[ PART I ]
I
WIDDER was a failure. And Widder, with the salt-and-pepper beginning to show above his ears, no longer made any effort to blink that fact. For he saw that he had come to accept the conditions of failure, to accept them impassively, as a man emerging from a fever accepts weakness.
It was useless now even to worry about it. He had lost the habit of thinking ahead. By limiting his ambitions, he found, he no longer affronted his pride. He had become a time-marker. He found life too tumultuous a tide to battle against. It was more comfortable to drift along with the current, snatching at what the back-currents of existence left within his reach.
There were times when his sense of failure was more poignant than at others. But if he was not actively and aggressively happy, he was not altogether unhappy. Time had taught him that he could always have a roof over his head, a roof of some sort, and two meals and a free-lunch tide-over every day, and enough clothes from the residuary Rialto of Seventh Avenue to keep him warm, to say nothing of the luxury of a penny evening paper to keep him in touch with life and romance, and an occasional rainy day in the public library to keep him posted as to the mechanical inventions of his luckier confreres.
In other words, Widder was respectably pauperized. The accumulation of stores was no longer essential to his scheme of life. He was as improvident as a park squirrel, with his instinct for garnering vitiated. For no matter how long the lean spells and the cold of winter, somewhere in a great city there were always casual hands to sustain his brisk incompetency.
Widder knew he was a failure, because he had become reconciled to the compromises of failure. If he had succeeded in feathering a nest of his own, it was a nest not worth the feathering. He no longer beat against the bars of his cage. His captivity was that confirmed captivity of the spirit which restrained him from seeking freedom even when the door stood open. For Widder no longer rebelled against the thought of his top-floor den in a dilapidated East Twenty-fourth Street rooming house, or at the consciousness of washing and drying his own underwear, or at the memory that many of his less meager meals were cooked by his own hand.
The cooking of his own meals, in fact, was the perpetuation of a sort of personal triumph for Widder, in that arid rooming house where the edict of Mrs. Feeney ordained there should be neither breakfasting nor supping above-stairs. And woe betide the lodger who essayed gustatory audacities over any of her gas jets and brought that gross and asthmatic figure up from her own Plutonian regions, whence issued, day by day, the ever provocative odor of fried bacon and boiling cabbage! But with Widder in his aerie at the top of the house it was somewhat different. For nearly two years ago, when Widder had taken that top-floor front, he had come with all the earmarks of a "permanent," and the astute Mrs. Feeney had sacrificed principle on the altar of expediency. Her abhorrence of transients, who as often as not were fly-by-nights given to screwing empty trunks to the floor and having poolroom slips behind the washstand, was immutable and immovable. She had a weakness for lodgers who carried open and unmistakable signs of anchorage. So when Widder and his wagonload of traps moved in she was prepared to make concessions.
"Would You Mind Waiting a Minute or Two? I'm Afraid There's Somebody Outside"
A man with two trunks, and a canary cage, and an iron-bound carpenter's chest, and racks and tripods and a barrel of photographic plates, and a vise and anvil combined, and boxes of odd-looking models, and bottles of hypo and acids and paint mixtures, and heaven knows what, seemed a man likely to put up with a leaky roof and a room without heat. Widder, in fact, had promptly and neatly soldered a piece of tin over the leak in the roof, being a handy man with tools, for—although at that particular time in the ebb tide of his efforts as a commercial photographer—he still technically designated himself as an inventor.
So sweeping, indeed, were Mrs. Feeney's concessions that she allowed her new lodger to cut a door between the top-floor front and what she still perversely called the skylight room, although for the latter room she exacted a rent of six dollars a month, notwithstanding the fact that the sealing up of its skylight had for two years' time left it quite untenable. This, Widder had explained, in pensively persuading her to let him pipe running water into that abode of darkness, would be just the place for developing his plates and pursuing his experiments in mechanics. And before winter set in he had given an Italian two dollars to install a ruinous grate and mantel, carried bodily from a neighboring house in the hands of "wreckers," into the empty fireplace of his own bleak-walled living room.
This innovation was endured, however, only after a distinct understanding with Mrs. Feeney that the aforementioned grate and mantel, once installed, were to remain where they had been put, no matter what became of Widder himself. When Mrs. Feeney darkly hinted at the danger of fire Widder triumphantly demonstrated the merits of Widder's Fireproof Paint, showing how even cigar boxes, once covered with his invention, stubbornly and persistently refused to be incinerated. So impressed was Mrs. Feeney with this seeming miracle that, in a moment of weakness, she extended to Widder permission to do a bit of cooking, provided he paid for the installation of his own meter and the use of his own gas. Yet this generous concession was achieved only after Widder had assuaged Mrs. Feeney's fixed apprehension as to mice and rats with the confident declaration that he could make a trap to catch any rat or mouse that so much as showed its nose above the third floor. The new lodger even explained that he preferred keeping his own quarters in order with his own hands, provided a rubbish box was left in the hall immediately outside his door.
Through the material matutinally carried belowstairs from this rubbish-box, however, Mrs. Feeney prospected both eagerly and assiduously, cradling and sifting it as patiently as a placer miner washes his Klondike sand for a speck of color. But outside of divers signs attesting that Widder's cooking activities were more extensive than he had implied, she found nothing to confirm her earlier suspicion that this top-floor lodger was a bomb maker secretly devoted to the fashioning of high explosive. So Widder stayed on.
