Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color Part 34

"I thought I had a quaint little silhouette of metropolitan life for you," De Ruyter responded, smiling back; "but you spoil the picture if you guy it like that."

"Very curious it is," said Barry--"very curious, indeed. 'How far a little candle throws its beams.' I don't think that the custom was exported from Ireland or from England--at least, I do not recall anything a.n.a.logous."

"I've heard an old Irishwoman complain that the law was harder here on the tenant than it was in the old country," Miss Peters a.s.serted; and then she appended an imitation of the old Irishwoman's speech: "'Sure, they'd boycott the landlord there, that's what they'd do, or they'd shoot the agent, maybe; but here ye can't--there's the police, bad cess to 'em!'"

"Have you ever seen the candle in the plate?" Barry asked her, across the table.

"Never," she answered.

"But you have heard of it?" De Ruyter inquired.

"Never before to-night," was her reply.

"You don't mean to say you don't believe that there is any such custom?"

Mrs. Jimmy asked. "Thus all our illusions are shattered one by one."

"Of course, I don't know," the girl responded; "I haven't been working down there very long--only since last February. But it sounds like it was a fake, as we used to say in the newspaper office when I was a reporter."

Mrs. Jimmy Suydam had never met Miss Peters before, and now she examined the girl curiously, wondering what sort of being a woman was who had been a reporter and was now living among the poor, and who happened also to be dining at Mrs. Canton's.

The hostess was just then explaining to Mr. Suydam in a whisper that Miss Peters was a Southern girl of excellent family, who used to write those "Polly Perkins" articles for the _Dial_ on Sunday, but who had given it up last winter, and now acted as her secretary.

"A fake?" repeated the Irishman, gleefully; "that's one of your Americanisms, isn't it? I must remember that. A fake--what does it mean exactly?"

"It means the thing that is not," De Ruyter explained, with a trace of acerbity in his voice. "Miss Peters disbelieves in the existence of the candle in the plate, and she was too polite to call my story a lie, so she said it was a fake."

"Oh, Mr. De Ruyter," was her retort, "and you used to be a newspaper man yourself once!"

"Your newspapers, now," Barry broke in, "I confess they puzzle me. They are so clever, you know, and so up-to-date, and all that; but you never know what to believe in them, do you? And then they do such dreadful things."

"I fear you will find few Americans prepared to defend our newspapers,"

said the story-teller, always a little ashamed that he had once been a reporter. "But what sort of a dreadful thing have you in mind just now?"

"Things quite inconceivable, you know," the Irishman explained; "a thing like this, for example. A year or two ago a man gave me a copy of one of your New York papers--the _Dial_, I think it was. I read it with great interest, as one would the writing of some strange tribe of savages, don't you know? It was so very extraordinary."

As the guest made this plain statement, little Miss Peters happened to catch the eye of the handsome Mrs. Jimmy Suydam, and they exchanged an imperceptible smile.

"What shocked me the most," Barry continued, "was a long article from some special commissioner, with headings in huge letters--"

"Scare-heads they call them," explained De Ruyter.

"Scare-heads?" repeated the Irishman. "That's the very name for them.

Scare-heads--delicious! This article, then, had scare-heads galore, and it described how a suicide had been identified. It seems some poor girl of the working-cla.s.s had got into trouble, and sooner than bring disgrace on her family she had jumped into the river here--Hudson's River, isn't it? She had carefully arranged so that there was no clew by which she could be traced. But she had not counted on the devilish ingenuity of the special commissioner, a woman, too--at least I suppose it was a woman, since the thing was signed 'Polly Perkins.'"

Mrs. Jimmy saw the blood rise in the cheeks of Miss Peters, until the little Southern girl was as red as any of the maple-leaves that decked the cloth between the two women. She noticed that Rupert De Ruyter was staring into his plate with ill-concealed embarra.s.sment, and that Mrs.

Canton seemed a little uneasy.

