Strictly Business by O. Henry Contents I. STRICTLY BUSINESS II. THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED III. BABES IN THE JUNGLE IV. THE DAY RESURGENT V. THE FIFTH WHEEL VI. THE POET AND THE PEASANT VII. THE ROBE OF PEACE VIII. THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT IX. THE CALL OF THE TAME X. THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY XI. THE THING'S THE PLAY XII. A RAMBLE IN APHASIA XIII. A MUNICIPAL REPORT XIV. PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER XV. A BIRD OF BAGDAD XVI. COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON XVII. A NIGHT IN NEW ARABIA XVIII. THE GIRL AND THE HABIT XIX. PROOF OF THE PUDDING XX. PAST ONE AT ROONEY’S XXI. THE VENTURERS XXII. THE DUEL XXIII. “WHAT YOU WANT” I STRICTLY BUSINESS I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You’ve been touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your ideas about the mysterious stageland would boil down to something like this: Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better than your own (madam) if they weren’t padded. Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew’s real name is Boyle O’Kelley. The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern; but Henry Miller is getting older than he was. All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink champagne and eat lobsters until noon the next day. After all, the moving pictures have got the whole bunch pounded to a pulp. Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people. If we did, the profession might be more overcrowded than it is. We look askance at the players with an eye full of patronizing superiority—and we go home and practise all sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our looking glasses. Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people in a new light. It seems to have been divulged that instead of being motoring bacchanalians and diamond-hungry _loreleis_ they are businesslike folk, students and ascetics with childer and homes and libraries, owning real estate, and conducting their private affairs in as orderly and unsensational a manner as any of us good citizens who are bound to the chariot wheels of the gas, rent, coal, ice, and wardmen. Whether the old or the new report of the sock-and-buskiners be the true one is a surmise that has no place here. I offer you merely this little story of two strollers; and for proof of its truth I can show you only the dark patch above the cast-iron of the stage-entrance door of Keetor’s old vaudeville theatre made there by the petulant push of gloved hands too impatient to finger the clumsy thumb-latch—and where I last saw Cherry whisking through like a swallow into her nest, on time to the minute, as usual, to dress for her act. The vaudeville team of Hart & Cherry was an inspiration. Bob Hart had been roaming through the Eastern and Western circuits for four years with a mixed-up act comprising a monologue, three lightning changes with songs, a couple of imitations of celebrated imitators, and a buck-and-wing dance that had drawn a glance of approval from the bass-viol player in more than one house—than which no performer ever received more satisfactory evidence of good work. The greatest treat an actor can have is to witness the pitiful performance with which all other actors desecrate the stage. In order to give himself this pleasure he will often forsake the sunniest Broadway corner between Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth to attend a matinée offering by his less gifted brothers. Once during the lifetime of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff and remains to go through with that most difficult exercise of Thespian muscles—the audible contact of the palm of one hand against the palm of the other. One afternoon Bob Hart presented his solvent, serious, well-known vaudevillian face at the box-office window of a rival attraction and got his d. h. coupon for an orchestra seat. A, B, C, and D glowed successively on the announcement spaces and passed into oblivion, each plunging Mr. Hart deeper into gloom. Others of the audience shrieked, squirmed, whistled, and applauded; but Bob Hart, “All the Mustard and a Whole Show in Himself,” sat with his face as long and his hands as far apart as a boy holding a hank of yarn for his grandmother to wind into a ball. But when H came on, “The Mustard” suddenly sat up straight. H was the happy alphabetical prognosticator of Winona Cherry, in Character Songs and Impersonations. There were scarcely more than two bites to Cherry; but she delivered the merchandise tied with a pink cord and charged to the old man’s account. She first showed you a deliciously dewy and ginghamy country girl with a basket of property daisies who informed you ingenuously that there were other things to be learned at the old log school-house besides cipherin’ and nouns, especially “When the Teach-er Kept Me in.” Vanishing, with a quick flirt of gingham apron-strings, she reappeared in considerably less than