“The man next door?” said Dulcet, in a casual tone.
“Sure, the cigar store.”
“Is his name Stork?” said Dulcet, reflectively.
“Stork? Why, no, Basswood. What do you mean, Stork?”
“I mean,” said Dulcet, slowly, “does he ever stand on one leg?”
“Quit your kidding,” cried the laundryman, annoyed.
“I assure you, I do not trifle,” said Dulcet, gravely. “I'll bring you in some collars to fix up for me. Much obliged.”
We went out again, and my companion stood for a moment in front of the laundry window, looking thoughtfully at the sign.
“While you ponder, old son,” I said, “I'll run into Mr. Stork-Basswood's and get some tobacco.”
He seized my arm in a firm and painful clutch and whispered, “Look at the corner!”
The laundry was the second shop from the corner. Under the lamp-post at the angle of the street I saw, to my amazement, a man standing balanced on one leg. Directly under the light, he was partly in shadow, and I could only see him in silhouette, but the absurd profile of his onelegged attitude afflicted me with a renewed sense of absurdity and irritation. Dulcet, I thought, had evidently suffered some serious stroke in the region of his wits.
“Now,” he said, softly, “can you see any rhyme between soft collars and standing on one leg?”
As he spoke, we both started, for somewhere near us on the street there sounded a sharp tapping, a ringing hollow wooden sound. Evidently it came from the one-legged man. This was too much for my composure. I broke away from Dulcet and ran to the corner. As I got there the one-legged creature put down a concealed limb and stood solidly on two feet, in a state of normalcy, as an eminent statesman would say. I was confused, and said angrily to the man:
“Here, you mustn't stand like that, on the public street you know, on one leg. It's setting a bad example.”
To my amazement he made no retort whatever, but turned and scuttled hastily down the avenue, disappearing in the crowds that were doing their evening marketing.
“My dear fellow,” said Dulcet, calmly, coming up to me, “you shouldn't have done that. You've very nearly spoilt it all. Come on, let's go in and get your tobacco.”
Basswood's proved to be one of those interesting combination tobacco, stationery, toy, and bookshops which are so common on the upper West Side. I have often noticed that these places are by no means unfruitful as hunting ground for books, because the dealers are wholly ignorant of literature and sometimes one may find on their shelves some forgotten volume that has been there for years, and which they will gladly part with for a song. A good many of these stores have, tucked away at the back, a shabby stock of circulating library volumes that have come down through many changes of proprietorship. Only the other day I saw in just such a place first editions of Kenneth Grahame's “The Golden Age” and Arthur Machen's “The Three Impostors,” which the storekeeper was delighted to sell for fifteen cents each.
A dark young man was behind the tobacco counter, and from him I got a packet of my usual blend.
“Mr. Basswood in?” said Dulcet.
“Just stepped out,” said the young man.
We lit our pipes and looked round the shop, glancing at the magazines and the queer miscellany of books. As it was approaching Christmas time there was a profuse assortment of those dreadful little bibelots that go by the name of “gift books,” among which were the usual copies of “Recessional” and “Vampire,” Thoreau's “Friendship,” and “Ballads of a Cheechako,” bound in what the trade calls “padded ooze”. I was particularly heartened to observe that one of these atrocities, called “As a Man Thinketh,” was described on the box (for all such books come in little cardboard cases) as being bound in antique yap. This pleased me so much that I was about to call it to Dulcet's attention, when I saw that he was looking at me from the rear of the store with a spark in his eye. I approached and found that he was staring at a doorway partly concealed by a pile of Christmas toys and novelties. Over this door was a sign: J. Basswood, Rare Book Department.
“Can we go in and look at the rare books?” said Dulcet.
“Sure thing,” said the young man. “Help yourself. The boss'll be back soon, if you want to buy anything.”
Mr. Basswood was evidently a man of some literary discretion. To our amazement we found, in a dark little room lined with shelves, a judicious assortment of modern books, several hundred volumes, and all first editions or autographed copies. The prices were marked in cipher, so we could not tell whether there were any bargains among them, but I know that I saw several particularly rare and desirable things which I would have been glad to have.
“Good heavens,” I said to Dulcet, “friend Basswood is a real collector. There isn't a thing here that isn't of prime value.”
He was staring at a shelf in the corner, and I went over to see what he had found.
“Upon my soul,” I cried, “look at the Digbies! Not merely one copy of each, but three or four! This man must have specialized in Digbies.”
“Not only that,” said Dulcet, “but he has three of 'The Autogenesis of a Novelist', the first thing that Digby wrote. It was privately printed, and afterward suppressed. It's devilish rare; even I haven't got a copy. I wish I knew what prices he asks for these things.”
“Look at this,” I said. “Perhaps this will tell us.” I picked up one of a pile of pamphlets that were lying in a large sheet of wrapping paper in a corner of the room. It was evidently a new catalogue of Mr. Basswood's rare books, that had just come from the printer.
“Here we are,” I said, turning over the leaves. “Look at this.”
Special Note
Fine Collection of Digbiana: J. Basswood wishes to call particular attention to the Digbiana listed below. Anticipating the growing interest in collectors' items of this great writer's work, J. Basswood has taken pains to gather a stock of first editions and presentation copies which is absolutely unique. The prices of these items, while high, are a fair index of the appreciation in which this author's work is held among connoisseurs. All are copies in good condition and their authenticity is guaranteed.
November 15, 19—.
Dulcet seized the catalogue and ran his eye down the pages.
“'Girlhood,' first edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1901, $100,” he read. “'The Nuisance of Being Loved,' first edition, $75. 'The Princess Quarrelsome,' $90. 'The Anatomy of Cheerfulness,' autographed copy, $150. 'Distemper,' acting copy, signed by the author and Richard Mansfield, $200.
