When the great man finally said he would see me, I found him tilting back in a swivel-chair in front of a mahogany table. He picked out Aunt Mary"s letter from a heap in front of him, and said: "Are you the Mr.
Macklin mentioned in this letter? What can I do for you?"
I said very deliberately: "You can do nothing for me. I have waited one hour to tell you so. When my aunt, Mrs. Endicott, does anyone the honor to write him a letter, there is no other business in New York City more important than attending promptly to that letter. I _had_ intended becoming a partner in your firm; now, I shall not. You are a rude, fat, and absurd, little person. Good-morning."
I crossed over to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and told Lowell and the other watch-officers in the ward-room of my first attempt to obtain a job.
They laughed until I hoped they would strangle.
"Who the devil do you think you are, anyway," they cried, "going around, insulting millionnaires like that?"
After leaving the cruiser that afternoon, I was so miserable that I could have jumped into the East River. It was the sight of the big, brown guns did it, and the cutla.s.ses in their racks, and the clean-limbed, bare-throated Jackies, and the watch-officer stamping the deck just as though he were at sea, with his gla.s.s and side-arms. And when the marine at the gate of the yard shifted his gun and challenged me, it was so like old times that I could have fallen on his neck and hugged him.
Over the wharves, all along my way to the ferry, the names of strange and beautiful ports mocked at me from the sheds of the steam-ship lines; "Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and the River Plata," "Guayaquil, Callao, and Santiago," "Cape Town, Durban, and Lorenzo Marquez." It was past six o"clock and very dark. The ice was pushing and grinding against the pier-heads, and through the falling snow the tall buildings in New York twinkled with thousands of electric lights, like great Christmas-trees.
At one wharf a steamer of the Red D line, just in from La Guayra, was making fast, and I guiltily crept on board. Without, she was coated in a shearing of ice, but within she reeked of Spanish-America--of coffee, rubber, and raw sugar. Pineapples were still swinging in a net from the awning-rail, a two-necked water-bottle hung at the hot mouth of the engine-room. I found her captain and told him I only wanted to smell a ship again, and to find out, if where he came from, the bands were still playing in the plazas. He seemed to understand, and gave me a drink of Jamaica rum with fresh limes in it, and a black cigar; and when his steward brought them, I talked to him in Spanish just for the sound of it. For half an hour I was under the Southern Cross, and New York was 3,000 miles astern.
When I left him, the captain gave me a bag of alligator-pears to take home with me, and I promised to come the next day, and bring him a new library of old, paper novels.
But, as it turned out, I sent them instead, for that night when I reached the New York side, I saw how weakly and meanly I was acting, and I threw the alligator-pears over the rail of the ferry-boat and watched them fall into the dirty, grinding ice. I saw that I had been in rank mutiny. My bed had been made for me and I must lie in it. I was to be a business-man. I was to "settle down," and it is only slaves who rebel.
The next day, humble and chastened in spirit, I kissed the rod, and went into the city to search for a situation. I determined to start at Forty-second Street, and work my way down town until I found a place that looked as though it could afford a foreign correspondent. But I had reached Twenty-eighth Street, without seeing any place that appealed to me, when a little groom, in a warm fur collar and chilly white breeches, ran up beside me and touched his hat. I was so surprised that I saluted him in return, and then felt uneasily conscious that that was not the proper thing to do, and that forever I had lost his respect.
"Miss Fiske would like to speak with you, sir," he said. He ran back to a brougham that was drawn up beside the curb behind me, and opened the door. When I reached it, Miss Fiske leaned from it, smiling.
"I couldn"t help calling you back, Captain Macklin," she said, and held out her hand.
When I took it she laughed again. "Isn"t this like our last meeting?"
she asked. "Don"t you remember my reaching out of the carriage, and our shaking hands? Only now," she went on, in a most frank and friendly manner, "instead of a tropical thunder-storm, it"s a snow-storm, and instead of my running away from your sh.e.l.ls, I"m out shopping. At least, mother"s out shopping," she added. "She"s in there. I"m waiting for her." She seemed to think that the situation required a chaperon.
"You mustn"t say they were my sh.e.l.ls, Miss Fiske," I protested. "I may insult a woman for protecting her brother"s life, but I never fire sh.e.l.ls at her."
It did not surprise me to hear myself laughing at the words which, when she spoke them, had seemed so terrible. It was as though none of it had ever occurred. It was part of a romantic play, and we had seen the play together. Who could believe that the young man, tramping the streets on the lookout for a job, had ever signed his name, as vice-president of Honduras, to a pa.s.sport for Joseph Fiske; that the beautiful girl in the sables, with her card-case in her hand, had ever heard the shriek of shrapnel?
And she exclaimed, just as though we had both been thinking aloud: "No, it"s not possible, is it?"
"It never happened," I said.
"But I tell you what has happened," she went on, eagerly, "or perhaps you know. Have you heard what my father did?"
I said I had not. I refrained from adding that I believed her father capable of doing almost anything.
"Then I"m the first to tell you the news," she exclaimed. She nodded at me energetically. "Well, he"s paid that money. He owed it all the time."