The roots of Widder's existence, in fact, struck deeper and deeper into that top-floor room, for with it he seemed finally able to solve life's final problem. He learned to live meagerly on what proved to be meager earnings. He had, almost without knowing it, achieved a sort of philosophic calm which inured him to the daily attritions of penury. It was not so much that he was without motor power as it was that he stood without incentive. The schemers and climbers of life all had something to scheme and climb for. Widder was alone in the world. His wants were few. When his work as a commercial photographer no longer proved profitable he pensively directed his attention to the retailing of wall maps and then to the peddling of a patented gas jet which, according to the circular that accompanied it, saved eighty per cent in gas consumption. Widder suspected that it did not save six per cent; but people accepted it, for people were romantically inclined and, being ever hopeful of miracles, were ever open to being hoodwinked. And when the gas jet was no longer profitable it became an egg beater, and the egg beater was in time displaced by an instantaneous tap filter that made Croton as clear as crystal and saved you from swallowing germs which one glance at the pamphlet pictures promptly persuaded you were as malignant to the human system as they were repulsive to the human eye.
Yet gas jets and egg beaters and tap filters had kept the pot boiling, and once a month, in cold weather, a quarter of a ton of coal was carried up and packed away in the lidded box with the corduroy-cushion top, and shoes were half-soled, and a larder replenished, and cuttle bone bought for the canary hung in the bit of sunlight which showed at the window on a clear day. He liked very much to hear the singing of that blithe-hearted little bird, for it was a true Harz Mountain canary and not one of the dyed sparrows that Sixth Avenue peddlers dispose of to the unwary. He liked those bird notes almost as much as he liked the mellow chime from the Metropolitan Tower, which he could always hear.
But there were times when he stared in puzzled reproof at that little yellow-feathered singer, seeming conscious of the fact that it was in some way a seal on his failure, a tacit avowal of subjugation, an acknowledgment of resignation, like a flower plot in which prisoners become forlornly interested. Moods such as this, however, never stayed long with him, for he had the habit of somewhat optimistically assuring himself that he was one man in a million, merely to have a roof over his head. He even consorted with a ghostly sense of well-being when his fire was lighted of a winter night and he compared himself with his neighbors, since that mansion of Mrs. Feeney's stood strangely like a second Mount Ætna, luxuriant enough at its base perhaps, but betraying ever-increasing sterility as one ascended, until at the fourth floor, with the exception of Widder's tight-walled crater of warmth, its arctic baldness marked it as a peak of eternal impoverishment.
Troubled and brief, as a rule, were the lodgments in the two rooms at the back, and especially in the little hall room whose open door stared so wistfully into the open door of Widder's abode, since privacy in a hall room can be purchased only at the price of warmth denied.
It was at the beginning of his second winter in the top-floor front that the great event of all Widder's life occurred. It came, as so many of life's great events seem to come, from a clear sky, without warning, without a tub thumper to proclaim its imminence. And with its arrival Widder felt that he and Romance had in some way joined hands. He may have been a mere snag in the current of city life, but thereafter it was a snag beside which the Lorelei were known to have sung. He suddenly found himself living cheek by jowl with Adventure. Even the fixed star of his fireproof paint's success, which was always with him because it was always so remote, seemed eclipsed by the radiance of this more meteoric event.
For hidden away in his cat-eyed little dark room, behind the double lock and key of his iron-bound carpenter's chest, lurked a vast hazard. There, so close to his bottles of hypo and his plate racks and the models that crowded his acid-stained worktable, waited a current of high emprise which could be turned on, if he chose, as easily as he turned on his water tap. There it lurked, giving a secret dignity to his quiet-eyed and ineradicable humility, touching with the wine glow of perilous days his pensive and patient habit of self-deprecation. And what it was and how it came there is not altogether unworthy of record.
It sprang out on him, like a tiger out of a jungle, from the dingy door of a dingy tenement of a dingy quarter of Williamsburg. Having "worked" Brooklyn with his patented tap filter, which could be bought from the jobbers along with a district right for fifteen cents apiece and peddled out at the rate of a dollar each, he patiently and pensively entered the more northerly district plumed by the factory chimneys that shrouded the Williamsburg Bridge from the rising sun. He worked dispiritedly but not despairingly, for he realized that one sale a day meant safety and three sales a day spelt munificence, although there were, indeed, days when entire suburban districts united in their distrust of a filter that could be attached to any tap without materially affecting its flow. From door to door he went with gentle doggedness, accepting defeat without bitterness and rebuffs without complaint.
It was at the end of an empty and altogether unprofitable morning that a door, not unlike the two hundred humdrum doors at which he had already applied, finally opened in answer to his knock. Widder, as was his wont, artfully advanced his right foot, thus gently interposing an obstacle against the inopportune shutting of that door. But the maneuver in this instance was unnecessary, for the hollow-cheeked Calabrian who occupied the flat not only examined Widder's tap filter with interest, but invited the mild-eyed peddler into his little dining room, There, after more talk over Widder's mechanical marvel in particular and the vicissitudes of house-to-house canvassing in general, the Calabrian not only bought a filter for one dollar but extended to his visitor an invitation to join him in his midday dinner. That alone would have made it a red-letter day for Widder. But during that meal of macaroni drenched with tomato sauce, and washed down with half a bottle of rather tepid Marsala, the Calabrian had watched his visitor closely and questioned him pointedly. Life, it was plain to see, had treated Widder none too handsomely. And when two rat-tailed cigars were handed out, the Calabrian even hinted that there were easier ways of making money than peddling tap filters.
Widder, with his tongue a little loosened by the tepid Marsala, thereupon resounded the possibilities of his fireproof paint, and his collapsible shoe-tree and razor-blade sharpener and music-sheet turner. But there was easier money, his host still proclaimed, than trying to market new inventions. When Widder meekly asked what this might be, the Calabrian slapped his leg—in a bandage from acid burns, he had explained—and declared the pensive-eyed filter peddler as exactly the type of man he wanted. And when Widder for the second time asked what this declaration might mean he was told that it would all be made plain at the proper hour. On the following day, when he came back, everything would be explained.