a “trice” as a fluffy “Parisienne”—so near does Art bring the old red mill to the Moulin Rouge. And then— But you know the rest. And so did Bob Hart; but he saw somebody else. He thought he saw that Cherry was the only professional on the short order stage that he had seen who seemed exactly to fit the part of “Helen Grimes” in the sketch he had written and kept tucked away in the tray of his trunk. Of course Bob Hart, as well as every other normal actor, grocer, newspaper man, professor, curb broker, and farmer, has a play tucked away somewhere. They tuck ’em in trays of trunks, trunks of trees, desks, haymows, pigeonholes, inside pockets, safe-deposit vaults, handboxes, and coal cellars, waiting for Mr. Frohman to call. They belong among the fifty-seven different kinds. But Bob Hart’s sketch was not destined to end in a pickle jar. He called it “Mice Will Play.” He had kept it quiet and hidden away ever since he wrote it, waiting to find a partner who fitted his conception of “Helen Grimes.” And here was “Helen” herself, with all the innocent abandon, the youth, the sprightliness, and the flawless stage art that his critical taste demanded. After the act was over Hart found the manager in the box office, and got Cherry’s address. At five the next afternoon he called at the musty old house in the West Forties and sent up his professional card. By daylight, in a secular shirtwaist and plain _voile_ skirt, with her hair curbed and her Sister of Charity eyes, Winona Cherry might have been playing the part of Prudence Wise, the deacon’s daughter, in the great (unwritten) New England drama not yet entitled anything. “I know your act, Mr. Hart,” she said after she had looked over his card carefully. “What did you wish to see me about?” “I saw you work last night,” said Hart. “I’ve written a sketch that I’ve been saving up. It’s for two; and I think you can do the other part. I thought I’d see you about it.” “Come in the parlor,” said Miss Cherry. “I’ve been wishing for something of the sort. I think I’d like to act instead of doing turns.” Bob Hart drew his cherished “Mice Will Play” from his pocket, and read it to her. “Read it again, please,” said Miss Cherry. And then she pointed out to him clearly how it could be improved by introducing a messenger instead of a telephone call, and cutting the dialogue just before the climax while they were struggling with the pistol, and by completely changing the lines and business of Helen Grimes at the point where her jealousy overcomes her. Hart yielded to all her strictures without argument. She had at once put her finger on the sketch’s weaker points. That was her woman’s intuition that he had lacked. At the end of their talk Hart was willing to stake the judgment, experience, and savings of his four years of vaudeville that “Mice Will Play” would blossom into a perennial flower in the garden of the circuits. Miss Cherry was slower to decide. After many puckerings of her smooth young brow and tappings on her small, white teeth with the end of a lead pencil she gave out her dictum. “Mr. Hart,” said she, “I believe your sketch is going to win out. That Grimes part fits me like a shrinkable flannel after its first trip to a handless hand laundry. I can make it stand out like the colonel of the Forty-fourth Regiment at a Little Mothers’ Bazaar. And I’ve seen you work. I know what you can do with the other part. But business is business. How much do you get a week for the stunt you do now?” “Two hundred,” answered Hart. “I get one hundred for mine,” said Cherry. “That’s about the natural discount for a woman. But I live on it and put a few simoleons every week under the loose brick in the old kitchen hearth. The stage is all right. I love it; but there’s something else I love better—that’s a little country home, some day, with Plymouth Rock chickens and six ducks wandering around the yard. “Now, let me tell you, Mr. Hart, I am STRICTLY BUSINESS. If you want me to play the opposite part in your sketch, I’ll do it. And I believe we can make it go. And there’s something else I want to say: There’s no nonsense in my make-up; I’m _on the level_, and I’m on the stage for what it pays me, just as other girls work in stores and offices. I’m going to save my money to keep me when I’m past doing my stunts. No Old Ladies’ Home or Retreat for Imprudent Actresses for me. “If you want to make this a business partnership, Mr. Hart, with all nonsense cut out of it, I’m in on it. I know something about vaudeville teams in general; but this would have to be one in particular. I want you to know that I’m on the stage for what I can cart away from it every pay-day in a little manila envelope with nicotine stains on it, where the cashier has licked the flap. It’s kind of a hobby of mine to want to cravenette myself for plenty of rainy days in the future. I want you to know just how I am. I don’t know what an all-night restaurant looks like; I drink only weak tea; I never spoke to a man at a stage entrance in my life, and I’ve got money in five savings banks.” “Miss Cherry,” said Bob Hart in his smooth, serious tones, “you’re in on your own terms. I’ve got ‘strictly business’ pasted in my hat and stenciled on my make-up box. When I dream of nights I always see a five-room bungalow on the north shore of Long Island, with a Jap cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen, and me with the title deeds to the place in my pongee coat pocket, swinging in a hammock on the side porch, reading Stanley’s ‘Explorations into Africa.’ And nobody else around. You never was interested in Africa, was you, Miss Cherry?” “Not any,” said Cherry. “What I’m going to do with my money is to bank it. You can get four per cent. on deposits. Even at the salary I’ve been earning, I’ve figured out that in ten years I’d have an income of about $50 a month just from the interest alone. Well, I might invest some of the principal in a little business—say, trimming hats or a beauty parlor, and make more.” “Well,” said Hart, “You’ve got the proper idea all right, all right, anyhow. There are mighty few actors that amount to anything at all who couldn’t fix themselves for the wet days to come if they’d save their money instead of blowing it. I’m glad you’ve got the correct business idea of it, Miss Cherry. I think the same way; and I believe this sketch will more than double what both of us earn now when we get it shaped up.” The subsequent history of “Mice Will Play” is the history of all successful writings for the stage. Hart & Cherry cut it, pieced it, remodeled it, performed surgical operations on the dialogue and business, changed the lines, restored ’em, added more, cut ’em out, renamed it, gave it back the old name, rewrote it, substituted a dagger for the pistol, restored the pistol—put the sketch through all the known processes of condensation and improvement. They rehearsed it by the old-fashioned boardinghouse clock in the rarely used parlor until its warning click at five minutes to the hour would occur every time exactly half a second before the click of the unloaded revolver that Helen Grimes used in rehearsing the thrilling climax of the sketch. Yes, that was a thriller and a piece of excellent work. In the act a real 32-caliber revolver was used loaded with a real cartridge. Helen Grimes, who is a Western girl of decidedly Buffalo Billish skill and daring, is tempestuously in love with Frank Desmond, the private secretary and confidential prospective son-in-law of her father, “Arapahoe” Grimes, quarter-million-dollar cattle king, owning a ranch that, judging by the scenery, is in either the Bad Lands or Amagansett, L. I. Desmond (in private life Mr. Bob Hart) wears puttees and Meadow Brook Hunt riding trousers, and gives his address as New York, leaving you to wonder why he comes to the Bad Lands or Amagansett (as the case may be) and at the same time to conjecture mildly why a cattleman should want puttees about his ranch with a secretary in ’em. Well, anyhow, you know as well as I do that we all like that kind of play, whether we admit it or not—something along in between “Bluebeard, Jr.,” and “Cymbeline” played in the Russian. There were only two parts and a half in “Mice Will Play.” Hart and Cherry were the two, of course; and the half was a minor part always played by a stage hand, who merely came in once in a Tuxedo coat and a panic to announce that the house was surrounded by Indians, and to turn down the gas fire in the grate by the manager’s orders. There was another girl in the sketch—a Fifth Avenue society swelless—who was visiting the ranch and who had sirened Jack Valentine when he was a wealthy club-man on lower Third Avenue before he lost his money. This girl appeared on the stage only in the photographic state—Jack had her Sarony stuck up on the mantel of the Amagan—of the Bad Lands droring room. Helen was jealous, of course. And now for the thriller. Old “Arapahoe” Grimes dies of angina pectoris one night—so Helen informs us in a stage-ferryboat whisper over the footlights—while only his secretary was present. And that same day he was known to have had $647,000 in cash in his (ranch) library just received for the sale of a drove of beeves in the East (that accounts for the price we pay for steak!). The cash disappears at the same time. Jack Valentine was the only person with the ranchman when he made his (alleged) croak. “Gawd knows I love him; but if he has done this deed—” you sabe, don’t you? And then there are some mean things said about the Fifth Avenue Girl—who doesn’t come on the stage—and can we blame her, with the vaudeville trust holding down prices until one actually must be buttoned in the back by a call boy, maids cost so much? But, wait. Here’s the climax. Helen Grimes, chaparralish as she can be, is goaded beyond imprudence. She convinces herself that Jack Valentine is not only a falsetto, but a financier. To lose at one fell swoop $647,000 and a lover in riding trousers with angles in the sides like the variations on the chart of a typhoid-fever patient is enough to make any perfect lady mad. So, then! They