The Gay Cockade Part 20

"Yes. Toys and all that--"

Ostrander, with his hand on the wheel, his feet on the brakes, slipped through the crowded streets unchallenged. It had been easy to unlock the car. He had learned many things in these later years.

It was several minutes before he was aware of faint fragrances--warm tropical fragrances of flowers and fruits and spices--Christmas fragrances which sent him back to the great kitchen where his grandmother's servants had baked and brewed.

He stopped the car and touched a b.u.t.ton. The light showed booty. He had not expected this. He had wanted the car for an hour, to feel the thrill of it under his fingers, to taste again the luxury of its warmth and softness. He had meant to take it back unharmed--with nothing more than the restless ghost of his poor desires to haunt Whiting when again he entered it.

But now here were toys and things which Whiting, in a climax of generosity, had culled from bake-shop and grocer, from flower-shop, fruit-shop, and confectioner.

He snapped out the light and drove on. He had still a half-hour for his adventure.

It took just three of the thirty minutes to slide up to the curb in front of the tall tenement. He made three trips in and up to the top floor. He risked much, but Fate was with him and he met no one.

Fate was with him, too, when he left the car at a corner near the club, and slipped out of it like a shadow, and thence like a shadow back to the shop whence his steps had tended before his adventures.

When he returned to the tall tenement the small family on the first floor had finished supper, and the mother had gone back to work. The baby was asleep. Milly and p.u.s.s.y, wrapped up to their ears, were hugging the waning warmth of the little stove.

"Mr. Tony, did you get the candle?" p.u.s.s.y asked as he came in.

"Yes. But I've been thinking"--his manner was mysterious--"I don't want to put it on the shelf. I want it in the window--to s.h.i.+ne out--"

"To s.h.i.+ne out--why?"

"Well, you know, there's St. Nicholas."

"Oh--"

"He ought to come here, p.u.s.s.y. Why shouldn't he come here? Why should he go up-town and up-town, and take all the things to children who have more than they want?"

Milly was philosophic. "St. Nicholas is fathers and mothers--"

But p.u.s.s.y was not so sure. "Do you think he'd come--if we did? Do you really and truly think he would?"

"I think he might--"

The candle set in the window made a fine show from the street. They all went out to look at it. Coming in, they sat around the stove together.

p.u.s.s.y drew her chair very close to Ostrander. She laid her hand on his knee. It was a little hand with short, fat fingers. In spite of lean living, p.u.s.s.y had managed to keep fat. She was adorably dimpled.

Ostrander, looking down at the fat little hand, began: "Once upon a time--there was a doll--a Fluffy Ruffles doll, in a rosy gown--"

"Oh!" p.u.s.s.y beat the small, fat hand upon his knee.

"And pink slippers--and it traveled miles to find some one to--love it.

And at last it said to St. Nicholas, 'Oh, dear St. Nick, I want to find a little girl who hasn't any doll--'"

"Like me?" said p.u.s.s.y.

"Like you--"

"And St. Nicholas said, 'Will you keep your pink slippers clean and your nice pink frock clean if I give you to a poor little girl?' and the Fluffy Ruffles doll said 'Yes,' so St. Nicholas looked and looked for a poor little girl, and at last he came to a window--with a red candle--"

The fat little hand was still and p.u.s.s.y was breathing hard.

"With a red candle, and there was a little girl who--didn't have any doll--"

p.u.s.s.y threw herself on him bodily. "Is it true? Is it true?" she shrieked.

Milly, a little flushed and excited by the story, tried to say sedately: "Of course it isn't true. It couldn't be--true--"

"Let's wish it to be true--" Ostrander said, "all three of us, with our eyes shut--"

With this ceremony completed the little girls were advised gravely to go to bed. "If Fluffy Ruffles and old St. Nick come by and find you up they won't stop--"

"Won't they?"

"Of course not. You must shut the door and creep under your quilt and cover up your head, and if you hear a noise you mustn't look."

Milly eyed him dubiously. "I think it is a shame to tell p.u.s.s.y such--"

"Corking things?" He lifted her chin with a light finger and looked into her innocent eyes. "Oh, Milly, Milly, once upon a time there was a Princess, with eyes like yours, and she lived in a garden where black swans swam on a pool, and she wore pale-green gowns and there were poppies in the garden. And a Fool loved her. But she shut him out of the garden. He wasn't good enough even to kneel at her feet, so she shut him out and married a Prince with a white feather in his cap."

He had a chuckling sense of Whiting as the white-feathered Prince. But Milly's eyes were clouded. "I don't like to think that she shut the poor Fool out of the garden."

For a moment he cupped her troubled face in his two hands. "You dear kiddie." Then as he turned away he found his own eyes wet.

As he started up-stairs p.u.s.s.y peeped out at him.

"Wouldn't it be--corking--to see a Fluffy Ruffles doll--a-walking up the street?"

In a beautiful box up-stairs the Fluffy Ruffles doll stared at him. She was as lovely as a dream, and as expensive as they make 'em. There was another doll in blue, also as expensive, also as lovely. Ostrander could see Milly with the blue doll matching her eyes.

There were toys, too, for the baby. And there was a bunch of violets.

And boxes of candy. And books. And there were things to eat. Besides the fruits a great cake, and a basket of marmalades and jellies and gold-sealed bottles and meat pastes in china jars, and imported things in gla.s.s, and biscuits in tins.

Ostrander, after some consideration, opened the tin of biscuits and, munching, he wrote a note. Having no paper, he tore a wrapper from one of the boxes. He had the stub of a pencil, and the result was a scrawl.

"MY DEAR WHITING:

"It was I who borrowed your car--and who ran away with your junk. I am putting my address at the head of this, so that if you want it back you can come and get it. But perhaps you won't want it back.

"I have a feeling that to you and your wife I am as good as dead.

If you have any thought of me it is, I am sure, to pity me. Yet I rather fancy that you needn't. I am down and out, and living on ten dollars a month. That's all I got when the crash came--it is all I shall ever get. I pay four dollars a month for my room and twenty cents a day for food. Sometimes I pay less than twenty cents when I find myself in need of other--luxuries. Yet there's an adventure in it, Whiting. A good little woman who lives in this house begs me to work. But I have never worked. And why begin? I've a heritage of bad habits, and one does not wish to seem superior to one's ancestors.

"The winters are the worst. I spend the summers on the open road.

Ask Marion if she remembers the days when we read Stevenson together in the garden? Tell her it is like that--under the stars--Tell her that I am getting more out of it than she is--with you--

"But the winters send me back to town--and this winter Fate has brought me to an old house in a shabby street just a bit back from the Club. On the first floor there is a little family. Three kiddies and a young mother who works to keep the wolf from the door. There's a p.u.s.s.y-Kiddie, and a Milly-Kiddie, and a baby, and they have adopted me as a friend.