Widder went back. He went back because the dragnet of the unusual compelled him to go back. But the Calabrian still temporized and cross-questioned and talked airily of easy money, of money enough to sink a ship. The time, however, was not right for particulars. There were certain enemies who must not be forgotten. It would take a few days more to make sure that the coast was clear. And in the meantime an offer was an offer. If Widder would carry home a suitcase and take care of it for a week the Calabrian would buy his entire stock of twelve tap filters for twelve good dollars. Then, when the coast was clear, they could get down to business. The Calabrian would come to Widder's room and talk things over.
Twenty Four Thousand Dollars—More Money Than He Had Ever Seen in All His Life
Widder, as he stood viewing the suitcase in question, scarcely knew what to say. Even while the aroma of romance widened before his nostrils the cynic philosophy which life had imposed on him drove his ardor back into its kennel of skepticism. It was an innocent-looking suitcase, as the Calabrian pointed out for the second time, and Widder could carry it away without fear of interception and harbor it without a shadow of suspicion. And it would be a test. It would prove that Widder was the sort of man he wanted. And if there were anything wrong about carrying a suitcase into New York, why, what a beehive of evil, for example, the Grand Central Terminal must be! That was what suitcases were made for—to be carried. And not many men got twelve good dollars for carrying one.
It was probably the hazard of the thing, rather than the unprecedented sale of twelve tap filters, that appealed to Widder's imagination. He finally consented to take the suitcase and keep it until the Calabrian called for it. Yet as he lugged it to a street car and sat with it between his knees as he sped homeward across the Williamsburg Bridge high above the housetops and the crawling East River shipping, he felt that he was in some way a marked man. When a second passenger crowded in beside him he even tingled with secret apprehension, and it was not often that the mice feet of alarm scampered up and down Widder's sedentary body. Why he was apprehensive he could not quite say. Nor could he say just why there was a distinct overtone of pleasure to those primarily disturbing excitements. But for the first time in his life he felt he was a fellow passenger with peril. A ruddier light in some way flared across the gray tenor of his monotonous days.
It was not until the second day that he began to worry about the suitcase. Then, for the twentieth time, he looked it over. It was a large-sized case of yellow cowhide, and its heaviness told him that it was well filled. But what it held he had no means of knowing. There was nothing equivocal about its lock. A hammer and chisel, of course, could demolish that fastening, just as a razor blade could have cut away the entire cowhide and canvas side of the case. But that, naturally, was not to be thought of. So once again Widder turned the suitcase over and over, and weighed it in his hand, and stood it up on his table. Then he sat studiously contemplating it, as though by staring at it he might finally come into some miraculous power of X-raying its contents.
Then the thought flashed through him that it might be packed with stolen silverware, and, this being traced, would surely lead him to being charged with being an accessory after the fact. Or it might be packed with nitro-glycerine or an infernal machine. Then an even more disturbing possibility took possession of his mind as he got up to light the gas. What was to prevent it from being—he hesitated, even, over articulating the thought—a dismembered human body? More than once his penny evening paper had told of such things, and had even printed corroborative photographic evidence, over which he had often enough pored with indifferent and half-incredulous eyes. They were, he remembered, invariably designated as Trunk Murders. And if there were trunk murders, why could there not also be suitcase murders?
Widder turned the gas a little higher. Then, having measured his own meager dimensions in comparison with the suitcase's, he saw, with a sigh of relief, that even a pygmy could not be fitted into such a receptacle. But his sleep that night was not peaceful, even after stowing the suitcase away in his carpenter's chest and carefully locking it there. And after another day of disquieting theorizing and another night of even more disquieting dreams, he decided that he had had enough of mystery. He journeyed over to Williamsburg to have that mystery solved, and solved to his own satisfaction. Otherwise the suitcase would have to be taken out of his possession and taken at once. Unless he could be given either a key or some definite knowledge of what the thing held, the compact would have to be called off. That much he intended to insist upon.
Yet he insisted on no such thing. For he found the Calabrian's street door surrounded by a crowd, who explained that an Italian "coiner" had shot a Treasury Department detective during a raid on his quarters, and would inevitably go to Sing Sing for life.
"And if the cop croaks he'll sure get the chair!" grimly announced an unshaven citizen close to Widder's elbow.
Widder filtered away through that crowd as quickly as water through one of his own tap strainers. He vanished promptly and discreetly from the neighborhood and returned palpitating to the haven of his top-floor quarters, where, having securely locked his door, he sat down and tried to think it all out. Then, having cautiously disinterred the suitcase from its hiding place, he sat viewing it with more concern than ever. He sat viewing it, in fact, with something akin to hatred, as he might have viewed a snake that he had neither the power nor the right to kill. But being unable to banish it, he determined that it should at least be kept caged. So he emptied his carpenter's chest, placed the suitcase in the bottom, and buried it under an array of photograph plates, and faded newspapers, and empty bottles, and underwear that had long since been put on the retired list. Then he double locked the chest, secreted it under his worktable, and made assurance trebly sure by even locking his dark-room door.