“Why,” he cried, shrilly, “this is madness! I am in touch with all the dealers in this sort of thing, and I know the proper prices. This man has multiplied them by ten.” He thrust the catalogue into his pocket and glared round at the musty shelves.
“I suppose it's due to poor Digby's death,” I said. I saw that Dulcet was overwrought, and suggested that we go out and get some supper.
“Supper?” he said. “A good idea. I know a place on Broadway where we can get some guinea pigs.” He strode out of the store and I followed, wondering what next. He seized my arm and hurried me along Seventy-ninth Street to Broadway.
In the clarid blue of the evening that blazing gully of light seemed to foam and bubble with preposterous fire. Chop suey restaurants threw out crawling streamers of red and yellow brilliance; against the peacock green of the western sky the queer church at the corner of Seventy-ninth, with the oriental pinnacle and truncated belfry rising above its solid Baptist wings, seemed like the offspring of some reckless marriage of two infatuated architects, one Jewish and one Calvinist. It was a fitting silhouette, I thought, congruent with an evening of such wild humours. Guinea pigs for supper, how original and enlivening! “Are guinea pigs properly kosher?” I asked, sarcastically.
Dulcet paid no heed, but, holding my arm, urged me along the pavement to an animal shop on the western side of Broadway. The window was full of puppies and long-haired cats. All down the aisle of the establishment were tiers of birdcages, covered with curtains while the birds slept. In lucid bowls persevering goldfish pursued their glittering and improfitable round.
“Those guinea pigs I ordered,” said Dulcet to the man, “are they ready?”
“All ready, sir,” he said, and took out a cage from under the counter. “Very fine pigs, sir, strong and hearty; they will stand a great deal.”
“Yes,” I said, with a wild desire to shout with laughter. “But will they stand being eaten? They will find that rather trying, I fancy.”
Dulcet tapped his forehead, and the dealer smiled indulgently. My companion took the cage, paid some money, and sped outdoors again.
I made no further comment and in a few minutes we were in Dulcet's apartment.
“You have no kitchenette here, have you?” I protested. “Or do we devour them raw? Oh, I see, you have a camp oven. How ingenious!”
He had put on the table a large tin box. With complete seriousness he now produced a small spirit lamp, over which he fitted a little basket of fine wire mesh. When the flame of the lamp was lit, it played upon the basket, which was supported by legs at just the right height. He now put the unsuspecting guinea pigs into the tin box, which was shaped like a rural-free-delivery letter-box, with a hinged door opening at one end. He took the spirit lamp with its attached basket and pushed the contraption carefully into the box with the pigs. Then he opened both windows in the room.
“Admirable!” I exclaimed. “Like those much-advertised cigarettes, they will be toasted. But won't it take a long time?”
“Don't be an ass,” he said.
He went to his desk, and took out the tin of Cartesian Mixture he had snatched away from me earlier in the evening.
“Your mention of those cigarettes is apt,” he said, “for in this case also the fuel is tobacco. Please go over by the window, and stay there.”
I watched, somewhat impressed by the gravity of his manner. From the tin of tobacco he took a small pinch of mixture and carefully placed it in the mesh basket above the lamp. Reaching into the box, he lit the wick of the lamp with a match, and hastily clapped to the hinged lid. The guinea pigs seemed to be awed by these proceedings, for they remained quiet. Dulcet joined me at the window, and remarked that fresh air was a fine thing.
We waited for about five minutes, while the guinea-pig oven stood quietly on the table.
“Well,” said Dulcet, finally, “we ought to be able to see whether it rhymes or not.”
He snatched open the door of the tin box, and skipped away from it in a way that seemed to me perfectly insane. He picked up a pair of tongs from the fireplace, and standing at a distance, lifted out the lamp. The tobacco was smoking strongly in its mesh basket. Holding the lamp away from him with the tongs, he carried it into the bathroom, and I heard him turn on the water. Then, coming back, he inserted the tongs into the tin box, and gingerly withdrew first one guinea pig and then the other. Both were calm as possible, quite dead. Looking over the sill to see that the pavement was clear, he threw the tin box into the street, where it fell with a crash.
“Surely they're not cooked already?” I said.
“I haven't heard from the doctor yet,” he said; “but he promised to ring me up this evening. I'm awfully sorry to have delayed your dinner, old man. Meet me at the Lucerne grill room, Seventy-ninth and Amsterdam Avenue, to-morrow evening at seven o'clock and we'll eat together. You've been a great help to me.”
“I hope the doctor is a mental specialist,” I said; but he pushed me gently out of the room. “We'll finish our rhyme at dinner to-morrow evening.”
I went out into the night, and sorrowfully visited a Hartford Lunch.
The next evening I was at the Lucerne grill promptly. This modest chop house was one of Dulcet's favourite resorts, and I found him already sitting in one of the alcoves studying the menu. He was in fine spirits, and his quizzical blue eyes shone with a healthy lustre.
“Are you armed?” he said, mysteriously.
“What,” I cried, “are we going to do some more guinea pigs to death? It was cruel. I have scruples against taking innocent lives. Besides, your experiment proved nothing. Those pigs would have died anyway, shut up in an air-tight box like that.”
“Stuff!” he said. “The box was not hermetic. I had left small apertures: there was plenty of oxygen. No, it was not the confinement in the tin box that killed them. After you had gone, the chemist whom I had consulted called me up. My suspicions were sound. Have you ever heard of fumacetic acid?”
This is going to be terrible, I thought to myself, and ordered tenderloin steak, well done, with a double order of hashed brown potatoes.
