You would go out and dance with them but you are chained every night to the centre pole of the hut. You believe the mountains dance, don"t you, Charlie?"
"I contradict no traveller"s tales," said Grandemont, with a smile.
Mr. Jack laughed loudly. He dropped his voice to a confidential whisper.
"You are a fool to believe it," he went on. "They don"t really dance. It"s the fever in your head. It"s the hard work and the bad water that does it. You are sick for weeks and there is no medicine. The fever comes on every evening, and then you are as strong as two men. One night the _compania_ are lying drunk with _mescal_. They have brought back sacks of silver dollars from a ride, and they drink to celebrate. In the night you file the chain in two and go down the mountain. You walk for miles--hundreds of them. By and by the mountains are all gone, and you come to the prairies. They do not dance at night; they are merciful, and you sleep. Then you come to the river, and it says things to you. You follow it down, down, but you can"t find what you are looking for."
Mr. Jack leaned back in his chair, and his eyes slowly closed. The food and wine had steeped him in a deep calm. The tense strain had been smoothed from his face. The languor of repletion was claiming him. Drowsily he spoke again.
"It"s bad manners--I know--to go to sleep--at table--but--that was--such a good dinner--Grande, old fellow."
_Grande!_ The owner of the name started and set down his gla.s.s.
How should this wretched tatterdemalion whom he had invited, Caliph-like, to sit at his feet know his name?
Not at first, but soon, little by little, the suspicion, wild and unreasonable as it was, stole into his brain. He drew out his watch with hands that almost balked him by their trembling, and opened the back case. There was a picture there--a photograph fixed to the inner side.
Rising, Grandemont shook Mr. Jack by the shoulder. The weary guest opened his eyes. Grandemont held the watch.
"Look at this picture, Mr. Jack. Have you ever--"
"_My sister Adele!_"
The vagrant"s voice rang loud and sudden through the room. He started to his feet, but Grandemont"s arms were about him, and Grandemont was calling him "Victor!--Victor Fauquier! _Merci, merci, mon Dieu!_"
Too far overcome by sleep and fatigue was the lost one to talk that night. Days afterward, when the tropic _calentura_ had cooled in his veins, the disordered fragments he had spoken were completed in shape and sequence. He told the story of his angry flight, of toils and calamities on sea and sh.o.r.e, of his ebbing and flowing fortune in southern lands, and of his latest peril when, held a captive, he served menially in a stronghold of bandits in the Sonora Mountains of Mexico. And of the fever that seized him there and his escape and delirium, during which he strayed, perhaps led by some marvellous instinct, back to the river on whose bank he had been born. And of the proud and stubborn thing in his blood that had kept him silent through all those years, clouding the honour of one, though he knew it not, and keeping apart two loving hearts. "What a thing is love!"
you may say. And if I grant it, you shall say, with me: "What a thing is pride!"
On a couch in the reception chamber Victor lay, with a dawning understanding in his heavy eyes and peace in his softened countenance. Absalom was preparing a lounge for the transient master of Charleroi, who, to-morrow, would be again the clerk of a cotton-broker, but also--
"To-morrow," Grandemont was saying, as he stood by the couch of his guest, speaking the words with his face shining as must have shone the face of Elijah"s charioteer when he announced the glories of that heavenly journey--"To-morrow I will take you to Her."
XVIII
ON BEHALF OF THE MANAGEMENT
This is the story of the man manager, and how he held his own until the very last paragraph.
I had it from Sully Magoon, _viva voce_. The words are indeed his; and if they do not const.i.tute truthful fiction my memory should be taxed with the blame.
It is not deemed amiss to point out, in the beginning, the stress that is laid upon the masculinity of the manager. For, according to Sully, the term when applied to the feminine division of mankind has precisely an opposite meaning. The woman manager (he says) economizes, saves, oppresses her household with bargains and contrivances, and looks sourly upon any pence that are cast to the fiddler for even a single jig-step on life"s arid march. Wherefore her men-folk call her blessed, and praise her; and then sneak out the backdoor to see the Gilhooly Sisters do a buck-and-wing dance.
Now, the man manager (I still quote Sully) is a Caesar without a Brutus. He is an autocrat without responsibility, a player who imperils no stake of his own. His office is to enact, to reverberate, to boom, to expand, to out-coruscate--profitably, if he can. Bill-paying and growing gray hairs over results belong to his princ.i.p.als. It is his to guide the risk, to be the Apotheosis of Front, the three-tailed Bashaw of Bluff, the Essential Oil of Razzle-Dazzle.
We sat at luncheon, and Sully Magoon told me. I asked for particulars.
"My old friend Denver Galloway was a born manager," said Sully. He first saw the light of day in New York at three years of age. He was born in Pittsburg, but his parents moved East the third summer afterward.
"When Denver grew up, he went into the managing business. At the age of eight he managed a news-stand for the Dago that owned it.
After that he was manager at different times of a skating-rink, a livery-stable, a policy game, a restaurant, a dancing academy, a walking match, a burlesque company, a dry-goods store, a dozen hotels and summer resorts, an insurance company, and a district leader"s campaign. That campaign, when Coughlin was elected on the East Side, gave Denver a boost. It got him a job as manager of a Broadway hotel, and for a while he managed Senator O"Grady"s campaign in the nineteenth.