Then he waited. Day by day he waited, pausing apprehensively at every footstep that sounded on Mrs. Feeney's stairways and on the street, shrinking inwardly at every stranger who for the second time might happen to glance in his direction. And, in the meantime, he scanned his evening paper meticulously, column by laborious column, wondering why the wheels of the law should move so slowly. But as week by uneventful week dragged by and no hand was laid accusingly on his shoulder his apprehensions gradually subsided. He got so he could once more step down into East Twenty-fourth Street without even changing color, and pass a policeman without holding his breath. Yet the tension was not entirely relaxed until he finally read of the sentencing of the counterfeiter, Nicolo Piazzia, to life imprisonment, with a sufficiently detailed recapitulation of the case to leave no doubt in Widder's mind as to the identity of the criminal.
So vast, indeed, was the former's relief at this news that he promptly and determinedly unearthed the suitcase, and with it started for a Fourth Avenue basement locksmith with whom he had more than once done business in the past. It would be easy enough, he concluded, to tell this locksmith that he had lost the key to his traveling bag. But on Mrs. Feeney's front steps he came abruptly to a stop, suddenly realizing that having a key fitted to that lock implied that the key would have to be tried. And the end of any such trial, he remembered, would mean the opening of the suitcase itself. That, concluded Widder, involved risks that he had neither the intention nor the courage to face. So he went dejectedly back to his top-floor room, locked himself in, and once more sat in a brown study before that enigmatic receptacle that still spelt for him a great Perhaps.
He pondered the matter for several hours. By midnight curiosity had overcome his last scruples. He quietly filed down the point of a buttonhook and started to work on the suitcase lock.
It took him some time. But in the end he was able to pick the lock and open the case.
Widder sat for several minutes without moving, staring down at the contents of that suitcase. He was trembling a little. And it took him some time, he found, to digest his discovery. It was, on the whole, the most dramatic moment of all Widder's meager life.
For in that compactly packed case he found an electro-bath and several dry cells and two bank-note plates carefully wrapped in tinfoil.
Then came a bottle of cyanide of potassium, four tubes of colored ink, two fine files, and a melting pot wrapped up in an Italian newspaper. Then came two plaster-of-Paris coin molds, a cardboard box filled with a silvery-white metallic substance which he recognized as antimony, a cigar box nearly filled with tin, and several pounds of bar lead wrapped in paper.
But what made Widder actually catch his breath was a collection of six compact columns wrapped in Manila paper, which, upon investigation, proved to be three hundred and sixty freshly minted half dollars. Beside these he found a compact bale of oddly tinted paper which, when untied, brought Widder's heart suddenly up into his mouth. For this bale, he found, was made up of twelve smaller packages neatly corded together; and each package, he soon discovered, held exactly one hundred yellow-backs, one hundred bank notes, all in the denomination of twenty. That, Widder computed, meant twenty-four thousand dollars, not counting the one hundred and eighty dollars in silver. And that was more money than he had ever seen in all his life.
It was counterfeit, of course. It had to be counterfeit. There was no chance of its being anything else. But those yellowbacks looked startlingly like all other twenty-dollar bills that he had ever seen, and even being able to sit and stare at them left Widder a little light-headed. If it was not wealth it was at least a persuasively theatrical representation of wealth. And people have thrilled, long before Widder did, at well-staged imitations of reality.
The imitations before him, he decided, were remarkably well done. Nothing about the yellowbacks openly proclaimed them as counterfeit. They satisfied the eye and felt authentic to the finger. As for the coins, there was no doubt about their trickiness. They were a mold product, he knew, yet their edges were as sharp and clear as though freshly cut by a Federal die. The two fine files, he was mechanic enough to suspect, had been used to retouch their milling and cut away the mold drag where the hot metal had been poured into the plaster-of-Paris form. And after that, undoubtedly, the entire coin had been subjected to an acid wash to sharpen it up. And the alloy itself was a very good one. It rang true, and it approximated to the weight of a genuine half dollar. Widder himself would never have questioned it—and Widder had learned to challenge all dubious half dollars, paying for that tuition in the sad school of experience.
It Was an Innocent Looking Suitcase, and Widder Could Carry it Away Without Fear
The next day Widder examined the plates and the colored inks. Having done so, he realized that with a hand press he could turn out several hundred of them a day. And before the week was out he attached the melting pot to his gas cooker, and experimented with alloys, and made a mold or two in the plaster forms, and reinvestigated the mysteries of electroplating. At the end of this work he awakened to the fact that Fate had thrust upon him the power of being the King Midas of Twenty-fourth Street.
If there was something intoxicating in that thought there was also something intimidating. It involved vistas too big for his imagination. It gave him little chills up and down the spine, and after thinking it over for an hour or two he carefully gathered up his newly made coins of alloy and reconsigned them to his melting pot. And with their reduction to base metal there returned to him a shadowy yet indisputable sense of peace. Then he repacked the suitcase and stowed it carefully away in its hiding place. The next morning he once more started on his rounds as a peddler of tap filters. He realized, as he went doggedly back to work, that he had many days of lost time to make up. Yet eight laborious hours of enlarging on the virtues of his filter resulted in only one sale. Honest money, Widder remembered, was not so easy to make.
During all his labors, however, he still carried with him the memory of that hidden wealth. It was something to have up one's sleeve, something to come home to. Merely to nurse the knowledge of so vast a fortune proved a phantasmal consolation. It threw a halo of adventure over the humdrum grayness of things. If it no longer thrilled him as it had done in the earlier days of its possession, it still endowed him with a perverse sense of fortitude as he reckoned up his weekly accounts and by much ingenuity and industry managed to live within his legal income.
