The Spread Eagle and Other Stories

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Next he came face to face with Mr. Jolyff, and the two old gentlemen
stared at each other coldly, but without any sign of recognition.
Once--ever so many years ago--they had been intimate friends. Mr.
Holiday had never had any other friend of whom he had been so fond. He
tried now to recall what their first difference had been, and because he
could not he thought he must be growing infirm. And he began to think of
his approaching party with less pleasure. He had let himself in for a
good deal of bother, he thought.

But this time Miss Hampton made him take a whole teaspoonful of punch,
and told him what a dear he was, and what a good time everybody was
going to have, and that she would do anything in the world for him; she
would even recite "The Night Before Christmas" for his company, if he
asked her. And then they did a great deal of whispering, and finally Mr.
Holiday said:

"But suppose they balk?"

"Nonsense," said Miss Hampton; "would you and I balk if we were in their
places?"

The pretty actress and the old gentleman laughed and bowed to each
other, and exchanged the most arch looks imaginable. And then Miss
Hampton exclaimed:

"Good Lord--it's twelve-thirty."

Then there came to them a sudden dreadful smell of burning feathers.
They dashed into the observation end of the car and found the ex-convict
smothering an incipient conflagration of the Christmas tree, which was
made of dusters, with his hands.

The girl who had run away was despatching the porter with the last batch
of invitations. The ex-convict showed them his burned hands.

"You go and feel the champagne," said Mr. Holiday, "that'll cool'em."

Mr. Holiday himself went to fetch the children. In his pockets were the
envelopes containing money for the train hands, the envelope containing
a check for the two hundred dollars that he had borrowed from the
clergyman, and enough over to complete the rebuilding fund which the
clergyman had tried so hard to collect. And there was an envelope for
the ex-convict--not with money in it, but with an I.O.U.

"_I.O.U. A Good Job_," Mr. Holiday had written on a card and signed his
name. And he had taken out of his satchel and transferred to his
waistcoat pocket a pair of wonderful black pearls that he sometimes wore
at important dinners. And he was going to give one of these to Miss
Hampton and one to the girl who had run away. And then there were all
the wonderful toys and things for Alice, and Freddie, and Euphemia, and
he was going to present them with the black trunk, too, so that they
could take their gifts off the train when it eventually got to
Painsville. And Mr. Holiday had thought of everybody, and had prepared a
little speech to speak to his guests; and for two of his guests he had
arranged one of the greatest surprises that can be sprung on two guests;
and he ought to have been perfectly happy. But he wasn't.

When he passed the door of Mr. Jolyff's drawing-room he noted that it
was tightly closed. And it ought to have pleased him to see how his
enemy had taken his exclusion from the party to heart, and had shut
himself away from any sign or sound of it. But, although he smiled
cynically, he wasn't altogether pleased. And presently he made a wry
mouth, as if he were taking something unpleasant; and he began to hustle
Freddie and Euphemia so as to get away from that closed door as quickly
as possible.

The girl who had run away was talking with Mr. Holiday when suddenly she
began to grow conscious and uncomfortable. She gave one swift look about
her, and saw that all the passengers, and all the train hands, and
porters, and the express-man were looking at her and smiling, and she
saw that they had ranged themselves against the sides of the car and
were making themselves as small as possible. Then she saw the young man
looking at her with a wonderful, nervous, radiant look. And then she saw
that the clergyman was standing all by himself, in a space that the
crowd had just managed to leave open for him, and that he had on his
surplice, and that he was marking a place in his prayer-book with one
finger. Then she understood.

Instinctively she caught Mr. Holiday's arm and clung to it, and Mr.
Holiday, smiling, patted her hand and began to draw her gently toward
the young man and the clergyman. It looked for a moment as if she were
going to hang back, and protest, and make a scene. But just when
everybody was beginning to fear the worst, and to look frightfully
nervous and uncomfortable, a wonderful and beautiful expression came
into her face, and her eyes lighted, and seemed to grow larger and
darker all at the same time. And if there were any present who had
regarded the impromptu wedding as something of a joke, these now had
their minds changed for them in the quickest kind of a jiffy. And if
there were any present who doubted of the beauty and dignity of love,
these had their minds changed for them, too. And they knew that they
were witnesses, not to a silly elopement, but to the great occasion in
the lives of two very young people who were absolutely sure of their
love for each other, and who would cherish each other in sickness and
peril, in good times and bad, in merry times and in heart-breaking
times, until death did them part.