“Have you ever heard of fumacetic acid?” he repeated, relentlessly.
“No,” I said, nervously.
“It is a deadly and little-known drug,” he said, “which (so the chemist tells me) possesses the property that when vaporized the slightest whiff of it causes instant death if inhaled into the lungs. The tobacco in that tin had been doctored with it. I sent the chemist the pipe that poor Digby was smoking when he died, and he analyzed what was left in the bowl. There is no doubt whatever. He was poisoned in that way. I tell you, my professional duty as a literary agent requires that in my clients' interest I should sift this thing to the bottom. It may explain some of those earlier deaths that baffled the Authors' League.”
“But Mrs. Carboy, surely, did not smoke,” I was about to say; but I checked myself in time.
“Dove,” I said, “you are superb. But I wish you would tell me how you worked the thing out. What was it that first aroused your suspicions? If it had not been for you, I should never have guessed anything wrong.”
“Of course,” he said, grimly, “it was that murderous placard in the laundry window, and that is to your credit, for you noticed it. That was the one thing that made plain the whole complicated business. Naturally I suspected the tobacco from the first, for (as I told you) it was a mixture that Digby never smoked ordinarily. But when I heard that that eccentric and damnable placard had been put there at the suggestion of the tobacconist next door, and then found that the tobacconist was also a bookseller, I knew the worst. I have spent to-day in rounding up the threads, and I think I may say without vainglory that the miscreant is in my power.”
“But the man standing on one leg?” I said, puzzled. “What was he up to, and why did he run?” Dulcet's face shone with quiet triumph.
“I told you,” he said, “to look for a nervous man smoking Cartesian Mixture. That tobacconist, Basswood, smokes Cartesian. It is a very moist, sticky blend, as you know. It can only be shaken out of the pipe, after smoking, by vigorously knocking the bowl on something hard. Very well, and if there is no stone step or something of that sort handy, what will a smoker tap his pipe on? Why, he will stand on one leg and knock it out on the lifted heel of the other. And his running away when you addressed him so whimsically, wasn't that a pretty good sign of nervousness—and also of a guilty and doubtful spirit?”
He finished his tumbler of the near-beer that has made Milwaukee infamous, and leaned forward earnestly.
“You know very well,” he said, “that that laundryman would never have thought of his grotesque notice, addressed to 'Artists and Authors', if someone hadn't suggested it to him. Obviously he was only a gull. That card was intended as a decoy, to lure Digby away from his room, so that Basswood could leave the poisoned tobacco for him. Basswood had studied Digby's habits, and must have known that the notice about the collars would be sure to catch his eye. Now we had better be going. The police will be at Basswood's shop at eight o'clock.”
I could have done with a little strong coffee, but he haled me out of the restaurant, and we walked up Amsterdam Avenue. How little, I reflected, did the passersby, hurrying about their kindly and innocent concerns, suspect our dark and perilous errand.
“The motive, of course,” said Dulcet, “was to profit by the increase of value Digby's death would give to his literary work. You will see a proof of that in a moment. Here we are. Come on, this is no time to hang back!”
He strode into the brightly lighted shop, and I followed with a clumsy assumption of carelessness. I must confess that my eye wandered in search of suitable cover in case there should be any gun play.
Mr. Basswood was behind his counter, smoking a battered-looking briar. One side of the bowl was worn down nearly half an inch (from repeated knocking out on stone steps, I suppose). He was a fat, cross-looking person, with a black jut of moustache and a small, vindictive eye.
“A friend told me about your bookshop,” said Dulcet. “He said that you sometimes buy books and manuscripts and that sort of thing.”
“Yes, sometimes,” said Basswood, without enthusiasm.
“I have an unpublished story of Kenelm Digby's,” said Dulcet. “It is about forty pages of manuscript. What would you give for that?”
The dealer's eyes brightened. He took his pipe from his mouth, and knocked it out smartly on his heel, tramping on the glowing cinders. Dulcet looked at me gravely.
“Let me see it,” Basswood said, eagerly.
“I haven't got it with me. But give me an idea what it would be worth to you.”
“If it is genuine, and characteristic of Digby's genius,” said Basswood, slowly, “I would give you two hundred dollars for it.”
“Nonsense!” said Dulcet. “It isn't worth half that. I would not dream of selling it for more than seventy-five.”
Basswood looked startled.
“I guess you are not in touch with the market for such things,” he said. “There is more interest among collectors in Digby's work than in any other recent writer. Perhaps you don't realize what a difference his sad death has made in the prices of his editions. It is very regrettable, but the death of a writer of that kind always puts a premium on collectors' items, because there will never be any more of them.”
“Oh, I see,” said Dulcet, politely. “It is his death that has made the difference, is it?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, then, I suppose this manuscript is worth more than I thought. By the way, I think the title of it will interest you. It is called 'The Mystery of the Soft Collars' and deals with a murder that took place on Eighty-second Street.”
I couldn't help admiring the glorious nonchalance with which Dulcet made this remark, gazing the dealer straight in the eye. Basswood's face was a study, and his cheek was pale and greasy. But he, too, was a man of considerable nerve.
“I don't believe it's genuine,” he said. “That doesn't sound to me like Digby's style.” His voice shook a little, and he added: “However, if it's as interesting as it sounds, I might pay even more than two hundred for it.”
“You rascal!” shouted Dulcet. “Do you think you can buy me off? No! keep your hands above the counter!”
He had whipped out his revolver, and held it at the man's face.