As winter deepened and the bite of the frost grew sharper it cast a vague radiance over the bleakness of existence, as an open fire lights up the emptiest of rooms. It became as ghostly an abstraction as an old love affair, not to be sullied by sordid handling. It merged into the realm of pure romance. For Widder made no attempt to use any of his hidden wealth. He was afraid to. He was without the courage to take one of those authoritative looking yellowbacks and pass it across a counter or push it in under a subway wicket. That would mean the end of his peace of mind, the sullying of an abstraction by sordid handling. Widder's code of ethics had never been definitely articulated. But he felt in his bones that honesty was in some way the best policy. And he was not crazy about having the law against him.
II
IT WAS snowing a little as Widder made his way homeward at the end of a day that had been the best in a week of desultory activities. The sale of three filters in an afternoon meant the prompt and reckless replenishing of his cupboard shelf, so, as he mounted the steps to Mrs. Feeney's rooming house and guardedly reached into his left-hand trousers pocket for his keys, he balanced on his right arm a parcel of laundry, a quart bag of sweet potatoes topped with three red onions, a can of condensed milk, a loaf of bread and a half pound of tub butter. Bulging from his pocket also were a pound of Hamburg steak and a half pound of bacon cut thin—for to Widder's way of thinking nothing was more fortifying of a sharp winter morning than the smell of frying bacon.
So familiar was he with the maneuver of effecting entrance thus encumbered that he found his keys, unlocked the door, stepped inside, and closed it with a swing of his foot, without for a moment disturbing the delicate equilibrium of the pyramid of comestibles trembling on his right arm.
His legs ached and he was glad to get home, for he had made the saddening discovery, during that afternoon's blithe snowfall, that his shoes were leaking again. And it was disheartening, in the canvassing business, to see how quickly a pair of half soles could go to the dogs. He was so glad to get home, indeed, that he found nothing obnoxious, as he mounted the worn stairs, in the perennial odor of boiled Brussels sprouts from the landlady's basement range, or in the pungent smell of the banana oil from the studio of the second-floor crayon artist who both manufactured and gilded the frames for his own masterpieces, or in the heavy aroma of Turkish cigarettes seeping from the third-floor quarters of the hydrogenated toe dancer, still blithely nursing her torn ligament and awaiting the culmination of her twenty-thousand-dollar damage suit against the King of the Big Time Circuit.
Widder was as unconscious of the heavy mustiness of the stairtreads and the heavier smell of gas-burned air about him as this same Jersey-born Russian toe dancer with the exotic, polysyllabic patronymic was unconscious of administrative upheavals in Petrograd. It was as he turned, breathing a little heavily, at the head of the last stairway that he heard a sound which for a moment arrested his attention. It was the sound of a woman crying behind a closed door.
He knew, as he came to a stop before his own door and absently lingered his key ring for the right key, that it was the new roomer in the top-floor back who was crying. Just why she should be doing this was no concern of Widder's.
But Widder, like many another man, occasionally found the audible sounds of a woman's grief not easy to endure. And he was especially disturbed by these little shaken sobs, because they were plainly made in secret, behind closed door, and not for the benefit of immediate neighbors, as were the lamentations of Maggie Morrissey of The Musical Morrisseys, on the occasions when her lord and master returned to Mrs. Feeney's parlor suite and sonorously reprimanded her for what he designated as hitting the bottle.
Time and experience, in fact, had left Widder somewhat skeptical as to the wanderers bivouacking in that hall bedroom, which so often seemed to stand as the last milestone on the roadway of adversity. The list was not an encouraging one. There had been the young Cuban, for instance, who tried to commit suicide because of his hapless love affair with a department-store glove girl. And there had been the runaway girl from upstate, whose long-bearded and orison-making father had come and taken her home, after publicly and passionately offering up prayer for the soul of the inarticulately indignant Mrs. Feeney.
Then there had been the spinster lady with the limp, who had announced herself as a teacher of polite languages and found New York stubbornly satisfied with its knowledge of the vulgar mother tongue. That faded spinster from a New England village, Widder knew, had not enough to eat; for one night, thinking he was hearing mice, he detected her in the act of rummaging stealthily through his hall-door rubbish box. Thereafter he became studiously extravagant, tossing away biscuit cartons with only two-thirds of their contents gone, and a whole Wienerwurst or two, and pieces of cheese substantial enough to fatten a dozen mice. The stealthy midnight pillagings were repeated, and the waste from Widder's cooking became more opulent, until, of a sudden, the whole game came to an end. He had overdone things. That timid starveling, he realized, after she had migrated into quarters unknown, had come to understand that he knew. But she hadn't the face to let him know that she knew he knew.
And there had been the artist's-model girl who had borrowed Widder's flatiron to press out her shirt waists, and had casually asked to dry her hair at his window, and had told him how she eventually intended to star if she didn't get the figure work for the new Exposition buildings. She had even come within an ace of giving him heart failure because of her offhand midnight interrogation as to whether or not he would mind boiling a pint of hot water for her on his gas stove. She had further presented him with a portfolio of art-calendar life studies of herself, diaphanously incased in cheesecloth—which Widder blushingly and promptly locked away in the carpenter's chest. She had been a companionable enough sort of girl, but he was not altogether sorry when she went suddenly West with a moving-picture company, although she had casually borrowed a dollar from him to pay the expressman and had departed without remembering to return it.
But of this new hall-room woman Widder knew practically nothing. Since her advent during the last week or two he had been more than usually preoccupied with his own affairs. He remembered having seen a pale-faced slip of a girl passing up and down the gloomy stairs as quietly as a ghost. He also recalled, when he came to think of it, meeting her once in the doorway as she was going out. She had seemed very tired. She had nice brown hair, however, and an honest look in her hazel eyes. That much he remembered distinctly. And she was not the rooming-house type. He had even felt a little sorry for her, although he had not taken the trouble to ask himself why, for in spite of all her tiredness he had been struck by the look of furtive innocence on her face, as though the city had frightened her into a distrust of her own soul's goodness. Yes, concluded Widder as he lighted his gas stove and carefully packed away his groceries, she was a different type from the others. Like all the rest of them, he supposed, she was hard at work trying to make both ends meet. And like so many of them she was probably not making a success of it. She was assuredly not making a success of it, for women who do never shut themselves up in their rooms and cry over it.