And then suddenly, just when the clergyman was about to begin, just when
Miss Hampton had succeeded in righting herself from smothering a sob,
Mr. Holiday, whose face, had you but noticed it, had been growing longer
and longer, and drearier and drearier, gave a half-strangled cry:

"Wait!"

Wholly oblivious to everything and everybody but what was in his mind at
the moment, he dropped the bride's hand as if it had been a red-hot
horseshoe and started to bolt from the car. But, strangely enough, the
old face that had grown so long and dreary was now wreathed in smiles,
and he was heard to mutter as he went:

"Just a minute, while I get Jolyff!"

* * * * *

Mr. Jolyff and Mr. Holiday lifted their glasses. And Mr. Holiday said,
so that all could hear:

"I drink to my old friends and to my new friends. And I drink to the
lesson of Christmas. For Christmas," said he, and he smiled in a
wonderful way, "teaches us that in all the world there is absolutely
nothing that we cannot forgive...."

The two very old gentlemen clinked their glasses together, and, looking
each other affectionately in the eyes, might have been heard to mutter,
somewhat brokenly, each the other's Christian name.

WHITE MUSCATS OF ALEXANDRIA

My wife, said the Pole, was a long time recovering from the birth of
our second child. She was a normal and healthy woman, but Nature has a
way in these matters of introducing the unnatural; science, too, mistook
the ABCs of the case for the XYZs; and our rooms were for many, many
weary weeks like a cage in which the bird has ceased to sing. I did what
I could. She was not without books, magazines, and delicacies; but I had
to attend to my business; so that time hung about her much like a
millstone, and she would say: "All's well with me, Michael, but I am
bored--bored--bored."

Our baby was put out to nurse and our older boy, Casimir, who was seven,
began, for lack of his mother's care, to come and go as he pleased. The
assurance and cheek of street boys began to develop in him. He startled
me by his knowledge and his naivete. But at the same time he was a
natural innocent--a little dreamer. In the matters of street life that
arise among children he had, as a rule, the worst of it. He was a born
believer of all that might be told him. Such children develop into
artists or ne'er-do-wells. It was too soon to worry about him. But I was
easiest in mind when I saw that he was fashioning anatomies with mud or
drawing with chalk upon the sidewalk. "Wait a little," I would say to my
wife, "and he will be old enough to go to school."

The happiest times were when it was dark and I had closed the store and
could sit by my wife's bed with Casimir on my knee. Then we would talk
over pleasant experiences, or I would tell them, who were both
American-born, stories of Poland, of fairies, and sieges; or hum for
them the tunes to which I had danced in my early youth. But oftenest my
wife and I talked, for the child's benefit, of the wonderful city in
whose slums we lived--upper central New York with its sables and its
palaces. During our courtship and honeymoon we had made many excursions
into those quarters of the city and the memory of them was dear. But if
I remembered well and with happiness, my wife remembered
photographically and with a kind of hectic eagerness in which, I fear,
may have been bedded the roots of dissatisfaction. Details of wealth and
luxury, and manners that had escaped me, even at the time, were as
facile to her as terms of endearment to a lover. "And, oh--do you
remember," she would say, "the ruby that the Fifth Avenue bride had at
her throat, and how for many, many blocks we thought we could still
hear the organ going? That was fun, Michael, wasn't it, when we stood in
front of Sherry's and counted how many real sables went in and how many
fakes, and noticed that the fake sables were as proudly carried as
the real?"

One night she would not eat her supper. "Oh, Michael," she said, "I'm so
bored with the same old soup--soup--soup, and the same old
porridge--porridge--porridge, and I hate oranges, and apples, and please
don't spend any more money on silly, silly, silly me."

"But you must eat," I said. "What would you like? Think of something.
Think of something that tempts your appetite. You seem better
to-night--almost well. Your cheeks are like cherries and you keep
stirring restlessly as if you wanted to get up instead of lying
still--still like a woman that has been drowned, all but her great, dear
eyes.... Now, make some decision, and were it ambrosia I will get it for
you if it is to be had in the city.... Else what are savings-banks for,
and thrift, and a knowledge of furs?"

She answered me indirectly.