“Look here, Mr. Basswood,” he said. “Even the cleverest of us make mistakes. Let me call your attention to one thing. If it was Digby's death that made the difference in the values of his books, how is it that this bill from your printer, for that new catalogue of yours, is dated ten days before Digby died? I picked it up in your back room the other day. Doesn't that seem to show that you knew, ten days before the event, that there was going to be a sudden boom in Digbiana? Ten days before he died you were multiplying the prices of the items you had gathered. Now, you dog, can you explain that?”
Basswood shook, but still he clung to his hope.
“I'll give you a thousand for that manuscript,” he said.
“Ben,” said Dulcet to me, “just slip around the corner and whistle three times. The police are waiting on Eighty-fifth Street.”
“There's still one thing that puzzles me,” I said to Dulcet late that night as we sat in his room for a final smoke. “I remember that before we discovered that sign in the laundry you said that what we needed to do was to find a rhyme between tobacco and collar buttons. Now what the deuce started you off on collar buttons?”
He smiled patiently.
“When I had to pack up poor old Digby's belongings,” he said, “I had the sad task of going through his bureau drawers. You know the devilish little buttons that the manufacturers insist on putting on soft collars. They always come off after one or two washings, and then the collar collapses round your neck into an object of slovenly reproach. Digby was a bachelor, and there was no one to do any mending for him. And when I found that every one of his soft collars had its little button neatly sewed on, I knew there was something wrong. I ask you, wouldn't that have aroused the alarm of the least suspicious?”
Up to the present time, as far as I know, Basswood remains the only bookseller who has ever been electrocuted.
IT WAS one of those gilded October days when the serene sunshine is as soft and tawny as candle-light; when the air is thin and sharp in the early mornings, but the noontime is as comfortably genial as the radiance of a hearth reddened with hickory embers. Dove Dulcet and I were strolling along Riverside Park, enjoying the blue elixir of the afternoon, in which there was just a faint prick, a gently tangible barb of the coming arrows of the North.
“Winter sharpens her spearheads,” said Dulcet. “Aye,” was my reply. Below us I saw the coaling-station at the Seventy-ninth Street pier. “The merriest music the householder can hear nowadays is the roar of coal going down the chute into the cellar.”
He sighed, and seemed touched by a sudden melancholy.
“Ben,” he said, “that coal-dump reminds me of Gloria Larsen. Did I ever tell you about her?”
“Never,” I said. “Coal, I presume, made you think of diamonds; and diamonds, of Miss Larsen. Were you engaged to her?”
“I might have been,” he said, sentimentally. Before us was an empty bench, on a little knoll that looks out over the shining sweep of the river. I drew him to it, and we filled our pipes. When you can get a minor poet in an autobioloquacious mood, it is well to encourage him. No one takes life so seriously as the minor poet, and consequently his memoirs make fine sport for the disinterested bystander.
“No,” he said, blowing a waft of tobacco smoke into the soft, sun-brimmed air, and settling down into the curve of the bench. “The association was even more obvious than that of coal and diamonds. I always think of Gloria when winter begins to come in.”
“Ah!” I said. “She was cold?”
He meditated, ignoring my jocularity.
“It was a good many years ago,” he said at last; “before you knew me. When I first came to town, you know, I had a fine ambition to be a writer. I had just a little money, so I shut myself up in a hall room at the top of a cheap lodging-house on Seventy-fifth Street, hired a typewriter, and set about to butt my bead against all the walls that hem in the beginner.
“It was one of those old four-story dwellings that are now mostly boarding-houses, and it was run by a good-hearted widow who would let her rooms only to men, because she said they were less trouble than women. Her house was clean and incredibly cheap, and almost all the lodgers were young fellows like myself—students, or starveling artists, or chaps with literary ambitions. That was how I had heard of the place, through another fellow who lived there and had built up a little sort of coterie in the house. He was Black-more. You know his name; he gave up art long ago. He's now the art editor of the Mother, Home, and Heaven Magazine.
“Mrs. Vesey, our landlady, was quite a character. I was always rather a favourite with her, because the very first day I came to her house I happened to find her cat, which had wandered away some days before, leaving her disconsolate. The cat's name, I remember, was Nemo. She had called it so because, with that admirable virginity of mind that one finds only in a childless married woman, she was uncertain of the animal's sex. Anyway, it was a fine big creature, and the apple of Mrs. Vesey's pie. She talked so much about it that we used to chaff her a good deal on the subject, and say that we thought it was going to have kittens, and all that sort of thing. Blackmore used to say, remembering the title of some idiotic melodrama he had seen, that it was 'Neither Maid, Wife, nor Widow.' He was right, for it was the kind of cat that is not likely to be either a father or a mother without a miracle. But I don't want to be indelicate. I only mention Nemo because it was through him that I first talked with Gloria.
“The first day I was at Mrs. Vesey's I heard her groaning about the vanished cat. That evening I went out to supper, feeling rather lonely, and dropped in at an eccentric-looking little restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue. It was called Larsen's Physical Culture Chophouse, and I have never seen a more amusing place. Old man Larsen was a Swede, and all the Scandinavian fads ran riot in his head—vegetarian food, for instance. He didn't absolutely condemn meat, for he would serve it if you insisted, but all his joy was in weird combinations of calory, protose, and vitamine, or whatever those things are called. Bean “cutlets,” and protose “steak” that turned out, on examination, to be made of chopped walnuts and lentils, and the “Thousand-Calory Combination Dinner,” of which he made a specialty. When you sat down, if you were a regular customer, old Larsen would come round and look you over and diagnose from your complexion the kind and quantity of calories you needed for that meal, and would give you combinations of spinach croquettes and lentil pie that he warranted would purge the blood and compose the mind. On the walls were charts of Swedish exercises and systems of calisthenics, and he sold a little pamphlet that he himself had written telling how to be strong and merry and full of physique.