"Denver was a New Yorker all over. I think he was out of the city just twice before the time I"m going to tell you about. Once he went rabbit-shooting in Yonkers. The other time I met him just landing from a North River ferry. "Been out West on a big trip, Sully, old boy," says he. "Gad! Sully, I had no idea we had such a big country.
It"s immense. Never conceived of the magnificence of the West before. It"s gorgeous and glorious and infinite. Makes the East seemed cramped and little. It"s a grand thing to travel and get an idea of the extent and resources of our country."
"I"d made several little runs out to California and down to Mexico and up through Alaska, so I sits down with Denver for a chat about the things he saw.
""Took in the Yosemite, out there, of course?" I asks.
""Well--no," says Denver, "I don"t think so. At least, I don"t recollect it. You see, I only had three days, and I didn"t get any farther west than Youngstown, Ohio."
"About two years ago I dropped into New York with a little fly-paper proposition about a Tennessee mica mine that I wanted to spread out in a nice, sunny window, in the hopes of catching a few. I was coming out of a printing-shop one afternoon with a batch of fine, sticky prospectuses when I ran against Denver coming round a corner.
I never saw him looking so much like a tiger-lily. He was as beautiful and new as a trellis of sweet peas, and as rollicking as a clarinet solo. We shook hands, and he asked me what I was doing, and I gave him the outlines of the scandal I was trying to create in mica.
""Pooh, pooh! for your mica," says Denver. "Don"t you know better, Sully, than to b.u.mp up against the coffers of little old New York with anything as transparent as mica? Now, you come with me over to the Hotel Brunswick. You"re just the man I was hoping for. I"ve got something there in sepia and curled hair that I want you to look at."
""You putting up at the Brunswick?" I asks.
""Not a cent," says Denver, cheerful. "The syndicate that owns the hotel puts up. I"m manager."
"The Brunswick wasn"t one of them Broadway pot-houses all full of palms and hyphens and flowers and costumes--kind of a mixture of lawns and laundries. It was on one of the East Side avenues; but it was a solid, old-time caravansary such as the Mayor of Skaneateles or the Governor of Missouri might stop at. Eight stories high it stalked up, with new striped awnings, and the electrics had it as light as day.
""I"ve been manager here for a year," says Denver, as we drew nigh.
"When I took charge," says he, "n.o.body nor nothing ever stopped at the Brunswick. The clock over the clerks" desk used to run for weeks without winding. A man fell dead with heart-disease on the sidewalk in front of it one day, and when they went to pick him up he was two blocks away. I figured out a scheme to catch the West Indies and South American trade. I persuaded the owners to invest a few more thousands, and I put every cent of it in electric lights, cayenne pepper, gold-leaf, and garlic. I got a Spanish-speaking force of employees and a string band; and there was talk going round of a c.o.c.kfight in the bas.e.m.e.nt every Sunday. Maybe I didn"t catch the nut-brown gang! From Havana to Patagonia the Don Senors knew about the Brunswick. We get the highfliers from Cuba and Mexico and the couple of Americas farther south; and they"ve simply got the boodle to bombard every bulfinch in the bush with."
"When we got to the hotel, Denver stops me at the door.
""There"s a little liver-coloured man," says he, "sitting in a big leather chair to your right, inside. You sit down and watch him for a few minutes, and then tell me what you think."
"I took a chair, while Denver circulates around in the big rotunda.
The room was about full of curly-headed Cubans and South American brunettes of different shades; and the atmosphere was international with cigarette smoke, lit up by diamond rings and edged off with a whisper of garlic.
"That Denver Galloway was sure a relief to the eye. Six feet two he was, red-headed and pink-gilled as a sun-perch. And the air he had! Court of Saint James, Chauncy Olcott, Kentucky colonels, Count of Monte Cristo, grand opera--all these things he reminded you of when he was doing the honours. When he raised his finger the hotel porters and bell-boys skated across the floor like c.o.c.kroaches, and even the clerk behind the desk looked as meek and unimportant as Andy Carnegie.
"Denver pa.s.sed around, shaking hands with his guests, and saying over the two or three Spanish words he knew until it was like a coronation rehearsal or a Bryan barbecue in Texas.
"I watched the little man he told me to. "Twas a little foreign person in a double-breasted frock-coat, trying to touch the floor with his toes. He was the colour of vici kid, and his whiskers was like excelsior made out of mahogany wood. He breathed hard, and he never once took his eyes off of Denver. There was a look of admiration and respect on his face like you see on a boy that"s following a champion base-ball team, or the Kaiser William looking at himself in a gla.s.s.
"After Denver goes his rounds he takes me into his private office.
""What"s your report on the dingy I told you to watch?" he asks.
""Well," says I, "if you was as big a man as he takes you to be, nine rooms and bath in the Hall of Fame, rent free till October 1st, would be about your size."
""You"ve caught the idea," says Denver. "I"ve given him the wizard grip and the cabalistic eye. The glamour that emanates from yours truly has enveloped him like a North River fog. He seems to think that Senor Galloway is the man who. I guess they don"t raise 74-inch sorrel-tops with romping ways down in his precinct. Now, Sully,"
goes on Denver, "if you was asked, what would you take the little man to be?"