Widder went to his floor and cautiously and silently opened it. He stood there staring at the closed door of the hall room, intently listening. He imagined that she had stopped crying. But he could not be sure of it. So he tiptoed silently along the dark hall. When he came to her door he stopped and listened, with head inclined.
No; she had not stopped. She was still crying. But she was doing it more quietly now. He could hardly catch the sound of her sobs. They were the stifled, broken whimpers of utter exhaustion and hopelessness. She was crying as a discouraged and abandoned child cries, thinly and quaveringly.
It was not a pleasant sound. Widder crept away from it, disturbed in spirit. He was back at his own door, with his hand on the knob, when a sudden wave of audacity swept over him. He took a deep breath and walked boldly to the hall-room door. Then he knocked on its faded yellow panel. For Widder, in hard weather, scattered bread crumbs along his window sill for the sparrows.
The crying stopped all of a sudden and there was a minute of silence. Then Widder knocked again. It was too late, he felt, to turn back, but he ventured a discreet glance down the stairway to make sure the coast was clear. For Mrs. Feeney's will, in the face of any "goin's on" in her house, was as the law of the Medes and Persians.
The door opened. The girl with the hazel eyes stood before him. Her hair was a little tumbled, and if there was the faintest trace of a misty redness above her cheek-bones there was a distinct look of challenging inquiry in the hazel eyes themselves.
"Is—is anything wrong?" Widder inadequately asked. He was plainly the more embarrassed of the two.
"I think not!" was her calmly impersonal response.
"I'm sorry," stammered Widder, backing away a little. "I thought I heard—I mean I thought you were"
"I think it must have been a mistake," she said, still rigid, for the city apparently had already taught her the need of cuirassing herself in that pathetic armor plate of aloofness before all strangers. But the kindliness and concern of Widder's squinting eyes were not to be evaded.
"Honestly," he told her, "I thought I heard you crying. And I was wondering if"
He seemed unable to finish. The girl looked at him for a moment or two of silence.
"I was crying," she suddenly admitted. But even the admission was practically a challenge.
"That's too bad. I hope it's" And again he came to a stop.
"No, it's nothing in which you could help me," she said. But Widder noticed that she gulped a little before she managed to get the words out.
"Are you sure?" he asked, as persistent now as though he were expounding the virtues of his patented tap filter to a vacillating householder.
For the first time the girl's face relaxed a little.
"Not unless you are a walking dictionary," she said with a wintry ghost of a smile. Her words for a moment seemed to perplex the man at the door.
"I am!" he announced, still audacious. For Widder, although innocent of being a bookworm, spent many a rainy day toasting his toes and poring over out-dated magazines and bargain-counter volumes from the Twenty-third Street stalls.
She turned to a spindle-legged bamboo table on which a typewriter stood and picked up an open notebook that lay beside it.
"Then how do you spell hyperpyrexia?" she solemnly demanded. "And is there, can there be, such a word as triskaidekaphobia?"
Widder did not intend to be stumped. So instead of answering that question, he asked another.
"But why do you want to know how to spell hyper—er—hyperpyrexia?" he inquired as he advanced a step or two into the room. That advance was unconscious, being, in fact, a professional habit with him, since no persuasiveness, he had found, could successfully penetrate a door panel. And doors had the habit of being shut in one's face and ending all argument.
She drooped the notebook listlessly down on the undulatory box couch with its Sixth Avenue Gobelin cover.
"It's no use," she announced. "I can't do it! I can't!"
She did not actually wring her hands, but her gesture struck Widder as being a distressingly hopeless one. She looked ill-nourished and worn, as if her taut nerves had been strung to the snapping point.
"You can't do what?" persisted the perplexed Widder.
"I can't make out a line of it."
"A line of what?"
"Of this dictation."
"Whose is it?"
"Doctor Funkhouser's. He's what they call a—a—pyretologist, I think it is. He gave me this as a test and told me to go home and type it out."
"Are you a stenographer?"
A faint flush mounted the girl's white cheek.
"I thought I could be one, the same as I thought I could do pastel work for the fashion papers. But I haven't had enough practice, and Doctor Funkhouser thought I was too young."
Widder began to understand. But he insisted on remaining practical.
"Is your machine a good one?"
"Not very; it's only rented by the week. But it's better than my notes."
"Let's have a look at them," he suggested. His tone was so matter of fact that she did not even hesitate.
He glanced over the pages of hieroglyphics, with here and there a phrase written out in long hand. Among these he encountered such words as fibrovascular and intravenous and pyosapremia, and many more like them.
"My, my, but they do seem jaw-breakers," he admitted. He rubbed the top of his head with his forefinger as he puzzled over the word "kakexia," with "cakexia" written above and "cachexia" below it.
"Now just what is kakexia?" he pondered aloud.
"That's something he said he thought I might possibly have myself," added the girl with listless bitterness. "This is the first page or two of his lecture on some sort of fever. He's getting the series ready to be brought out in book form. That's why he advertised for an extra stenographer."
Widder was still studying the notebook. Then the idea came to him:
"Why, what you need here is a medical dictionary. Then you can look up the words and make sure of them. And that'll put you straight on the spelling, besides showing that you've got your text coherent."