“Well, to come back to my first visit to Larsen's restaurant. I hadn't been in there many minutes before I noticed the girl at the cashier's desk. My, my, what a girl! My table was close to her little throne, and I couldn't help watching her out of the end of my eye. I wondered if she was raised entirely on protose and lentils, for I have never seen anything so gloriously and vitally physical in my life. Great, bold blue eyes, and crisp, sparkling golden hair, and blood that spoke delicately through her skin, and a figure—well, just our old friend of Melos over again, that lively combination of grace and strength. She was just curves and waves and athletic softness—the kind of creature that makes your arms tingle, you know. No corset, I suppose. In the old man's booklet on physical culture he defended the gymnastic doctrine that women should develop what he called a muscle corset by bending and swaying from the hips a thousand times a day. He said it must be done—well, au naturel, in front of an open window in one's bedroom in the morning. I'd be ashamed to admit that we fellows at Mrs. Vesey's used to set our alarm clocks at half-past six to go round the corner to Amsterdam Avenue——”
Dulcet paused a while and watched the river pensively.
“But about the cat,” I reminded him presently.
“Yes,” he said. “Well, that first night I was at the chop-house I noticed a very fine, fat cat browsing about under the tables. I was amused at the corpulence of the animal. I said to myself that a cat as large as that must surely get some meat somewhere, because, while vegetarian protose food may be all right for Swedes, a cat is a realist in the matter of carnal meals. And when I went to the desk to pay my check, wanting some excuse to get into talk with the superb Gloria—who was, of course, the old man's daughter—I remarked on the sleek, healthy appearance of her cat.
“'Oh, it's not ours,' she said. 'It came in here yesterday. I don't know whose he is.'
“I'll bet I know whose it is,” I said.
I told her that Mrs. Vesey, who ran the bachelor lodging-house on Seventy-Fifth Street, had lost her Nemo. She listened with interest, those thrilling blue eyes sizing me up in a keen, humorous way.
“'I shouldn't wonder it's hers,' she said.
“Welcoming any pretext for prolonging the discussion, I borrowed the phone at Gloria's elbow, and, studying the heart-rending curves of her chin and cheek and throat, I called up Mrs. Vesey and told her I thought I had found her pet. Mrs. Vesey hurried round to the restaurant, and swept up the vagabond Nemo with cries of joy into her lean and affectionate bosom. Nemo purred, and I escorted Mrs. Vesey home, recapitulating in my mind the perfect contours of the girl's heavenly form. My enthusiasm was even such that when the other men came in I could not refrain from telling them all about her. I saw that I had made a mistake, for instantly Blackmore swore he would get her to sit for him.
“Of course, from that time on, the Physical Culture Chophouse became the nightly haunt of our little party. The other men had seen it many times, but the vegetarian threats in the window had frightened them away. But now, none of us dared to be absent very many dinners, for fear the rest would gain some advantage with the girl. I cannot give you any conception of the humorous glamour of that time unless I insist that she was the most superbly luscious thing I have ever glimpsed; and one sees a good many covetable creatures on the streets of New York. Some of them said she was cold; that in spite of all the nutritious algebra printed on old Larsen's menus (he used to put down all sorts of preposterous formulas about starch, and albumen, and phosphorus, and proteids, and so on)—she was lacking in calories. But I know that when we sat at table, and she came round to ask if everything was all right, and leaned over us with her clear eyes, as blue as a special-delivery stamp, and that cream-white neck, and the faint glimmer of a blue ribbon shining through the hilly slopes of her blouse——-Oh, well, Ben, we were young, and we ate red meat for lunch, anyway.
“I guess old man Larsen, who spent most of his time in the kitchen, encouraged her to kid us along, for he never seemed to mind our open admiration of his daughter. He probably saw that she was a bigger business asset than any number of calory charts. Every now and then he would come out and chin with us, for our party became a nightly event in the café. Before long we had sampled every kind of vegetarian combination on the list, and had him busy inventing new ones. We used to ask him if he had raised a girl like that on nothing but vegetables, and he would laugh and swear that Gloria had never tasted blood until she was sixteen. It seemed queer to us that the restaurant wasn't full of her suitors. I should have thought, with a girl like her, they'd have been standing in line waiting for a look at her. I suppose that people who feed on nothing but vegetables are rather puny in such matters. It's an odd thing, but I've always noticed that most of the people who frequent these crank physical-culture and dietetic eating-places are a queer, sick-looking lot—youths with rolling Adam's apples, and sallow, soup-stained girls. Certainly our little gang, so very jovial and fancy-free, made a quaint contrast to most of the patrons of the house. In a few days we felt as if we owned the place, and had the old man slide two tables together just underneath Gloria's cash register, where we met every evening for dinner.
“As for Larsen, he was a crank on many subjects but he was no fool. He was an athletic, erect fellow with a bristling gray moustache and cropped hair and a forcible gray eye. On the wall was a huge photo of him in a kind of Sandow pose, with a leopard-skin apron round his middle, showing terrific knotty biceps and back muscles. Gloria told us that at one time he had been a physical instructor in the Swedish army, and the head of a Turnverein, or something of that sort. There was a certain physical and gymnastic candour about him that amused us. He was awfully proud of Gloria, whom he had raised himself (being a widower) according to his own hygienic and athletic principles. After we had all bought his booklets, and promised to take up his system of calisthenics, he became quite chummy and showed us a lot of photographs of Gloria at different ages, doing her gymnastic exercises, beginning as a little plump Venus and ending as a stunning profile in tights. We tried to maintain an attitude of merely scientific detachment toward those pictures, admiring them only as connoisseurs of physical culture; but we ended by begging him for copies, insisting that they would be a useful guide to us in our own private exercising. But Larsen said he was keeping them to illustrate a new enlarged edition of his physical-culture book. We told him that it would sell a million copies, and I think we all volunteered to act as selling-agents for the book. Annette Kellermann and Susanna Cocroft, we cried, were scarecrows compared to Gloria.