"Do you remember, Michael," she said, "the butcher shops uptown, the
groceries, and the fruit stores, where the commonest articles, the
chops, the preserved strawberries, the apples were perfect and
beautiful, like works of art? In one window there was a great olive
branch in a glass jar--do you remember? And in that fruit store near the
Grand Central--do you remember?--we stood in the damp snow and looked in
at great clean spaces flooded with white light--and there were baskets
of strawberries--right there in January--and wonderful golden and red
fruits that we did not know the names of, and many of the fruits peeped
out from the bright-green leaves among which they had actually grown--"

"I remember the two prize bunches of grapes," I said.

And my wife said:

"I was coming to those ... they must have been eighteen inches long,
every grape great and perfect. I remember you said that such grapes
looked immortal. It was impossible to believe they could ever rot--there
was a kind of joyous frostiness--we went in and asked a little man what
kind of grapes they were, and he answered like a phonograph, without
looking or showing politeness: 'Black Hamburgs and White Muscats of
Alexandria'--your old Sienkiewicz never said anything as beautiful as
that, 'White Muscats of Alexandria--'"

"Dear little heart," I said. "Childkin, is it the memory of those white
grapes that tempts your appetite?"

"Oh, Michael," she exclaimed, clasping her hands over those
disappointed breasts into which the milk had not come in sufficiency.
"Oh, Michael--they were two dollars and a half a pound--"

"Heart of my heart," I said, "Stag Eyes, it is now late, and there are
no such grapes to be had in our part of the city--only the tasteless
white grapes that are packed with sawdust into barrels--but in the
morning I will go uptown and you shall have your White Muscats of
Alexandria."

She put her arms about my neck with a sudden spasm of fervor, and drew
my head, that was already gray, down to hers. I remember that in that
moment I thought not of passion but of old age, parting, and the grave.

* * * * *

But she would not eat the grapes in my presence. There was to be an
orgy, she said, a bacchanalian affair--she was going to place the grapes
where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the
sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and
devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes--almost neurotically.
But, though her fancies did not please my sense of fitness, I only
laughed at her, or smiled--for she had been ill a long time.

"But, at least, eat one now," I said, "so that I may see you enjoy it."

"Not even one," she said. "The bunch must be perfect for me to look at
until--until I can resist no more. Hang them there, on the foot of the
bed by the crook of the stem--is it strong enough to hold them? and
then--aren't you going to be very late to your business? And, Michael, I
feel better--I do. I shouldn't wonder if you found me up and dressed
when you come back."

In your telling American phrase, "there was nothing doing" in my
business that morning. It was one of those peaceful, sunny days in
January, not cold and no wind stirring. The cheap furs displayed in the
window of my shop attracted no attention from the young women of the
neighborhood. The young are shallow-minded, especially the women. If a
warm day falls in winter they do not stop to think that the next may be
cold. Only hats interest them all the year round, and men.

So I got out one of my Cicero books and, placing my chair in a pool of
sunshine in the front of the shop, I began to read, for the hundredth
time, his comfortable generalities upon old age. But it seemed to me,
for the first time, that he was all wrong--that old age is only
dreadful, only a shade better than death itself. And this, I suppose,
was because I, myself, during those long months of my wife's illness,
had turned the corner. The sudden passions of youth had retreated like
dragons into their dens. It took more, now, than the worse end of a
bargain or the touch of my wife's lips to bring them flaming forth. On
our wedding day we had been of an age. Now, after nine years, my heart
had changed from a lover's into a father's, while she remained, as it
were, a bride. There remained to me, perhaps, many useful years of
business, of managing and of saving--enjoyable years. But life--life as
I count life--I had lived out. One moment must pass as the next. There
could be no more halting--no more moments of bliss so exquisite as to
resemble pain. I had reached that point in life when it is the sun alone
that matters, and no more the moon.

A shadow fell upon my pool of sunshine and, looking up, I perceived a
handsome, flashy young man of the clever, almost Satanic type that is so
common below Fourteenth Street; and he stood looking cynically over the
cheap furs in my window and working his thin jaws. Then I saw him take,
with his right hand, from a bunch that he carried in his left, a great
white grape and thrust it into his mouth. They were my grapes, those
which I had gone uptown to fetch for my wife. By the fact that there
were none such to be had in our neighborhood I might have known them.
But the sure proof was a peculiar crook in the stem which I had noticed
when I had hung them for my wife at the foot of her bed.

