"Look here, Mary Louise Moss, from Escanaba, Michigan, you stop trying to write the slop you"re writing now. Stop it. Drop the love tales that are like the stuff that everybody else writes. Stop trying to write about New York. You don"t know anything about it. Listen. You get back to work, and write about Mrs. Next Door, and the hair-washing, and the vegetable garden, and bees, and the back yard, understand? You write the way you talked to me, and then you send your stuff in to Cecil Reeves."
"Reeves!" mocked Mary Louise. "Cecil Reeves, of The Earth? He wouldn"t dream of looking at my stuff. And anyway, it really isn"t your affair."
And began to descend the stairs.
"Well, you know you brought me up here, kicking with your heels, and singing at the top of your voice. I couldn"t work. So it"s really your fault." Then, just as Mary Louise had almost disappeared down the stairway he put his last astonishing question.
"How often do you wash your hair?" he demanded.
"Well, back home," confessed Mary Louise, "every six weeks or so was enough, but----"
"Not here," put in the rude young man, briskly. "Never. That"s all very well for the country, but it won"t do in the city. Once a week, at least, and on the roof. Cleanliness demands it."
"But if I"m going back to the country," replied Mary Louise, "it won"t be necessary."
"But you"re not," calmly said the collarless young man, just as Mary Louise vanished from sight.
Down at the other end of the hallway on Mary Louise"s floor Charlie, the janitor, was doing something to the windows now, with a rag, and a pail of water.
"Get it dry?" he called out, sociably.
"Yes, thank you," answered Mary Louise, and turned to enter her own little apartment. Then, hesitatingly, she came back to Charlie"s window.
"There--there was a man up there--a very tall, very thin, very rude, very--that is, rather nice youngish oldish man, in slippers, and no collar. I wonder----"
"Oh, him!" snorted Charlie. "He don"t show himself onct in a blue moon.
None of the other tenants knows he"s up there. Has the whole top floor to himself, and shuts himself up there for weeks at a time, writin"
books, or some such truck. That guy, he owns the building."
"Owns the building!" said Mary Louise, faintly. "Why he looked--he looked----"
"Sure," grinned Charlie. "That"s him. Name"s Reeves--Cecil Reeves.
Say, ain"t that a divil of a name?"
XII
WHERE THE CAR TURNS AT 18TH
This will be a homing pigeon story. Though I send it ever so far--though its destination be the office of a home-and-fireside magazine or one of the kind with a French story in the back, it will return to me. After each flight its feathers will be a little more rumpled, its wings more weary, its course more wavering, until, battered, spent, broken, it will flutter to rest in the waste basket.
And yet, though its message may never be delivered, it must be sent, because--well, because----
You know where the car turns at Eighteenth? There you see a glaringly attractive billboard poster. It depicts groups of smiling, white-clad men standing on tropical sh.o.r.es, with waving palms overhead, and a glimpse of blue sea in the distance. The wording beneath the picture runs something like this:
"Young men wanted. An unusual opportunity for travel, education, and advancement. Good pay. No expenses."
When the car turns at Eighteenth, and I see that, I remember Eddie Houghton back home. And when I remember Eddie Houghton I see red.
The day after Eddie Houghton finished high school he went to work. In our town we don"t take a job. We accept a position. Our paper had it that "Edwin Houghton had accepted a position as clerk and a.s.sistant chemist at the Kunz drugstore, where he would take up his new duties Monday."
His new duties seemed, at first, to consist of opening the store in the morning, sweeping out, and whizzing about town on a bicycle with an unnecessarily insistent bell, delivering prescriptions which had been telephoned for. But by the time the summer had really set in Eddie was installed back of the soda fountain.
There never was anything better looking than Eddie Houghton in his white duck coat. He was one of those misleadingly gold and pink and white men.
I say misleadingly because you usually a.s.sociate pink-and-whiteness with such words as sissy and mollycoddle. Eddie was neither. He had played quarter-back every year from his freshman year, and he could putt the shot and cut cla.s.ses with the best of "em. But in that white duck coat with the braiding and frogs he had any musical-comedy, white-flannel tenor lieutenant whose duty it is to march down to the edge of the footlights, s.n.a.t.c.h out his sword, and warble about his country"s flag, looking like a flat-nosed, blue-gummed Igorrote. Kunz"s soda water receipts swelled to double their usual size, and the girls" complexions were something awful that summer. I"ve known Nellie Donovan to take as many as three ice cream sodas and two phosphates a day when Eddie was mixing. He had a way of throwing in a good-natured smile, and an easy flow of conversation with every drink. While indulging in a little airy persiflage the girls had a great little trick of pursing their mouths into rosebud shapes over their soda straws, and casting their eyes upward at Eddie. They all knew the trick, and its value, so that at night Eddie"s dreams were haunted by whole rows of rosily pursed lips, and seas of upturned, adoring eyes. Of course we all noticed that on those rare occasions when Josie Morehouse came into Kunz"s her gla.s.s was heaped higher with ice cream than that of any of the other girls, and that Eddie"s usually easy flow of talk was interspersed with certain stammerings and stutterings. But Josie didn"t come in often. She had a lot of dignity for a girl of eighteen. Besides, she was taking the teachers" examinations that summer, when the other girls were playing tennis and drinking sodas.