The suggestion was a simple enough one, but at the core of Widder's enthusiasm burrowed a small canker of disquiet. Such things cost money, and he himself, that week, was not overburdened with ready cash.
The girl shook her head.
"He's only given me until nine o'clock in the morning to turn it in."
"Then supposing we get that dictionary and settle down to work," he hesitatingly suggested.
"Where?" asked the incredulous girl.
"Why, I can have a medical dictionary up here in a jiffy," announced the heroically mendacious Widder.
"But I can't ask you to do this," objected the girl.
"Fiddlesticks!" said Widder. "I can borrow that book inside of ten minutes!"
This was not exactly the truth, but he gave her no time to fathom his deceptions. Instead, he slipped back into his own room, turned down the gas in the stove, put on his hat and coat, and bolted for East Twenty-third Street between Lexington and Fourth Avenues. There he found one of the basement booksellers along that tideway of second-hand literature putting up his shutters for the night. Widder casually inquired if he had anything in the line of medical dictionaries. He was shown a nurse's handbook, for eighty cents, and a much fatter and more authentic volume which could be knocked down to him at half price, to wit: one dollar and seventy-five cents.
Widder, being an artful buyer, lamented the break in the dictionary's binding and the utter absence of a title page. He promptly proclaimed it as being worth a dollar to him, and no more. The dealer said a dollar and a half. Widder shook his head. The dealer, consulting his watch, said it could go for a dollar and a quarter if it went without further argument. Widder counted out a dollar and ten cents and announced that amount as his limit. It was the dealer's turn to shake his head; he couldn't afford to lose money on books like that. Widder accordingly gathered up his dime and four quarters and started for the door. As he had hoped and half expected, the dealer stopped him before he mounted the snow-covered steps to the street level. The bargain was closed; it was giving the book away, but no shop could be kept open all night over a matter of fifteen cents.
Widder did not wait even to have the dictionary wrapped up. He scurried home like a rabbit making for its warren. And he was glad to find the musty hallways empty, for the girl was waiting for him at the head of the stairs. Her eyes were no longer red.
"It's c-a-c-h-e-x-i-a," he triumphantly announced, for he had taken the trouble to look it up in the bookstore; "and it means ill-nourishment or malnutrition."
But she did not seem to hear him. She merely stood watching him as he riffled the pages of the bulky volume before her eyes.
"Do you do things like this for everybody?" she asked.
He in turn did not listen directly to her words, for the spirit of adventure suddenly burned strong within him.
"Now this is what we ought to do," he meditatively observed: "Your room seems a bit small for two to work in, doesn't it? And your light isn't what it ought to be for typing stuff like this. So supposing we shift."
"Shift?" she echoed.
"Yes, shift that machine into my room. Then as soon as I get a fire going we'll start to work and get that shorthand straightened out inside of a couple of hours."
"But this is my Waterloo," objected the girl.
"Well, I'll be the Blücher who came in at the tail end, to kind of help along," announced Widder, astounded a little at his own audacity and tingling a little at the thought of so neatly capping what he plainly saw to be a historical allusion. For there was a time when Widder had been a reading man, even on days when it didn't rain.
"I can't!" protested the girl.
Widder seemed unable to comprehend her scruples.
"Don't you want to win out at this?" he inquired with a hand movement toward the notebook.
"Yes," she finally admitted.
"Then if I can help you out with an hour's work, isn't it the sensible thing to do?"
"It isn't fair!" she persisted.
"But if I can turn the tables and get you to help me out for an hour or so, wouldn't that make it fair?"
Her brow cleared.
"That is the only condition on which I'd think of it," was her answer.
"Then it's settled," said Widder with decision.
"But how can I help you?"
A few weeks of city life, it was plain to Widder, had shaken that girl down to hardpan. And she looked as though a good square meal might be the making of her.
"By typing six or eight letters about a patent of mine," he promptly explained to her. And he eased his conscience by reminding himself that there were a few manufacturers whose attention might reasonably be redirected toward his fireproof paint. "That can be done later in the week. But we'll have to start straightening out this doctor stuff in half an hour."
He turned and walked back to his room. He walked on his heels, like a man with a purpose, and he refused to look over the banister for any possible apparitions of Mrs. Feeney.
Back in his room he promptly lighted the green-globed reading lamp which he had bought in a junk shop and rehabilitated with his own hand. Then he touched a match to his open fire, fed and watered the canary and, donning a huge apron of white butcher's linen, began his preparations for supper. He worked both rapidly and resolutely.
When the table, draped with imitation linen of his own laundering and garnished with much mismated chinaware, had been placed in front of the blazing fire, and when the Hamburg had been smothered in finely sliced onions and the buttered toast had been spread fanwise over a somewhat battered plate of the willow pattern, and the coffee had been done to a turn, Widder, still in his huge apron, stepped back to the hall-room door.
"Can you come now?" he asked in his most matter-of-fact tone.
"Yes," the girl answered, staring a little blankly at the white butcher's linen, which Widder, through long use, had come to wear as unconsciously as a busy surgeon wears his operating gown.
"Then if you'll take the notebook," he explained, "I'll bring along the typewriter."
He saw, to his relief, that she was no longer hesitating. He waited in the hallway until she turned down her gas and closed her door. Then he nodded toward the opposing doorway, through which the warmer light streamed.
She stepped into his room as calmly as a secretary steps into an office. Her face did not cloud even when he carefully shut the door behind him. But a look of perplexity came into her eyes as they turned from the twittering canary and the open fireplace to the supper table unmistakably prepared for refection. That look troubled Widder not a little.
"I hope you—you won't mind. But you see I had to have supper. And I thought you might not—I mean I thought you might join me."