stand in the (ranch) library, which is furnished with mounted elk heads (didn’t the Elks have a fish fry in Amagensett once?), and the dénouement begins. I know of no more interesting time in the run of a play unless it be when the prologue ends. Helen thinks Jack has taken the money. Who else was there to take it? The box-office manager was at the front on his job; the orchestra hadn’t left their seats; and no man could get past “Old Jimmy,” the stage door-man, unless he could show a Skye terrier or an automobile as a guarantee of eligibility. Goaded beyond imprudence (as before said), Helen says to Jack Valentine: “Robber and thief—and worse yet, stealer of trusting hearts, this should be your fate!” With that out she whips, of course, the trusty 32-caliber. “But I will be merciful,” goes on Helen. “You shall live—that will be your punishment. I will show you how easily I could have sent you to the death that you deserve. There is _her_ picture on the mantel. I will send through her more beautiful face the bullet that should have pierced your craven heart.” And she does it. And there’s no fake blank cartridges or assistants pulling strings. Helen fires. The bullet—the actual bullet—goes through the face of the photograph—and then strikes the hidden spring of the sliding panel in the wall—and lo! the panel slides, and there is the missing $647,000 in convincing stacks of currency and bags of gold. It’s great. You know how it is. Cherry practised for two months at a target on the roof of her boarding house. It took good shooting. In the sketch she had to hit a brass disk only three inches in diameter, covered by wall paper in the panel; and she had to stand in exactly the same spot every night, and the photo had to be in exactly the same spot, and she had to shoot steady and true every time. Of course old “Arapahoe” had tucked the funds away there in the secret place; and, of course, Jack hadn’t taken anything except his salary (which really might have come under the head of “obtaining money under”; but that is neither here nor there); and, of course, the New York girl was really engaged to a concrete house contractor in the Bronx; and, necessarily, Jack and Helen ended in a half-Nelson—and there you are. After Hart and Cherry had gotten “Mice Will Play” flawless, they had a try-out at a vaudeville house that accommodates. The sketch was a house wrecker. It was one of those rare strokes of talent that inundates a theatre from the roof down. The gallery wept; and the orchestra seats, being dressed for it, swam in tears. After the show the booking agents signed blank checks and pressed fountain pens upon Hart and Cherry. Five hundred dollars a week was what it panned out. That night at 11:30 Bob Hart took off his hat and bade Cherry good night at her boarding-house door. “Mr. Hart,” said she thoughtfully, “come inside just a few minutes. We’ve got our chance now to make good and make money. What we want to do is to cut expenses every cent we can, and save all we can.” “Right,” said Bob. “It’s business with me. You’ve got your scheme for banking yours; and I dream every night of that bungalow with the Jap cook and nobody around to raise trouble. Anything to enlarge the net receipts will engage my attention.” “Come inside just a few minutes,” repeated Cherry, deeply thoughtful. “I’ve got a proposition to make to you that will reduce our expenses a lot and help you work out your own future and help me work out mine—and all on business principles.” “Mice Will Play” had a tremendously successful run in New York for ten weeks—rather neat for a vaudeville sketch—and then it started on the circuits. Without following it, it may be said that it was a solid drawing card for two years without a sign of abated popularity. Sam Packard, manager of one of Keetor’s New York houses, said of Hart & Cherry: “As square and high-toned a little team as ever came over the circuit. It’s a pleasure to read their names on the booking list. Quiet, hard workers, no Johnny and Mabel nonsense, on the job to the minute, straight home after their act, and each of ’em as gentlemanlike as a lady. I don’t expect to handle any attractions that give me less trouble or more respect for the profession.” And now, after so much cracking of a nutshell, here is the kernel of the story: At the end of its second season “Mice Will Play” came back to New York for another run at the roof gardens and summer theatres. There was never any trouble in booking it at the top-notch price. Bob Hart had his bungalow nearly paid for, and Cherry had so many savings-deposit bank books that she had begun to buy sectional bookcases on the instalment plan to hold them. I tell you these things to assure you, even if you can’t believe it, that many, very many of the stage people are workers with abiding ambitions—just the same as the man who wants to be president, or the grocery clerk who wants a home in Flatbush, or a lady who is anxious to flop out of the Count-pan into the Prince-fire. And I hope I may be allowed to say, without chipping