“To all this banter Gloria would listen calmly and unembarrassed, for she had a magnificent unconsciousness of her own superb allure. We would each try to get a moment alone with her to describe the exercises we were taking, and to ask her advice about our muscular development. I remember that Blackmore, after secret practice that we had not suspected, took the wind out of our sails one evening when some of us were bragging of our accomplishment in bending and touching the floor while standing on tiptoe. He jumped up and caught hold of the lintel of the doorway, and chinned himself on it a dozen times or so. We were all crestfallen by this feat until Gloria came forward—all the other customers had gone home—and did the same thing about twenty times. She went back to her counter with a heavenly flush of pride, while Blackmore dashed to a table and did a little sketch of her from memory, with the lovely lines of her figure silhouetted against the doorway.
“But it was I who was first to think of the subtlest compliment that any one could pay her, which was to ask the privilege of feeling her biceps. And what an arm she had! Not a great, fleshy, flabby washerwoman's limb, but the rippling marble of a Greek statue brought to warm life! Blackmore used to sit at meal-times neglecting his protose steak and making sketches of her while she wasn't looking. The best I could do was write verses about her. And while she played no favourites, I think she really gave me a little the inside track, because I talked physical culture with her more seriously than the others, who tried to make love to her a little too baldly.
“By this time she had us all doing calisthenics. The creaky floors of Mrs. Vesey's house used to resound night and morning with the agonies of our gymnastics. There was one exercise that Gloria told us she found particularly helpful. It was to lie down with the feet under a bureau or any other heavy piece of furniture, extend the arms behind the head, and then raise and lower the body a hundred times, pivoting from the waist. This was only one of fifty or more laborious accomplishments that we undertook for the sake of our goddess. No woman was ever wooed with more honest pangs, or with more repeated genuflections. As we lay on the floor before going to bed, raising our legs in the air two hundred times, or groaned in some sinew-cracking, twisting contortion devised by the pitiless Swede, it was the vision of Gloria's beauty of snow and rose that gave us courage. If any passer-by ever looked up at the front of Mrs. Vesey's house in the early mornings, he must have been startled to see a white figure near every window, furiously going through the Swedish manual. One of us, we fondly thought, would some day spend a healthy Swedish honeymoon performing these motions in ecstatic company with Gloria; and we did not want to be shamed by her incomparable perfection. If she worshipped bodily symmetry, our goal was nothing less. We wanted to be lithe, supple, very panthers of elasticity and grace. The evening I was able to stand on one leg in the restaurant and proudly raise my other foot to touch a gas-jet some six feet from the floor, I felt that Gloria might some day be mine.”
Dove paused again, and seemed to fall into a reminiscent reverie. Unconsciously he stiffly extended one leg in front of him, and I divined that he was inwardly rehearsing that act of calisthenic triumph.
“By gracious!” he said, “I've never forgotten the night I got her father's permission to take her to some gymnastic tournament, or something of that sort, down at Madison Square Garden. How annoyed the other men were when they went to the chop-house that night for their evening penance of lentils, and found Gloria absent! Yes, it was an odd wooing. I had found the measurements of the Venus de Milo in some Sunday paper, and that night, when we became quite sentimental, I made her promise to take her own dimensions, so that we could compare the proportions of the two. And we had some very happy little jokes, quite simple ones that she would understand, about her arms being much more lovely than those of the statue, and that sort of thing. How deliciously she blushed the next day when she gave me her list of measurements, written out on a sheet of paper. Of course, I pretended not to understand which was which. I wrote a little poem about them.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that you were getting on very well. What was the trouble? You didn't marry her, did you?”
“Old man Larsen,” he continued, gravely, “had a number of other hobbies besides vegetarianism and physical culture. He was a mechanical genius in his way. I remember once, after we had expressed exaggerated admiration of some atrocious compound of lentils and nuts and fruit, Gloria took us through the kitchen to show us an ingenious sandwich-making machine her father had contrived. You fed in loaves of pumpernickel bread and pats of nut butter on one side, hard-boiled eggs and lettuce and dressing on the other, and out came egg-salad sandwiches through a slot, as neat as you could want to see. But the best of his stunts was a sort of miniature vacuum cleaner which the waitresses used for taking the crumbs off the tables. You've seen those little hot-air pistols they use at swell shoe-shining stands to dry the liquid cleanser off your shoes before they put on the polishing paste? Well, Larsen's decrumbing machine, as we used to call it, looked rather like those. You screwed a plug into an electric light socket, ran the little gun over the table, and in a jiffy it sucked up crumbs and cigarette ashes and spilled lentils and matches, and left the cloth neat. Larsen was so proud of it he said he was going to patent it.
“I never cared so very much for the old man, he was a little too eccentric; and I began to think, after a while, that he used his daughter a little too crudely as a business bait; but he was full of ideas. He had a big motor-truck that he used to cruise around town, visiting the markets himself, to get the pick of the vegetables; and he was always tinkering with that truck, planning new mechanical tricks of some kind. He had an insatiable curiosity, too. He used to sit down at the table with us sometimes, late in the evening, and ask about our work, and where we lived, and what Mrs. Vesey was like, and what time of day we were home, and all sorts of fool questions like that.