He was plainly making a mess of it.
"But I've had my supper," said the girl, biting her lip. For the second time he noticed a slight flush steal up over her face.
"Then perhaps you won't mind sitting here, if only as a matter of form," he suggested. "You see, I thought coffee might keep us up a bit."
She was once more looking studiously about the room. Then she stared through the dark-room doorway at the gas stove burning on the zinc board at the end of his worktable. He felt sure she was sniffing the smell of coffee on the warm air. But her attitude still seemed uncompromising.
"I'm afraid my cooking is—is too plain, perhaps, for"
She laughed openly, for the first time, though he could not understand her reason for laughing.
"It smells good!" she declared.
"Then if you will honor me," he began a little ponderously.
She laughed again as she sat down in the chair which he had pushed back for her. And a distinct tingle went up and down his spine as he stepped back through the dark-room door for the coffeepot. For it came home to him, in a sort of dizzy flash, that a young woman was actually eating supper with him in his rooms.
And once started, that young woman ate with honest and direct relish, as he had expected anyone with such honest and direct hazel eyes would do. She ate fried onions and Hamburg and buttered toast and strained honey and fig newtons, with two cups of coffee. And, as she ate, her color mounted incredibly, and the last lingering stiffness went out of her speech. She even offered to help Widder clear away the things. But he told her to enjoy the fire, for it would take him only a jiffy. And while the débris was being transported to the dark room the girl sat and watched the fire, and fed cracker crumbs to the sleepy canary, which promptly rewarded this attention with a little run of notes.
"She sings very sweetly," said the girl over her shoulder to Widder.
"Yes, he's a good singer," amended the owner of the bird, taking off his apron and feeling as though he himself, for some absurd reason, might trill an equally light-hearted run of notes.
Then they started to work. Widder first looked over the typewriter. Then he doubled a sheet of paper and tried its action.
"This machine'll work better if I tighten up the tension spring," he told the girl, who watched from over his shoulder. "And if I bend back two or three of those type bars it'll probably make the letters align a little truer."
"The lines were rather wabbly," the girl acknowledged as she held her breath while Widder, with his pliers, applied apparently calamitous pressure to the slender bars of steel. But he was mechanic enough not to bungle the job. And in another two minutes they were at work with the notebook and the medical dictionary, tracing up the renegade words and building out the sentences.
Widder, once on the trail of a word, tracked it down, no matter what its disguises, as a detective tracks down an outlaw. Certain of these fugitives, such as odynophobia and tritacophya and phlegmasia and edema, gave him a great deal of trouble. But he came to regard it as a sort of game, and by midnight the last uncertain Greco-Latin jawbreaker had been rounded up and identified and imprisoned in the text where it belonged. Then, after a final revision had been made, Widder took the copy and read it aloud, spelling out the hard words, while the girl at the machine put the sentences into type.
"I'm afraid it's rather done you out," ventured Widder as the girl at the table added her last sheet to the little pile, took them up and gently tamped the uneven edges together.
"I'm not tired," she protested, although the shadows about her eyes plainly enough contradicted that statement. "For all the hard work fell on you."
The gratitude in those tired eyes he knew was more than he deserved. So he tried to tell her that it had seemed fun to him, and he'd learned a lot out of that dictionary in the last few hours.
"Then it must be late!" she announced, suddenly conscious of her surroundings.
Widder consulted his big nickel watch. That honest timepiece said exactly half-past twelve.
The girl at once got up from her chair. At the same moment Widder, with his head inclined and an intent look in his vacant eyes, made a prompt and peremptory motion for silence. He felt sure that he had heard a faint asthmatic cough and the shuffling of feet.
"Would you mind waiting a minute or two?" he said in a whisper. "I'm—I'm afraid there's somebody outside."
She stood staring at him with perplexed eyes. She continued to stare at him as he tiptoed to the door and cautiously slipped the bolt.
"What difference does it make?" she said a little scornfully.
"Sssh!" softly hissed the perturbed Widder.
It was plain that she was not yet fully acquainted with the administrative ultimatums of the apparitional Mrs. Feeney. And Widder found himself rather at a loss as to the best manner of making her understand the situation.
"Just a minute or two, please!" he asked as he stood with his back to the door, listening intently. Finally, a little nettled by the girl's smile of careless scorn, he withdrew the bolt. Then he opened the door, an inch at a time. The hall, to his infinite relief, was empty.
"I'll bring your typewriter," he said, still in a whisper. But he stood guarded and watchful as the girl walked back to her own room and swung open the door. He could hear the puff of her gas as she lighted it. Taking up the typewriter, he tiptoed quietly along the hall with it. But he seemed to lack the courage to penetrate farther than the threshold.
She came to the door and took the typewriter from his hands. By this time he felt everything was safe, yet his horripilations of anxiety, oddly enough, had in some way served to give a touch of abandoned adventure to it all. The girl came back to the open door and stood with her straight young figure outlined against the light behind her.
"I'm not going to try to thank you now," she said, subdued by the midnight quietness of the house and speaking in little more than a whisper. But she held out her hand to him and he took it clumsily. Then he dropped it as suddenly as though it had been a hot potato.
"Will you let me know how everything comes out?" he whispered.
"Yes," she whispered back. "Good night!"
"Good night," he answered.
It was not until he had crept cautiously back through his own door and swung it shut that a moan, grim yet faint, sounded through the gloom of the upper house. For Mrs. Feeney, standing like an avenging Sibyl at the bottom of the fourth-floor stairway, realized that "goin's on" were being enacted in her house and its fair name was being threatened.
(TO BE CONTINUED)