Cupid's Middleman Part 9

How sweet the cadence of his lyre!

What melody of words!

They strike a pulse within the heart, Like songs of forest birds, Or tinkling of the shepherd's bell Among the mountain herds.

Can't you hurry home, Margaret? The town has not lost all its fascination for you, I hope. Are there no other joys in life but the top notes of the birdies and the murmurings of the awakening forest?

Come, come to me, love!

Come, love! Arise!

And shame the bright stars With the light of thine eyes; Look out from thy lattice-- Oh, _lady-bird_, hear!

Write me, my darling, the good news of your home-coming, that I may greet you at the Grand Central. Oh, promise me that you will hasten home, and name the minute the train is due, that I may be there an hour early.

'Tis then the promised hour When torches kindle in the skies To light thee to thy bower.

Your only, devoted, well-nigh distracted, but fondly true

JAMIE.

Whew! Shade of Morris, forgive me for the base uses to which I turned your love songs!

When I had finished going over the letters I proceeded to be extremely wise and diplomatic.

"These letters seem to bear Hosley's name," said I; "they might help us--in fact, I am glad you took the pains to bring them to me.

Are there any more?" He might not have noticed how anxious I was to have them all.

"Yes, you have the complete and most damaging doc.u.ments in the case," he answered. "They only need your identification, or if there should be any handwriting for comparison, you can understand--yes, just so--why, it would be easy without your evidence. I see you appreciate their enormous value."

This fellow was getting around to talk cash in a way that made me squirm, and as he eased off again his pain kept him engaged and gave me a chance to think. When I wrote those letters I thought they were pretty nice, but I never put any cash value on them, and never supposed there would be any market for them.

"Mr. Obreeon," said I, "about what would compensate you for your trouble in gathering up those letters?" I was calm.

"One thousand dollars." And as he said it his pain left him and shot into me.

I rocked and gripped the chair. I could see there was no use to get mad and talk loud, for he had me where there was only one move I could make without getting in check, and that was into my pocketbook. Besides, if I talked too much he might find where I came in on the thing.

"Five hundred, cash down, I'll give you," said I, trying to look disinterested, as if I dealt in autographs and letters of great men.

"One thousand dollars, hair and all," said he, rubbing his palms in a net-price manner.

"Hair?"

"Yes; there's a lock of Hosley's hair and some rings--everything is included in my price."

What was it worth to keep out of the electric chair? That is the way I figured it; it wasn't so much a question of letters and mere poetry and hair.

"That's an awful price," said I, "_an awful price_."

"Well, let me take them around to Tescheron. My price to him will be three thousand dollars, and I know from the prices Smith is getting that he'll pay. Glad to see you improving. Anything in my line, Mr. Hopkins, would be pleased to hear from you; old established house--"

"Sit down! Sit down, Obreeon! I'll split the difference with you and let you have my check." I touched a b.u.t.ton and requested that my new handbag containing my checkbook and fountain pen be brought. Thank goodness, my bank account had not burned and my reputation might yet be saved.

"No, Mr. Hopkins, I am favoring you, really I am, in this matter, you know, and I could not--I could not cut that price."

What was the use? It almost cleaned me out, but I never hankered after money if it meant publicity. You may say it was only a fad or fancy of mine. I drew my check for $1,000 of hard-earned cash, slowly gathered by years of saving out of a small salary, and gave it to him, making sure I had the goods and extra fittings.

Mr. Obreeon started for home with warm feet and a remarkably steady gait.

Well, I never thought any letters of mine would bring that sum in the open market, and as for Jim's hair, I had known him to pay a quarter to have a lot of it cut off and thrown away.

I did a little figuring with my pen after Obreeon left. Taking the hairs and letters combined, they cost me an average price of $5.55.

I worked it out this way:

162--of my letters.

18--of Jim's hairs.

---- 180--total hairs and letters.

You then divide $1,000 by 180 to ascertain the average price of $5.55.

Or, if you want to get at the price of each hair, counting the letters as dead stock, you grasp at a glance that the hairs are just 10 per cent, of the outfit, so you divide 180 by 10, and that gives you 18; take this amount and you run it into $1,000, and you get the price per hair as $55.55. When you arrive at this answer you may note that you might have obtained it by multiplying the average price by ten. In other words, the hair, if entirely loose from the poetry, costs ten times as much. To get at the price of the poetry loose from the hair, you simply divide $1,000 by 162, the number of letters, and that gives you $6.17 as the price of each letter, wholly disregarding the hair. It will be seen, therefore, that the commodity of highest value in an ordinary love correspondence, such as this was, is the hair, so that it is important for purchasers to consider if it is worth the price should the poetry go out of style.

I have often thought I might have bought four or five Persian lamb coats for--well, never mind. There is no cold-storage expense keeping this fur of Jim's. Every deal shows its profit one way or the other, and sooner or later you'll find it. There is a heavy expense attached to making over Persian lamb coats, besides. What I have of Jim's coat I wouldn't alter for the world, because whenever I have a craving for poetry with hair, I turn to that and get all I want for some time to come, just at a glance.