“Well, the time went on, and it began to be cold weather. I noticed this sooner than the other fellows, I think, because whereas most of them went to offices during the daytime, I stayed home at Mrs. Vesey's, trying to write in my narrow coop of a top bedroom. You know how depressing an instrument a typewriter is when your hands are cold. I haven't forgotten some dreary vigils I had up there, struggling to write short stories. Sometimes I used to give it up weakly, and go round to Larsen's, where it was always warm and cozy, to drink herb coffee and eat those brittle Swedish biscuits and chat with Gloria. I used to complain to her about the cold in my room, and she would laugh and say that I just ought to try a winter in Sweden.
“'Swedish exercises,' she would say. 'That's the thing to stir up your blood! They'll keep you warm.'
“And then, in her enchanting way, she would tell me a new one, and if there were no customers (as there generally weren't in the middle of the afternoon) she would illustrate how it should be done. Sometimes she would even allow me what she called a Swedish kiss—a very fleeting and provocative embrace. And then I would show her my new perfection in doing the backward stoop or some such muscular oddity, and return to my cold citadel.
“But in spite of the fact that we were all busy much of the time going through our manual of exercises, presently the chill of Mrs. Vesey's lodgings became severe. Mrs. Vesey was a rather obstinate and frugal old dear, and she herself dwelt down in the kitchen, where her big gas-range kept her comfortable. When we complained of the cold, she had all sorts of excuses for postponing lighting the furnace. There was a big coal strike that year, and she was quite right in suspecting that once her present supply was exhausted it would be very hard to get more. Also, she said, her furnace man had quit, but she was hunting for another. On one pretext or another, she kept on putting us off, until finally it was mid-November, and we were doing our exercises in rooms where our breath showed like clouds of fog. And then one day Mrs. Vesey came up in great glee to say that a coal man had called that very morning, of his own accord, and had offered to give her five tons. She had promptly snapped at the chance, and he had put the coal in the cellar; so we should have heat the very next day, when the new furnace man was expected.
“Naturally we were all cheered by this good news. We sped round to Larsen's restaurant in high spirits, and adored our divinity with even more than usual abandon.
“'Now my fingers will be warm again, Gloria,' I said, 'I'll be able to write some more poems about you.'
“'Yes,' cried Blackmore, 'and now it will be warm enough for you to come and pose for me in my lovely attic at Mrs. Vesey's. If you had come before, I should have called my painting “The Chilblain Venus.”'
“'Silly boys!' said Gloria, with that delicious, soft Swedish accent which I can't even try to imitate. 'You are hot-blooded enough as it is. You don't need all that warming up. Look at us vegetarians; you make fun of us, but our lentils keep our blood circulating. Try Brussels sprouts; they are full of calories.'
“'Ah!' we shouted. 'But you seem to keep this place warm enough.'
“Old Larsen, who passed through the room just then, broke in crossly:
“'We have to, for the sake of the customers,' he said. 'Gloria, stop fooling with the gentlemen and attend to business.' He seemed in a bad humour that night.
“The next day must have been some sort of holiday, for I know we all went out to see a football game. We got back about supper-time and found the house perishing chill. With shouts and protests we called Mrs. Vesey from her kitchen, but she explained that the expected furnace man had not turned up.
“'Well,' said Blackmore, 'this can't go on any longer, Mrs. Vesey. I'll go down and light the fire myself. We'll take turns and keep it going till your man comes.'
“He ran down to the basement, but a minute later he was up again.
“'Mrs. Vesey,' he shouted, 'what is all this nonsense? Are you kidding us? There's no coal down there at all!'
“'No coal?' she exclaimed. 'Why, there was a good three or four tons, and the man said he put five tons more in yesterday. I heard him do it—never heard such a noise in my life. I paid him ten dollars a ton.
“'Impossible!' Blackmore cried, angrily. 'There's not enough down there to fry Nemo with. About three shovelfuls, that's all. What is this—some kind of a game to freeze us out?'
“Mrs. Vesey wrung her hands, and we all ran down to the cellar. It was as Blackmore had said. The bins were empty, save for a few lumps.”
Dove gazed down thoughtfully at the coal office on the pier below us, where a wagon was loading.
“On a mellow afternoon like this,” he said, “coal doesn't seem quite so pressing a concern; but I tell you, in a bleak boarding-house about Thanksgiving time, with no heat of any sort available but a gas-jet, it is a different matter. We were an angry and puzzled lot that night. Mrs. Vesey protested so pitifully that there had been coal in the bins only the day before, and asserted so repeatedly that she had heard the noise of the new load going in, that we could not help believe her. She promised to call up her coal man the first thing the next morning, and we also agreed to go round and visit him in a body, to add our personal appeals; but how on earth several tons of coal could have been stolen out of the cellar without any one hearing it seemed to us a mystery.
“The next morning we visited the coal-dealer en masse—in a coalition, as Blackmore said—and by spirited imprecation and paying cash we extracted a promise to have a couple of tons sent at once. His office was some distance up on Columbus Avenue, and on our way back we passed through one of the cross-streets—Eighty-Third, I think it was, because one of us wanted to get some stamps at the post-office. As we came along, we heard the rumble of coal passing down a chute, and saw a coal-wagon in the distance.
“'There's somebody in luck,' said one.
“'But what an odd-looking coal-wagon,' said another, as we approached.
“It was a large motor-truck with a hinged metal top, something like a huge street-cleaning cart. The engine was throbbing, and the coal was roaring noisily in the chute, which led down into the cellar window of a brownstone dwelling. The chute, instead of being the customary shallow trough, was a large circular pipe, so that we could not actually see the coal pouring downward, but only hear it crashing through the metal tube. That struck me as a good idea for preventing the coal-dust from spreading over everything near.