"That"s not news," I said.
She flushed a little, and laughed.
"But, indeed, father was not to blame," she exclaimed. "They deceived him dreadfully. But when we got home, he looked it up, and found you were right about that money, and so he"s paid it back, not to that odious Alvarez man, but in some way, I don"t quite understand how, but so the poor people will get it."
"Good!" I cried.
"And he"s discharged all that Isthmian crowd," she went on.
"Better," I said.
"And made my brother president of the new company," she continued, and then raised her eyebrows, and waited, smiling.
"Oh, well," I said, "since he"s your brother--"best.""
"That"s right," she cried. "That"s very nice of you. Here comes mother.
I want you to meet her."
Mother came toward us, out of a French dress-maker"s. It was one of the places I had decided against, when I had pa.s.sed it a few minutes before.
It seemed one of the few business houses where a French linguist would be superfluous.
I was presented as "Captain Macklin--who, you know, mother--who fought the duel with Arthur--that is, who didn"t shoot at him."
Mrs. Fiske looked somewhat startled. Even to a trained social leader it must be trying to have a man presented to you on a sidewalk as the one who did not shoot your son.
Mrs. Fiske had a toy dog under one arm, and was holding up her train, but she slipped the dog to the groom, and gave me her hand.
"How do you do, Mr.--Captain Macklin," she said. "My son has told me a great deal about you. Have you asked Captain Macklin to come to see us, Helen?" she said, and stepped into the brougham.
"Come in any day after five," said Miss Fiske, "and we"ll have tortillas and frijoles, and build a camp-fire in the library. What"s your address?"
"Dobbs Ferry," I said.
"Just Dobbs Ferry?" she asked. "But you"re such a well-known person, Captain Macklin."
"I"m Mr. Macklin now," I answered, and I tried to shut the door on them, but the groom seemed to think that was his privilege, and so I bowed, and they drove away. Then I went at once to a drug-store and borrowed the directory, to find out where they lived, and I walked all the way up the avenue to have a look at their house. Somehow I felt that for that day I could not go on asking for a job. I saw a picture of myself on a high stool in the French dressmaker"s writing to the Paris house for more sable cloaks for Mrs. Fiske.
The Fiske mansion overlooks Central Park, and it is as big as the Academy of Music. I found that I knew it well by sight. I at once made up my mind that I never would have the courage to ring that door-bell, and I mounted a Fifth Avenue stage, and took up my work of reconnoitering for a job where Miss Fiske had interrupted it.
The next day I got the job. I am to begin work on Monday. It is at Schwartz & Carboy"s. They manufacture locks and hinges and agricultural things. I saw a lot of their machetes in Honduras with their paper stamp on the blade. They have almost a monopoly of the trade in South America.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, one of their Spanish clerks had left them, and when I said I had been in Central America and could write Spanish easily, Schwartz, or, it may have been Carboy--I didn"t ask him which was his silly name--dictated a letter and I wrote it in Spanish.
One of the other clerks admitted it was faultless. So, I regret to say, I got the job. I"m to begin with fifteen dollars, and Schwartz or Carboy added, as though it were a sort of a perquisite: "If our young men act gentlemanly, and are good dressers, we often send them to take our South American customers to lunch. The house pays the expenses. And in the evenings you can show them around the town. Our young men find that an easy way of seeing the theatres for nothing."
Knowing the tastes of South Americans visiting New York, I replied severely that my connection with Schwartz & Carboy would end daily at four in the afternoon, but that a cross-town car pa.s.sed Koster & Bial"s every hour. I half hoped he would take offence at that, and in consequence my connection, with Schwartz & Carboy might end instantly and forever; but whichever one he was, only laughed and said: "Yes, those Brazilians are a queer lot. We eat up most of our profits bailing them out of police courts the next morning. Well--you turn up Monday."
DOBBS FERRY, Sunday, Midnight
It"s all over. It will be a long time before I add another chapter to my "Memoirs." When I have written this one they are to be sealed, and to-morrow they are to be packed away in Aunt Mary"s cedar chest. I am now writing these lines after everyone else has gone to bed.
It happened after dinner. Aunt Mary was upstairs, and Beatrice was at the piano. We were waiting for Lowell, who had promised to come up and spend the evening. I was sitting at the centre-table, pretending to read, but watching Beatrice. Her back was turned toward me, so I could stare at her as long as I pleased. The light of the candles on each side of the music-rack fell upon her hair, and made it flash and burn. She had twisted it high, in a coil, and there never was anything more lovely than the burnished copper against the white glow of her skin, nor anything so n.o.ble as the way her head rose upon her neck and sloping shoulders. It was like a flower on a white stem.
She was not looking at the music before her, but up at nothing, while her hands ran over the keyboard, playing an old sailor"s "chantey" which Lowell has taught us. It carries with it all the sweep and murmur of the sea at night.
She could not see me, she had forgotten that I was even in the room, and I was at liberty to gaze at her and dream of her undisturbed. I felt that, without that slight, white figure always at my side, the life I was to begin on the morrow, or any other life, would be intolerable.