CHAPTER VIII

Now that I know Gabrielle Tescheron, I am for giving woman the largest liberty in all matters; let her have suffrage if she will take it. I am for giving woman everything--just let her run loose, here, there and everywhere, and then you'll see the world tidy up. It's time the worldliness of the world was viewed with fresh eyes. Woman, so long held in restraint, in many ways is a better observer than conventional man.

She is like a countryman newly arrived in the city. It takes a countryman to see the real sights of New York; of course, he won't let on or be surprised at anything, for he wants you to feel that the only metropolis worth while is the place he calls "down street," up home; he is taking it all in, however, like an old-fas.h.i.+oned sap-kettle, and if you have dumped maple juice fresh from the trees into one all day, you'd think it held the five oceans and the Great Lakes. For years afterward his views on New York illuminate locally every city scandal reported in the New York papers; he probably saw it coming when he was down, and can tell a lot of incidents there was no s.p.a.ce for in the crowded papers.

At one of the Oswegatchie County dinners held in a swell New York hotel I once saw one of these confident, you-can't-surprise-me countrymen take a drink of water from a goblet with a scalloped edge; it stood fourteen inches high and six across. The waiter had placed it on the table near him full of celery, but when the last piece had been taken and only a few green leaves floated like lily pads on its calm surface, he knew the proper thing to do. He just blew off the stray leaves, stretched his mouth around the p.r.o.ngs on the edge, got his paw under it, turned it up and enjoyed his simple highball. All our strong men come from the country. They drink and see things straight. They are more particular as to contents than containers, for they are nearly all prohibitionists or very high license advocates. When they are "dry," they drink equally well from a spring-hole, a spigot, a dipper or a pail.

"Rather generous with the water at these dinners, Reuben," I said, addressing him across the table, as he covered his mouth with his napkin preparatory to resuming his composure.

"These fas.h.i.+onable gla.s.ses always cut my mouth," he replied, wrinkling his brow to emphasize his dislike for the fads of the aristocracy.

But when an out-and-out city man goes to the country, he can't see anything; it's all just like Central Park, in that there are no houses to be seen, only it's not laid out so well nor raked so clean. I have often seen these chaps when they came up to our place. The city man is as blind as a cave fish, and all he wants to know is when do they eat and are there any mosquitoes and poison ivy. The air suits him, only it's a little too strong; and the dirt is satisfactory--all else is away below par, and if it weren't for the air and the dirt, which the country-bred city doctor has told him the kids need, he'd like to be home, where he can be sociable in his sub-stratum of atmospheric poison, amid the clatter that consumes his vital forces and keeps him pleasantly anaemic and tolerably dead.

Did you ever go through the woods with a native New Yorker? There has been an incessant stream of startling things running before his eyes since his birth, with plenty of noise, dust and expense, so that when he is thrown out into the fields or the woods he finds he can't be one of Nature's Quakers and hold communion with the silent wors.h.i.+ppers through whom the Spirit speaks. His outdoor religion is in the Salvation Army cla.s.s, and he can't warm up enough to admire a potted geranium unless he hears a ba.s.s drum or a hand organ to distract him on the side. If the sweet air and comforting silence of the country were to fall upon New York, the town would probably drop to even lower levels from the shock.

The country boy, who has been used to concentrating on the wood-pile, runs the country; or, if it happens to be a city boy who runs it, he is a fellow who had the wood-pile grafted onto him in time to save his career. Gabrielle Tescheron, the woman in a new field, saw the world aright; there was no mystery for her at any time. Her intuitions guided her unerringly while we who reasoned became entangled.

Shrewdness in the country lad, however, is not commended very highly by me. It may be that the country boy has been tutored by the most unscrupulous politicians that ever got out a big vote on a moral issue--usually the one coined at the mint with unanimous consent and a cry for more: "In G.o.d We Trust." If the country boy has fallen, it may be that he was blinded by this, so that when he came to the city and took the prizes he used the same old methods. We find some of these shrewd country lads with abundant health, close observers, selling their birthrights here in the sort of deals that were regarded as clever in up-country politics, and so became legitimate in their eyes.

There's more politics in the country than they can dilute in their sermons, although they absorb about thirty times as many of these as the city man. Some day all the country fathers will reform, even if they have to change their politics and half of them die because of it. They will think it more worth while to save their sons than to save the country.

What about the morality of the city man? It isn't a factor because he isn't.

If the management of our affairs had been entrusted to Gabrielle Tescheron there would have been no trouble. Had her father been a wise man and allowed this only child to have her way--to have noted the whole situation from her fresh view-point, he would have found peace where he found an abundance of perplexing conditions and ample expense closely adhering to every bramble bush into which the tactics of Smith hurled him. Gabrielle could not save him and she did not try. Where the cause of the trouble is idiocy of the Tescheron quality, it has to go through a long course of pulverization, maceration and cure; if you hurry the process, the goods will be sour and hurt the business, if the lot gets out under the trade-mark. The best thing to do with it is to send it to the coal heap, for if you try to get your money back at a Front Street auction room, some hand-cart syndicate will nab it and cut your price.

They'll undersell the direct trade, and when you have finished writing an explanation to the men on the road, you'd wish you had eaten the whole carload yourself.