“But we were all interested not only in the odd appearance of the truck, but in the extraordinary din it caused. Delivering coal is never a silent job, naturally; but this racket was really terrific. The driver seemed to have left his engine running full tilt, and the whole truck quivered and shook with the power. We stood amazed at the furious rattle and uproar. The noise was too great for spoken words to be caught, but I pointed out the circular chute to Blackmore. It was made in telescoping sections, to slide into itself, and was an interesting novelty.
“It occurred to me that this dealer, whoever he might be—there was no name on the truck—could perhaps let Mrs. Vesey have some coal. We could see the feet of the driver, who was standing on the other side of the truck, and I went round to speak to him. It was a stocky man with a flowing bush of black beard and wearing a suit of very grimy overalls. At the top of my voice I yelled:
“'Got any coal to sell?'
“He shook his head in a surly way and turned his back on me.
“I could not tell from his gesture whether he had answered my question, or was indicating that he could not hear; so I shouted at him again.
“At the same time I noticed Blackmore and the others gathered at the cellar window, looking in curiously over the slope of the delivery pipe. The coal man seized a lever and shut off his power, for the engine stopped, and after a little sliding and rumbling in the tube the racket ceased. He picked up a shovel and ran to the group by the chute.
“'Here, let that alone!' he cried, angrily. “'Keep your shirt on,' said Blackmore. 'We're just looking at this outfit of yours. It makes a devil of a noise. Regular public nuisance, I call it!' '“It's none of your affair,' said the man. 'Keep out of what don't concern you.'
“He returned to his truck, pulled a handle, and the roar of the coal began again. I was standing near him, while the others were on the opposite side of the wagon, so I was the only one to see a curious thing. There were several revolving cogwheels at the side of the truck, and in his irritation, I suppose the driver stooped over them too closely. At any rate, his beard caught in the cogs, and I gave a cry of dismay, thinking he would be cruelly hurt. To my amazement the beard was whisked quickly from his face, and I saw that he was Larsen. He looked at me with an expression of alarm and anger that was laughable.
“'When did you turn coal-dealer?' I shouted. But at this moment Blackmore, who was still bending over the chute, sprang up and ran round to us. He, too, was staggered to see the identity of the driver. He dragged me a few paces away and shouted in my ear.
“'Damn queer business,' he said. 'That coal isn't going in. It's coming out!'
“'What the deuce do you mean?' I said.
“'Just what I say. He's got some sort of a suction engine in that truck, a kind of big vacuum cleaner, and he's simply siphoning the coal out of somebody's cellar.'
“Larsen ran at us with a big spanner in his hand, but we grappled with him, and while three of us held him the others examined the truck. It was perfectly true. By an ingenious gasoline pump installed in the wagon he was drawing out the coal. Looking into the top of the wagon through a little glass peephole, we could see the black nuggets coming swiftly up out of the chute. By this time a little crowd had gathered, and the lady of the house ran out to see what was happening. I think she thought we were trying to seduce her coal supply. She explained angrily to us that Larsen had driven up to her door half an hour before and offered to sell her several tons of coal. Her cellar, like everyone else's, was none too well stocked, and she had been delighted to agree.
“While we were wondering just what to do, Larsen, who had been glaring wickedly at us, broke away from our grasp and reversed his machinery so that the coal began to thunder back honestly into the cellar. The puzzled woman, not suspecting anything wrong, went back indoors after we made some impromptu explanation for the fuss. Larsen's amputated black beard whirled round and round, still adhering to the rolling cogs, as we watched, while he stood by sullenly. We walked away down the block to hold a council, and also to let the group of mystified onlookers disperse. Of course, our first thought was to go for the police; but then we thought of Gloria.”
Dove sighed, and tapped out his long-expired pipe.
“Well,” he said, “that's pretty near the end of the story. I'm afraid association with Beauty blunts the sense of rectitude. No, we didn't do anything about it, except see to it that Larsen put back that coal in the cellar. I suppose we were really accessory to a misdemeanour, because we gathered from some small paragraphs we saw in the papers that a number of householders in that neighbourhood had been mysteriously robbed of their coal. To tell you the truth, we couldn't bear the thought of taking any action that would ruin Gloria's happiness. What were a few tons of black, filthy coal compared to that serene and golden-white beauty of hers, like some princess in a Norse fairy tale? The old man was a lunatic, we supposed, and would come to grief sooner or later. We were not going to be the ones to bring humiliation upon him.
“We walked back, stricken, to our lodgings; and as we passed the Physical Culture Chophouse we looked furtively through the window. We could see Gloria laying the tables for lunch, the tall, strong curve of her back as she leaned over, her capable white hands smoothing the cloth. None of us had the heart to go in.
“We clubbed together to pay for Mrs. Vesey's new supply of coal, although it broke our pocket-books for the next month or so. We were too hard up, then, to go on eating at Larsen's. We had to patronize a lunch-counter instead, where we gloomed over frankfurters and beans and quarrelled with one another, in sheer misery, as to which one of us Gloria had really liked best. We never saw her again, because about a week later the Larsen café shut up, and they disappeared.”
“And the calisthenics?” I said. “Did you go on with those?”
“No,” he said; “we were too melancholy. Also, as soon as Mrs. Vesey's coal arrived, we didn't need to. That was the terrible part of it. You see, Gloria had simply egged us on to do those exercises so that we wouldn't feel the chill when her father stole the coal. I'm afraid she was as guilty as he was, but we tried to convince ourselves that she was only a tool.”
We got up from our bench, for the afternoon air was growing bleak.
“Now you know,” he said, “why that coal-dump down there reminded me of Gloria. Well, it was wonderful while it lasted—until, as you might say, the serpent drove us out of our Garden of Sweden.”