"It seems that the poor creature's body was sent to the Morgue," Barry continued, "and no one claimed it, so it was buried at the cost of the county. And there's where the diabolical cunning of this reporter was exercised. She guessed that the girl's family would want to see the body laid away in holy ground, and so she went to the burying. And she hit it, for there were two women there in deep black, the mother of the poor wretch and the sister, not afraid to show their bitter grief when they thought they were unknown and unwatched. The spy tracked them to their house and she found out their names, and she put the whole story in the paper! I suppose it broke the mother's heart, and the sister's, to see the dead girl's shame brought home to her and to them when they thought it was buried in the grave with her body. I don't deny that the female detective showed a deal of skill; but what a pitiful thing! To risk breaking two loving hearts--and for what purpose?"

There was a moment's silence when the Irishman asked this unanswerable question. Then Miss Peters raised her head and looked him in the eye.

"That was what is called a 'beat.' No other paper had the news," she said; "and the reporter who wrote that story got a raise of five dollars a week."

"Faith, she deserved it," Barry returned. "It was blood-money she was taking, I'm thinking."

"That's what I think now," Miss Peters replied. "I wish I had thought so then. I wrote that article, and that is one reason why I am living down there among the poor, to try and make it up to them. Of course, I can't undo the wrong I did; but I mean to do my best."

Then there was another silence, broken by Mrs. Jimmy, who turned to Mrs.

Canton and asked if she was going to take a box at the horse-show.

When the ladies left the dining-room Barry took the chair by the side of Suydam.

"What's the name of that pretty little girl?" he asked. "Peters, isn't it? I say, it was awfully plucky of her to tell us that she was 'Polly Perkins,' wasn't it, now? I like her; she's a trump! And that fair hair of hers is very fetching, isn't it?"

(1897.)

MEN AND WOMEN AND HORSES

Merrymount Morton walked briskly down Madison Avenue that warm November evening, when there was never a foretaste of winter in the intermittent breezes that blew gently across the city from river to river; and as he crossed the side streets one after another he saw the full moon in the east, low and large and mellow. On the brow of Murray Hill he checked his pace for a moment in frank enjoyment of the vista before him, differing in so many ways from the scenes which met his vision in the little college town of New England where he earned his living, and where he had spent the most of his life. The glow of the great town filled the air, and the roar of the city arose all about him. It seemed to him almost as though he could feel the heart of the metropolis throbbing before him. He caught himself wondering again whether he had not erred in accepting the professors.h.i.+p he had been so glad to get when he came back from Germany, and whether his life would not have been fuller and far richer had he come to New York, as once he thought of doing, and had he resolutely struck out for himself in the welter and chaos of the commercial capital of the country.

Down at the foot of the slope a cl.u.s.ter of electric lights spelled out the name of a trivial extravaganza then nearing its hundredth performance in the lovely Garden Theatre, and the avenue hereabouts had a strange, unnatural brilliance. High up in the pure dark blue the beautiful tower rose in air, its grace made visible by many lights of its own. The avenue was clogged with carriages, and the arcade before the theatre and under the tower was thick with men who carried under their arms folded card-board plans of the great amphitheatre, and who vociferously proffered tickets for the horse-show. So far remote from the current of fas.h.i.+on was Merrymount Morton that he had not been aware that the horse-show week was about to come to a glorious end. But he was familiar enough with New York to know that the horse-show was also an exhibition of men and women, and that the human entries were quite as important as the equine, and rather more interesting. He had never happened to be in the city at this season of the year; and although he had intended to spend the evening at the College Club, he seized the occasion to see a metropolitan spectacle which chanced to be novel to him.

