby-face, was doing a

cake-walk up and down close to the footlights, yelling the chorus of her song.

I'll never mimic that song, Mag, although I can see her and hear it as plain as though I'd listened and watched her all my life. But there's no fun in it for me. I hate the very bars the orchestra plays before she begins to sing. I can't bear even to think of the words. The whole of it is full of horrible things — it smells of the jail — it looks like stripes — it . . .

“You're not going to faint?” asked the man, moving closer to me.

“Me? I never fainted in my life. . . Where is he now — Tom Dorgan?”

“Tom Dorgan!”

“Yes. I was sure I saw him sail, but, of course, I was mistaken. He has sent you after me, has he? I can hardly believe it of Tom — even — even yet.”

“I don't know anything that connects you with Dorgan. If he was in with you on this, you'd better remember, before you say anything more, that it'll all be used against you.”

The curtain had gone down and gone up again. I was watching the star. She has such a boyish

way of nodding her head, instead of bowing, after she waddles out to the center; and every time she wipes her lips with her lace handkerchief, as though she'd just taken one of the cocktails she makes in the play with all the skill of a bartender. I found myself doing the same thing — wiping my lips with that very same gesture, as though I had a fat, bare forearm like a rolling-pin — when all at once the thought came to me: “You needn't bother, Nancy. It's all up. You won't have any use for it all.”

“Just what is the charge?” I asked, turning to the man beside me.

“Stealing a purse containing three hundred dollars from Mrs. Paul Gates' house on the night of April twenty-seventh.”

“What!”

It was Obermuller. He had pushed the curtains aside; the crashing of the orchestra had prevented our hearing the clatter of the rings. He had pushed by the man standing there, had come in and — he had heard.

“Nance!” he cried. “I don't believe a word of it. He turned in his quick way to the men. “What are your orders?”

“To take her to her flat and search it.”

Obermuller came over to me then, and took my hand for a minute.

“It's a pity they don't know about the Gray rose diamond,” he whispered, helping me on with my jacket. “They'd see how silly this little three-hundred dollar business is. . . . Brace up, Nance Olden!”

Oh, Mag, Mag, to hear a man like that talk to you as though you were his kind, when you have the feel of the coarse prison stripes between your dry, shaking fingers, and the close prison smell is already poisoning your nostrils!

“I don't see — ” my voice shook — “how you can believe — in me.”

“Don't you?” he laughed. “That's easy. You've got brains, Nance, and the most imbecile thing you could do just now, when your foot is already on the ladder, would be just this — to get off in order to pick up a trinket out of the mud, when there's a fortune up at the top waiting for you. Clever people don't do asinine things. And other clever people know that they don't. You're clever, but so am I — in my weak, small way. Come along, little girl.”

He pulled my hand in his arm and we walked out, followed by the two men.

Oh, no! It was all very quiet and looked just like a little theater party that had an early supper engagement. Obermuller nodded to the manager out in the deserted lobby, who stopped us and asked me what I thought of the star.

You'll think me mad, Mag. Those fellows with the badges were sure I was, but Obermuller's eyes only twinkled, and the manager's grin grew broad when, catching up the end of my skirt and cake-walking up and down, I sang under my breath that coon-song that was trailing over and over through my head.

“Bravo! bravo!” whispered the manager, hoarsely, clapping his hands softly.

I gave one of those quick, funny, boyish nods the star inside affects and wiped my lips with my handkerchief.

That brought down my house. Even the biggest fellow with the badge giggled recognizingly, and then put his hand quickly in front of his mouth and tried to look severe and official.

The color had come back to Obermuller's face; it was worth dancing for — that.

“Be patient, Mag; let me tell it my way.”

There wasn't room in the coupé waiting out in front for more than two. So Obermuller couldn't come in it. But he put me in — Mag, dear, dear Mag — he put me in as if I was a lady — not like Gray; a real one. A thing like that counts when two detectives are watching. It counted afterward in the way they treated me.

The big man climbed up on the seat with the driver. The blue-eyed fellow got in and sat beside me, closing the door.

“I'll be out there almost as soon as you are,” Obermuller said, standing a moment beside the lowered window.

“You good fellow!” I said, and then, trying to laugh: “I'll do as much for you some day.”

He shook his fist laughingly at me, and I waved my hand as we drove of.

“You know, Miss, there may be some mistake about this,” said the man next to me, “and — ”

“Yes, there may be. In fact, there is.”

“I'm sure I'll be very glad if it is a mistake. They do happen — though not often. You spoke of Dorgan — ”

“Did I?”

“Yes, Tom Dorgan, who busted out of Sing Sing the other day.”

“Surely you're mistaken,” I said, smiling right into his blue eyes. “The Tom Dorgan I mentioned is a sleight-of-hand performer at the Vaudeville. Ever see him?”

“N — no.”

“Clever fellow. You ought to. Perhaps you don't recognize him under that name. On the bills he's Professor Haughwout. Stage people have so many names, you know.”

“Yes, so have — some other people.”

I laughed, and he grinned back at me.

“Now that's mean of you,” I said; “I never had but one. It was all I needed.”