into the contribution basket, that they often move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform. But, listen. At the first performance of “Mice Will Play” in New York at the Westphalia (no hams alluded to) Theatre, Winona Cherry was nervous. When she fired at the photograph of the Eastern beauty on the mantel, the bullet, instead of penetrating the photo and then striking the disk, went into the lower left side of Bob Hart’s neck. Not expecting to get it there, Hart collapsed neatly, while Cherry fainted in a most artistic manner. The audience, surmising that they viewed a comedy instead of a tragedy in which the principals were married or reconciled, applauded with great enjoyment. The Cool Head, who always graces such occasions, rang the curtain down, and two platoons of scene shifters respectively and more or less respectfully removed Hart & Cherry from the stage. The next turn went on, and all went as merry as an alimony bell. The stage hands found a young doctor at the stage entrance who was waiting for a patient with a decoction of Am. B’ty roses. The doctor examined Hart carefully and laughed heartily. “No headlines for you, Old Sport,” was his diagnosis. “If it had been two inches to the left it would have undermined the carotid artery as far as the Red Front Drug Store in Flatbush and Back Again. As it is, you just get the property man to bind it up with a flounce torn from any one of the girls’ Valenciennes and go home and get it dressed by the parlor-floor practitioner on your block, and you’ll be all right. Excuse me; I’ve got a serious case outside to look after.” After that, Bob Hart looked up and felt better. And then to where he lay came Vincente, the Tramp Juggler, great in his line. Vincente, a solemn man from Brattleboro, Vt., named Sam Griggs at home, sent toys and maple sugar home to two small daughters from every town he played. Vincente had moved on the same circuits with Hart & Cherry, and was their peripatetic friend. “Bob,” said Vincente in his serious way, “I’m glad it’s no worse. The little lady is wild about you.” “Who?” asked Hart. “Cherry,” said the juggler. “We didn’t know how bad you were hurt; and we kept her away. It’s taking the manager and three girls to hold her.” “It was an accident, of course,” said Hart. “Cherry’s all right. She wasn’t feeling in good trim or she couldn’t have done it. There’s no hard feelings. She’s strictly business. The doctor says I’ll be on the job again in three days. Don’t let her worry.” “Man,” said Sam Griggs severely, puckering his old, smooth, lined face, “are you a chess automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry’s crying her heart out for you—calling ‘Bob, Bob,’ every second, with them holding her hands and keeping her from coming to you.” “What’s the matter with her?” asked Hart, with wide-open eyes. “The sketch’ll go on again in three days. I’m not hurt bad, the doctor says. She won’t lose out half a week’s salary. I know it was an accident. What’s the matter with her?” “You seem to be blind, or a sort of a fool,” said Vincente. “The girl loves you and is almost mad about your hurt. What’s the matter with _you_? Is she nothing to you? I wish you could hear her call you.” “Loves me?” asked Bob Hart, rising from the stack of scenery on which he lay. “Cherry loves me? Why, it’s impossible.” “I wish you could see her and hear her,” said Griggs. “But, man,” said Bob Hart, sitting up, “it’s impossible. It’s impossible, I tell you. I never dreamed of such a thing.” “No human being,” said the Tramp Juggler, “could mistake it. She’s wild for love of you. How have you been so blind?” “But, my God,” said Bob Hart, rising to his feet, “it’s _too late_. It’s too late, I tell you, Sam; _it’s too late_. It can’t be. You must be wrong. It’s _impossible_. There’s some mistake. “She’s crying for you,” said the Tramp Juggler. “For love of you she’s fighting three, and calling your name so loud they don’t dare to raise the curtain. Wake up, man.” “For love of me?” said Bob Hart with staring eyes. “Don’t I tell you it’s too late? It’s too late, man. Why, _Cherry and I have been married two years!_” II THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it. All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in his bottle of testing acid. Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by George the Veracious is the Little Rialto. Here stand the actors of that quarter, and this is their shibboleth: “‘Nit,’ says I to Frohman, ‘you can’t touch me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,’ and out I walks.” Westward and southward from the Thespian glare are one or two streets where a Spanish-American colony has huddled for a little tropical warmth in the nipping North. The centre of life in this precinct is “El Refugio,” a café and restaurant that caters to the volatile exiles from the South. Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia, the rolling republics of Central America and the ireful islands of the Western Indies flit the cloaked and sombreroed señores, who are scattered like burning lava by the political eruptions of their several countries. Hither they come to lay counterplots, to bide their time, to solicit funds, to enlist filibusterers, to smuggle out arms and ammunitions, to play the game at long taw. In El Refugio, they find the atmosphere in which they thrive. In the restaurant of El Refugio are served compounds delightful to the palate of the man from Capricorn or Cancer. Altruism must halt the story thus long. On, diner, weary of the culinary subterfuges of the Gallic chef, hie thee to El Refugio! There only will you find a fish—bluefish, shad or pompano from the Gulf—baked after the Spanish method. Tomatoes give it color, individuality and soul; chili colorado bestows upon it zest, originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish piquancy and mystery, and—but its crowning glory deserves a new sentence. Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity—but never in it—hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and delicate that only the Society for Psychical Research could note its origin. Do not say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has wafted one kiss that lingers in the parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those kisses in life, “by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others.” And then, when Conchito, the waiter, brings you a plate of brown frijoles and a carafe of wine that has never stood still between Oporto and El Refugio—ah, Dios! One day a Hamburg-American liner deposited upon Pier No. 55 Gen. Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon, a passenger from Cartagena. The General was between a claybank and a bay in complexion, had a 42-inch waist and stood 5 feet 4 with his Du Barry heels. He had the mustache of a shooting-gallery proprietor, he wore the full dress of a Texas congressman and had the important aspect of an uninstructed delegate. Gen. Falcon had enough English under his hat to enable him to inquire his way to the street in which El Refugio stood. When he reached that neighborhood he saw a sign before a respectable red-brick house that read, “Hotel Español.” In the window was a card in Spanish, “Aqui se habla Español.” The General entered, sure of a congenial port. In the cozy office was Mrs. O’Brien, the proprietress. She had blond—oh, unimpeachably blond hair. For the rest she was amiability, and ran largely to inches around. Gen. Falcon brushed the floor with his broad-brimmed hat, and emitted a quantity of Spanish, the syllables sounding like firecrackers gently popping their way down the string of a bunch. “Spanish or Dago?” asked Mrs. O’Brien, pleasantly. “I am a Colombian, madam,” said the General, proudly. “I speak the Spanish. The advisement in your window say the Spanish he is spoken here. How is that?” “Well, you’ve been speaking it, ain’t you?” said the madam. “I’m sure I can’t.” At the Hotel Español General Falcon engaged rooms and established himself. At dusk he sauntered out upon the streets to view the wonders of this roaring city of the North. As he walked he thought of the wonderful golden hair of Mme. O’Brien. “It is here,” said the General to himself, no doubt in his own language, “that one shall find the most beautiful señoras in the world. I have not in my Colombia viewed among our beauties one so fair. But no! It is not for the General Falcon to think of beauty. It is my country that claims my devotion.” At the corner of Broadway and the Little Rialto the General became involved. The street cars bewildered him, and the fender of one upset him against a pushcart laden with oranges. A cab driver missed him an inch with a hub, and poured barbarous execrations upon his head. He scrambled to the sidewalk and skipped again in terror when the whistle of a peanut-roaster puffed a hot scream in his ear. “Válgame Dios! What devil’s city is this?” As the General fluttered out of the streamers of passers like a wounded snipe he was marked simultaneously as game by two hunters. One was “Bully” McGuire, whose system of sport required the use of a strong arm and the misuse of an eight-inch piece of lead pipe. The other Nimrod of the asphalt was “Spider” Kelley, a sportsman with more refined methods. In pouncing upon their self-evident prey, Mr. Kelley was a shade the quicker. His elbow fended accurately the onslaught of Mr. McGuire. “G’wan!” he commanded harshly. “I saw it first.” McGuire slunk away, awed by superior intelligence. “Pardon me,” said Mr. Kelley, to the General, “but you got balled up in the shuffle, didn’t you? Let me assist you.” He picked up the General’s hat and brushed the dust from it. The ways of Mr. Kelley could not but succeed. The General, bewildered and dismayed by the resounding streets, welcomed his deliverer as a caballero with a most disinterested heart. “I have a desire,” said the General, “to return to the hotel of O’Brien, in which I am stop. Caramba! señor, there is a loudness and rapidness of going and coming in the city of this Nueva York.” Mr. Kelley’s politeness