From one of the shouting and insistent venders he bought a ticket, and he walked through the broad entrance-hall, the floor of which slanted upwards. He pa.s.sed the door of a restaurant on his right, and he glanced down a staircase which led to the semi-subterranean stalls where the horses were tethered. A pungent, acrid, stable odor filled his nostrils. Then he found himself inside the immense amphitheatre, under the skeleton ribs of its roof picked out with long lines of tiny electric bulbs. Morton had a first impression of glittering hugeness, and a second of restless bustle. From a gallery behind him there came the blare and crash of a bra.s.s band playing an Oriental march; but even this did not drown the buzz and murmur of many thousand voices. The vast building seemed to Morton to be filled with men and women, all of them talking and many of them in motion. He found himself swept along slowly in the dense crowd that circled steadily around the high fence which guarded the arena wherein the horses were exhibited. This crowd was too compact for him to approach the railing, and he could not discover for himself whether or not anything was to be seen.

A thin line of more or less horsy fellows fringed the fence, and seemed to be interested in what was going on. The most of the men and women who filled the broad promenade between the railing and the long tier of private boxes paid little or no attention to the arena; they gave themselves up to staring at the very gayly dressed ladies in the boxes.

It struck the New England college professor that the most of those present made no pretence of caring for the horses, as though horses could be seen any day; while they frankly devoted themselves to gazing at the people of fas.h.i.+on penned side by side in the boxes, and not often placing themselves so plainly on exhibition. Some of those who were playing their parts on this narrow and elevated stage had the self-consciousness of the amateur, and some had the ease that comes of long practice. These latter looked as though they were accustomed to be stared at, as though they expected it of right, as though they were there on purpose to be seen. They seemed to know one another; and it struck Morton that they were apparently all members of a secret fraternity of fas.h.i.+on, with their own signs and pa.s.swords and their own system of private grips; and they wholly ignored the people who had not been initiated and who were not members of their society. They nodded and smiled brightly to belated arrivals of their own set. They kept up a continual chatter among themselves, the women leaning across to talk to acquaintances in the adjoining compartments, and the men paying visits to the boxes of their friends. Now and again some one in a box would recognize some one in the circling throng below; but for the most part there was no communication between the two cla.s.ses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EXPLANATIONS]

To Morton the spectacle had the attraction of novelty; it was so novel, indeed, that he did not quite know what to make of it. It disconcerted him not a little to see people, of position presumably, and obviously of wealth, willing thus to show themselves off, dressed, many of them, as though with special intent to attract attention. As a student of sociology, he found this inspection of Society--in the narrowest sense of the word--almost as instructive as it was interesting. At times the vulgarity of the whole thing shocked him, more especially once when he could not but hear the loud voices of one over-dressed group of women, who were discussing the characteristics of one "Willie."

"He's a wretched little beast!" cried one of these ladies.

"You mustn't say that," rejoined another, a tall woman with gray hair; "you know he's my corespondent." And at this stroke of wit the rest of the party laughed repeatedly.

But few of those on exhibition were as common as the members of this group. Indeed, Morton was struck with the fact that the most of the men and women who were being stared out of countenance were apparently people of breeding, and he wondered that they were willing to place themselves in what seemed to him so false a position. Many of the girls, for example, who wore striking costumes and extravagant hats, were themselves refined in face and retiring in bearing; they were stylish, no doubt, but they were well bred also. It seemed to Morton that style was perhaps the chief characteristic of these New York girls--style rather than beauty.

The average of good looks was high, and yet, as it happened, he was able to walk half around the huge building without seeing half a dozen women whom he was prepared to declare handsome. The girls appeared to be strong, healthy, lively, quick-witted, and charming, but rarely beautiful. They seemed to him, moreover, to be emphatically superior to the men who accompanied them, superior not only in looks, but in manners and intelligence.

Morton noted, to his surprise, that some of these men were quite as conscious of their clothes as any of the women were; and he caught also more than one remark showing that the appreciation of the women's clothes was not confined to the women themselves.

As he was nearing the Fourth Avenue end of the edifice he saw in a box just above him--for he found himself staring like the rest--a lady of striking beauty, with a look of sadness on her face, that gave place to a fact.i.tious smile when she spoke to one or another of the three or four young men who stood on the steps at the side of her chair. The face interested Morton, and it was recognized by two young men just behind him.

"h.e.l.lo!" said one of them, "there's Mrs. Cyrus Poole. Smart gown, hasn't she?"