I rose and went quietly out of the shop.

"Happy to show you anything," I said, smiling.

"Don't need anything in the fur line to-day," said he; "much obliged."

"What fine grapes those are," I commented.

"Um," said he, "they call 'em white muskets of Alexander"; and he
grimaced.

"Where are such to be had?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "I got these just round the corner; but _you'd_ have to
visit some uptown fruit emporium and pay the price."

"So you bought the last bunch?"

"Bought nothin'," he said, and he smiled in a knowing and leering way.

"They were given to me," he said, "by a married woman. I happened to
drop in and she happened to have sent her husband uptown to fetch these
grapes for her because she's playing sick and works him in more ways
than one--but she said the grapes sickened her conscience, and she made
me take 'em away."

"So she has a conscience?" I said.

"They all have," said the young man. "Have one?"

I took one of the grapes with a hand that shook, and ate it, and felt
the red blood in my veins turn into acid.

There happened to be a man in the neighborhood who had been nibbling
after my business for some time. I went to him now and made him a cheap
sale for cash. This I deposited with my savings, keeping out a hundred
dollars for myself, and put the whole in trust for my wife and children.
Then I went away and, after many hardships, established myself in a new
place. And, as is often the case with men who have nothing whatsoever to
live for and who are sad, I prospered. God was ever presenting me with
opportunities and the better ends of bargains.

When fifteen years had passed I returned once more to New York. I had
reached a time of life when the possibility of death must be as steadily
reckoned with as the processes of digestion. And I wished, before I lay
down in the narrow house, to revisit the scenes of my former happiness.
I took the same furnished lodging to which we had gone after our
wedding. I lay all night, but did not sleep, in our nuptial bed. Alone,
but rather in reverence and revery than sadness, I made all those little
excursions upon which we had been so happy during the days of our
honey-moon. I made a point of feeding the animals in the park, of dining
at Claremont--I even stood for a long time before the fruit shop that is
near the Grand Central. But I was too old to feel much. So it seemed.

One day I sat on the steps of the lodging-house in the sun. I had been
for a long walk and I was very tired, very sick of my mortal coil, very
sure that I did not care if the end were to be sleep or life
everlasting. Then came, slowly around the corner of the shabby street
and toward me, a hansom cab. Its occupant, an alert, very young, eager
man, kept glancing here and there as if he were looking for something or
some one; for the old East Side street had still its old look, as if all
the inhabitants of its houses had rushed out to watch an eclipse of the
sun or the approach of a procession--and were patiently and idly
awaiting the event.

The children, and even many of the older people, mocked at the young man
in the hansom and flung him good-natured insults. But he knew the
language of the East Side and returned better than he received. My old
heart warmed a little to his young, brightly colored face, his quick,
flashing eyes, and his ready repartees. And it seemed to me a pity that,
like all the pleasant moments I had known, he, too, must pass and
be over.

But his great eyes flashed suddenly upon my face and rested; then he
signalled to the driver to stop and, springing out, a big sketch-book
under his arm, came toward me with long, frank strides.

"I know it's cheeky as the devil," he began in a quick, cheerful voice,
while he had yet some distance to come, "but I can't help it. I've been
looking for you for weeks, and--"

"What is it that I can do for you?" I asked pleasantly.

"You can give me your head." He said it with an appealing and delighted
smile. "I'm a sort of artist--" he explained.

"Show me," I said, and held out my hands for the sketch-book.

"Nothing but notes in it," he said, but I looked, not swiftly, through
all the pages and--for we Poles have an instinct in such matters--saw
that the work was good.

"Do you wish to draw me, _Master?_" I said.

He perceived that I meant the term, and he looked troubled and pleased.

"Will you sit for me?" he asked. "I will--"

But I shook my head to keep him from mentioning money.

"Very cheerfully," I said. "It is easy for the old to sit--especially
when, by the mere act of sitting, it is possible for them to become
immortal. I have a room two flights up--where you will not be
disturbed."

"Splendid!" he said. "You are splendid! Everything's splendid!"

When he had placed me as he wished, I asked him why my head suited him
more than another's.

"How do I know?" he said. "Instinct--you seem a cheerful man and yet I
have never seen a head and face that stood so clearly for--for--please
take me as I am, I don't ever mean to offend--steadiness in sorrow.... I
am planning a picture in which there is to be an ol--a man of your age
who looks as--as late October would look if it had a face...."