Eddie really hated the soda water end of the business, as every soda clerk in the world does. But he went about it good-naturedly. He really wanted to learn the drug business, but the boss knew he had a drawing card, and insisted that Eddie go right on concocting faerie queens and strawberry sundaes, and nectars and Kunz"s specials. One Sat.u.r.day, when he happened to have on hand an over-supply of bananas that would have spoiled over Sunday, he invented a mess and called it the Eddie Extra, and the girls swarmed on it like flies around a honey pot.
That kind of thing would have spoiled most boys. But Eddie had a sensible mother. On those nights when he used to come home nauseated with dealing out chop suey sundaes and orangeades, and saying that there was no future for a fellow in our dead little hole, his mother would give him something rather special for supper, and set him hoeing and watering the garden.
So Eddie stuck to his job, and waited, and all the time he was saying, with a melting look, to the last silly little girl who was drinking her third soda, "Somebody looks mighty sweet in pink to-day," or while he was doping to-morrow"s ball game with one of the boys who dropped in for a cigar, he was thinking of bigger things, and longing for a man-size job.
The man-size job loomed up before Eddie"s dazzled eyes when he least expected it. It was at the close of a particularly hot day when it seemed to Eddie that every one in town had had everything from birch beer to peach ice cream. On his way home to supper he stopped at the postoffice with a handful of letters that old man Kunz had given him to mail. His mother had told him that they would have corn out of their own garden for supper that night, and Eddie was in something of a hurry. He and his mother were great pals.
In one corner of the dim little postoffice lobby a man was busily tacking up posters. The whitewashed walls bloomed with them. They were gay, attractive-looking posters, done in red and blue and green, and after Eddie had dumped his mail into the slot, and had called out, "h.e.l.lo, Jake!" to the stamp clerk, whose back was turned to the window, he strolled idly over to where the man was putting the finishing touches to his work. The man was dressed in a sailor suit of blue, with a picturesque silk scarf knotted at his hairy chest. He went right on tacking posters.
They certainly were attractive pictures. Some showed groups of stalwart, immaculately clad young G.o.ds lolling indolently on tropical sh.o.r.es, with a splendor of palms overhead, and a sparkling blue sea in the distance.
Others depicted a group of white-clad men wading knee-deep in the surf as they laughingly landed a cutter on the sandy beach. There was a particularly fascinating one showing two barefooted young chaps on a wave-swept raft engaged in that delightfully perilous task known as signaling. Another showed the keen-eyed gunners busy about the big guns.
Eddie studied them all.
The man finished his task and looked up, quite casually.
"h.e.l.lo, kid," he said.
"h.e.l.lo," answered Eddie. Then--"That"s some picture gallery you"re giving us."
The man in the sailor suit fell back a pace or two and surveyed his work with a critical but satisfied eye.
"Pitchers," he said, "don"t do it justice. We"ve opened a recruiting office here. Looking for young men with brains, and muscle, and ambition. It"s a great chance. We don"t get to these here little towns much."
He placed a handbill in Eddie"s hand. Eddie glanced down at it sheepishly.
"I"ve heard," he said, "that it"s a hard life."
The man in the sailor suit threw back his head and laughed, displaying a great deal of hairy throat and chest. "Hard!" he jeered, and slapped one of the gay-colored posters with the back of his hand. "You see that!
Well, it ain"t a bit exaggerated. Not a bit. I ought to know. It"s the only life for a young man, especially for a guy in a little town.
There"s no chance here for a bright young man, and if he goes to the city, what does he get? The city"s jam full of kids that flock there in the spring and fall, looking for jobs, and thinking the city"s sittin" up waitin" for "em. And where do they land? In the dime lodging houses, that"s where. In the navy you see the world, and it don"t cost you a cent. A guy is a fool to bury himself alive in a hole like this. You could be seeing the world, traveling by sea from port to port, from country to country, from ocean to ocean, amid ever-changing scenery and climatic conditions, to see and study the habits and conditions of the strange races----"
It rolled off his tongue with fascinating glibness. Eddie glanced at the folder in his hand.
"I always did like the water," he said.
"Sure," agreed the hairy man, heartily. "What young feller don"t? I"ll tell you what. Come on over to the office with me and I"ll show you some real stuff."
"It"s my supper time," hesitated Eddie. "I guess I"d better not----"
"Oh, supper," laughed the man. "You come on and have supper with me, kid."