would not suffer the distinguished Colombian to brave the dangers of the return unaccompanied. At the door of the Hotel Español they paused. A little lower down on the opposite side of the street shone the modest illuminated sign of El Refugio. Mr. Kelley, to whom few streets were unfamiliar, knew the place exteriorly as a “Dago joint.” All foreigners Mr. Kelley classed under the two heads of “Dagoes” and Frenchmen. He proposed to the General that they repair thither and substantiate their acquaintance with a liquid foundation. An hour later found General Falcon and Mr. Kelley seated at a table in the conspirator’s corner of El Refugio. Bottles and glasses were between them. For the tenth time the General confided the secret of his mission to the Estados Unidos. He was here, he declared, to purchase arms—2,000 stands of Winchester rifles—for the Colombian revolutionists. He had drafts in his pocket drawn by the Cartagena Bank on its New York correspondent for $25,000. At other tables other revolutionists were shouting their political secrets to their fellow-plotters; but none was as loud as the General. He pounded the table; he hallooed for some wine; he roared to his friend that his errand was a secret one, and not to be hinted at to a living soul. Mr. Kelley himself was stirred to sympathetic enthusiasm. He grasped the General’s hand across the table. “Monseer,” he said, earnestly, “I don’t know where this country of yours is, but I’m for it. I guess it must be a branch of the United States, though, for the poetry guys and the schoolmarms call us Columbia, too, sometimes. It’s a lucky thing for you that you butted into me to-night. I’m the only man in New York that can get this gun deal through for you. The Secretary of War of the United States is me best friend. He’s in the city now, and I’ll see him for you to-morrow. In the meantime, monseer, you keep them drafts tight in your inside pocket. I’ll call for you to-morrow, and take you to see him. Say! that ain’t the District of Columbia you’re talking about, is it?” concluded Mr. Kelley, with a sudden qualm. “You can’t capture that with no 2,000 guns—it’s been tried with more.” “No, no, no!” exclaimed the General. “It is the Republic of Colombia—it is a g-r-reat republic on the top side of America of the South. Yes. Yes.” “All right,” said Mr. Kelley, reassured. “Now suppose we trek along home and go by-by. I’ll write to the Secretary to-night and make a date with him. It’s a ticklish job to get guns out of New York. McClusky himself can’t do it.” They parted at the door of the Hotel Español. The General rolled his eyes at the moon and sighed. “It is a great country, your Nueva York,” he said. “Truly the cars in the streets devastate one, and the engine that cooks the nuts terribly makes a squeak in the ear. But, ah, Señor Kelley—the señoras with hair of much goldness, and admirable fatness—they are magnificas! Muy magnificas!” Kelley went to the nearest telephone booth and called up McCrary’s café, far up on Broadway. He asked for Jimmy Dunn. “Is that Jimmy Dunn?” asked Kelley. “Yes,” came the answer. “You’re a liar,” sang back Kelley, joyfully. “You’re the Secretary of War. Wait there till I come up. I’ve got the finest thing down here in the way of a fish you ever baited for. It’s a Colorado-maduro, with a gold band around it and free coupons enough to buy a red hall lamp and a statuette of Psyche rubbering in the brook. I’ll be up on the next car.” Jimmy Dunn was an A. M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the confidence line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been possible to procure such a thing in New York. It was the ambition of “Spider” Kelley to elevate himself into Jimmy’s class. These two gentlemen held a conference that night at McCrary’s. Kelley explained. “He’s as easy as a gumshoe. He’s from the Island of Colombia, where there’s a strike, or a feud, or something going on, and they’ve sent him up here to buy 2,000 Winchesters to arbitrate the thing with. He showed me two drafts for $10,000 each, and one for $5,000 on a bank here. ’S truth, Jimmy, I felt real mad with him because he didn’t have it in thousand-dollar bills, and hand it to me on a silver waiter. Now, we’ve got to wait till he goes to the bank and gets the money for us.” They talked it over for two hours, and then Dunn said; “Bring him to No. –––– Broadway, at four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.” In due time Kelley called at the Hotel Español for the General. He found the wily warrior engaged in delectable conversation with Mrs. O’Brien. “The Secretary of War is waitin’ for us,” said Kelley. The General tore himself away with an effort. “Ay, señor,” he said, with a sigh, “duty makes a call. But, señor, the señoras of your Estados Unidos—how beauties! For exemplification, take you la Madame O’Brien—que magnifica! She is one goddess—one Juno—what you call one ox-eyed Juno.” Now Mr. Kelley was a wit; and better men have been shriveled by the fire of their own imagination. “Sure!” he said