Then he began to sketch me, and, as he worked, he chattered about this
and that.

"Funny thing," he said, "I had a knife when I started and it's
disappeared."

"Things have that habit," I said.

"Yes," said he, "things and people, and often people disappear as
suddenly and completely as things--chin quarter of an inch lower--just
so--thank you forever--"

"And what experience have you had with people disappearing?" I asked.
"And you so young and masterful."

"I?" he said. "Why, a very near and dear experience. When I was quite a
little boy my own father went to his place of business and was never
heard of again from that day to this. But he must have done it on
purpose, because it was found that he had put all his affairs into the
most regular and explicit order--"

I felt a little shiver, as if I had taken cold.

"And, do you know," here the young man dawdled with his pencil and
presently ceased working for the moment, "I've always felt as if I had
had a hand in it--though I was only seven. I'd done something so naughty
and wrong that I looked forward all day to my father's home-coming as a
sinner looks forward to going to hell. My father had never punished me.
But he would this time, I knew--and I was terribly afraid and--sometimes
I have thought that, perhaps, I prayed to God that my father might never
come home. I'm not sure I prayed that--but I have a sneaking suspicion
that I did. Anyway, he never came, and, Great Grief! what a time there
was. My mother nearly went insane--"

"What had you done?" I asked, forcing a smile, "to merit such terrible
punishment?"

The young man blushed.

"Why," he said, "my mother had been quite sick for a long time, and, to
tempt her appetite, my father had journeyed 'way uptown and at vast
expense bought her a bunch of wonderful white hot-house grapes. I
remember she wouldn't eat them at first--just wanted to look at
them--and my father hung them for her over the foot of the bed. Well,
soon after he'd gone to business she fell asleep, leaving the grapes
untouched. They tempted me, and I fell. I wanted to show off, I suppose,
before my young friends in the street--there was a girl, Minnie
Hopflekoppf, I think her name was, who'd passed me up for an Italian
butcher's son. I wanted to show _her_. I'm sure I didn't mean to eat the
things. I'm sure I meant to return with them and hang them back at the
foot of the bed."

"Please go on," I managed to say. "This is such a very human page--I'm
really excited to know what happened."

"Well, one of those flashy Bowery dudes came loafing along and said:
'Hi, Johnny, let's have a look at the grapes,' I let him take them, in
my pride and innocence, and he wouldn't give them back. He only laughed
and began to eat them before my eyes. I begged for them, and wept, and
told him how my mother was sick and my father had gone 'way uptown to
get the grapes for her because there were none such to be had in our
neighborhood. And, please, he must give them back because they were
White Muscats of Alexandria, very precious, and my father would kill me.
But the young man only laughed until I began to make a real uproar. Then
he said sharply to shut up, called me a young thief, and said if I said
another word he'd turn me over to the police. Then he flung me a
fifty-cent piece and went away, munching the grapes. And," the young man
finished, "the fifty-cent piece was lead."

Then he looked up from his sketch and, seeing the expression of my
face, gave a little cry of delight.

"Great Grief, man!" he cried, "stay as you are--only hold that
expression for two minutes!"

But I have held it from that day to this.

WITHOUT A LAWYER

However bright the court's light may have appeared to the court, the
place in which it was shining smelt damnably of oil. It was three
o'clock in the afternoon, but already the Alaskan night had descended.
The court sat in a barn, warmed from without by the heavily drifted snow
and from within by the tiny flames of lanterns and the breathing of men,
horses, and cows. Here and there in the outskirts of the circle of light
could be seen the long face of a horse or the horned head of a cow.
There was a steady sound of munching. The scene was not unlike many
paintings of the stable in Bethlehem on the night of the Nativity. And
here, too, justice was being born in a dark age. There had been too many
sudden deaths, too many jumped claims, too much drinking, too much
shooting, too many strong men, too few weak men, until finally--for
time, during the long winter, hung upon the neck like a millstone--the
gorges of the more decent had risen. Hence the judge, hence the jury,
hence the prisoner, dragged from his outlying cabin on a charge of
murder. As there were no lawyers in the community, the prisoner held
his own brief. Though not a Frenchman, he had been sarcastically
nicknamed, because of his small size and shrinking expression,
Lou Garou.

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