It flashed through me then what a thing like this might do to a name. You know, Mag, every bit of recognition an actress steals from the world is so much capital. It isn't like the old graft when you had to begin new every time you took up a piece of work. And your name — the name the world knows — and its knowing it makes it worth having like everything — that name is the sum of every scheme you've planned, of every time you've got away with the goods, of every laugh you've lifted, of

every bit of cleverness you've thought out and embodied, of everything that's in you, of everything you are.

But I didn't dare think long of this. I turned to him.

“Tell me about this charge,” I said. “Where was the purse? Whose was it? And why haven't they missed it till after a week?”

“They missed it all right that night, but Mrs. Gates wanted it kept quiet till the servants had been shadowed and it was positively proved that they hadn't got away with it.”

“And then she thought of me?”

“And then she thought of you.”

“I wonder why?”

“Because you were the only person in that room except Mrs. Gates, the lady who lost the purse, Mrs. Ramsay, and — eh?”

“N — nothing. Mrs. Ramsay, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Not Mrs. Edward Ramsay, of Philadelphia?”

“Oh, you know the name?”

“Oh, yes, I know it.”

“It was printed, you know, in gold lettering on the inside flap and — ”

“I don't know.”

“Well, it was, and it contained three hundred dollars, Mrs. Ramsay says. She had slipped it under the fold of the spread at the top of the bed in the room where you took off your things in Mrs. Gates' presence, and put them on again when no one else was there.”

“And you mean to tell me that this is all?” I raged at him; “that every bit of evidence you have to warrant your treating an innocent girl like — ”

“You didn't behave like a very innocent girl, if you'll remember,” he said dryly, “when I first came into the box. In fact, if that fellow hadn't just come in then I believe you'd 'a' confessed the whole job. . . . 'Tain't too late,” he added.

I didn't answer. I put my head back against the cushions and closed my eyes. I could feel the scrutiny of his blue eyes on my naked face — your face is so unprotected with the eyes closed; like a fort whose battery is withdrawn. But I was tired — it tires you when you care. A year ago, Mag, this sort of thing — the risk, the nearness to danger, the chances one way or the other — would have intoxicated me. I used to feel as though I was dancing

on a volcano and daring it to explode. The more twistings and turnings there were to the labyrinth, the greater glory it was to get out. Maggie darlin', you have before you a mournful spectacle — the degeneration of Nancy Olden. It isn't that she's lost courage. It's only that she used to be able to think of only one thing, and now — What do you suppose it is, Mag? If you know, don't you dare to tell me.

When we got to the flat Obermuller was already there. At the door I pulled out my key and opened it with a flourish.

“Won't you come in, gentlemen, and spend the evening?” I asked.

They followed me in. First to the parlor. The two fellows threw off their coats and searched that through and through — not a drawer did they miss, not a bit of furniture did they fail to move. Obermuller and I sat there guying them as they pried about in their shirt-sleeves. That Trust business has taken the life out of him of late. All their tricks, all their squeezings, their cheatings, their bossing and bragging and bullying have got on to his nerves till he looks like a chained bear getting a drubbing. And he swears that they're in a conspiracy

to freeze him and a few others like him out; he believes there's actually a paper in existence that would prove it. But this affair of the purse seemed to excite him till he behaved like a bad school-boy.

And I? Well, Nance Olden was never far behind at the Cruelty when there was anything going on. We trailed after them, and when they'd finished with the bedrooms — yours and mine — I asked the big fellow to come into the kitchen with Mr. O. and me, while the blue-eyed detective tackled the dining-room, and I'd get up a lunch for us all.

Mag, you should have seen Fred Obermuller with a big apron on him, dressing the salad while I was making sandwiches. The Cruelty taught me how to cook, even if it did teach me other things. You wouldn't have believed that the Trust had got him by the throat, and was choking the last breath out of him. You wouldn't have believed that our salaries hadn't been paid for three weeks, that our houses were dwindling every night, that —

I was thinking about it all there in the back of my head, trying to see a way out of it — you know if there is such an agreement as Obermuller swears there is, it's against the law — while we rattled on,

the two of us, like a couple of children on a picnic, when I heard a crash behind me.

The salad bowl had slipped from Obermuller's fingers. He stood with his back turned to me, his eyes fixed upon that searching detective.

But he wasn't searching any more, Mag. He was standing still as a pointer that's scented game. He had moved the lounge out from the wall, and there on the floor, spread open where it had fallen, lay a handsome elephant-skin purse, with gold corners. From where I stood, Mag, I could read the plain gold lettering on the dark leather. I didn't have to move. It was plain enough — quite plain.

MRS. EDWARD RAMSAY

Hush, hush, Mag; if you take on so, how can I tell you the rest?

Obermuller got in front of me as I started to walk into the dining-room. I don't know what his idea was. I don't suppose he does exactly — if it wasn't to spare me the sight of that damned thing.

Oh, how I hated it, that purse! I hated it as if it had been something alive that could be glad of what it had done. I wished it was alive that I could

tear and rend it and stamp on it and throw it in a fire, and drag it out again, with burned and bleeding nails, to tear it again and again. I wanted to fall on it and hide it; to push it far, far away out of sight; to stamp it down — down into the very bottom of the earth, where it could feel the hell it was making for me.

But I only stood there, stupidly looking at it, having pushed past Obermuller, as though I never wanted to see anything else.

And then I heard that blue-eyed fellow's words.

“Well,” he said, pulling on his coat as though he'd done a good day's work, “I guess you'd just better come along with me.”