with a grin; “but you mean a peroxide Juno, don’t you?” Mrs. O’Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous head. Her businesslike eye rested for an instant upon the disappearing form of Mr. Kelley. Except in street cars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady. When the gallant Colombian and his escort arrived at the Broadway address, they were held in an anteroom for half an hour, and then admitted into a well-equipped office where a distinguished looking man, with a smooth face, wrote at a desk. General Falcon was presented to the Secretary of War of the United States, and his mission made known by his old friend, Mr. Kelley. “Ah—Colombia!” said the Secretary, significantly, when he was made to understand; “I’m afraid there will be a little difficulty in that case. The President and I differ in our sympathies there. He prefers the established government, while I—” the secretary gave the General a mysterious but encouraging smile. “You, of course, know, General Falcon, that since the Tammany war, an act of Congress has been passed requiring all manufactured arms and ammunition exported from this country to pass through the War Department. Now, if I can do anything for you I will be glad to do so to oblige my old friend, Mr. Kelley. But it must be in absolute secrecy, as the President, as I have said, does not regard favorably the efforts of your revolutionary party in Colombia. I will have my orderly bring a list of the available arms now in the warehouse.” The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly with the letters A. D. T. on his cap stepped promptly into the room. “Bring me Schedule B of the small arms inventory,” said the Secretary. The orderly quickly returned with a printed paper. The Secretary studied it closely. “I find,” he said, “that in Warehouse 9, of Government stores, there is shipment of 2,000 stands of Winchester rifles that were ordered by the Sultan of Morocco, who forgot to send the cash with his order. Our rule is that legal-tender money must be paid down at the time of purchase. My dear Kelley, your friend, General Falcon, shall have this lot of arms, if he desires it, at the manufacturer’s price. And you will forgive me, I am sure, if I curtail our interview. I am expecting the Japanese Minister and Charles Murphy every moment!” As one result of this interview, the General was deeply grateful to his esteemed friend, Mr. Kelley. As another, the nimble Secretary of War was extremely busy during the next two days buying empty rifle cases and filling them with bricks, which were then stored in a warehouse rented for that purpose. As still another, when the General returned to the Hotel Español, Mrs. O’Brien went up to him, plucked a thread from his lapel, and said: “Say, señor, I don’t want to ‘butt in,’ but what does that monkey-faced, cat-eyed, rubber-necked tin horn tough want with you?” “Sangre de mi vida!” exclaimed the General. “Impossible it is that you speak of my good friend, Señor Kelley.” “Come into the summer garden,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “I want to have a talk with you.” Let us suppose that an hour has elapsed. “And you say,” said the General, “that for the sum of $18,000 can be purchased the furnishment of the house and the lease of one year with this garden so lovely—so resembling unto the patios of my cara Colombia?” “And dirt cheap at that,” sighed the lady. “Ah, Dios!” breathed General Falcon. “What to me is war and politics? This spot is one paradise. My country it have other brave heroes to continue the fighting. What to me should be glory and the shooting of mans? Ah! no. It is here I have found one angel. Let us buy the Hotel Español and you shall be mine, and the money shall not be waste on guns.” Mrs. O’Brien rested her blond pompadour against the shoulder of the Colombian patriot. “Oh, señor,” she sighed, happily, “ain’t you terrible!” Two days later was the time appointed for the delivery of the arms to the General. The boxes of supposed rifles were stacked in the rented warehouse, and the Secretary of War sat upon them, waiting for his friend Kelley to fetch the victim. Mr. Kelley hurried, at the hour, to the Hotel Español. He found the General behind the desk adding up accounts. “I have decide,” said the General, “to buy not guns. I have to-day buy the insides of this hotel, and there shall be marrying of the General Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon with la Madame O’Brien.” Mr. Kelley almost strangled. “Say, you old bald-headed bottle of shoe polish,” he spluttered, “you’re a swindler—that’s what you are! You’ve bought a boarding house with money belonging to your infernal country, wherever it is.” “Ah,” said the General, footing up a column, “that is what you call politics. War and revolution they are not nice. Yes. It is not best that one shall always follow Minerva. No. It is of quite desirable to keep hotels and be with that Juno—that ox-eyed Juno. Ah! what hair of the gold it is that she have!” Mr. Kelley choked again. “Ah, Senor Kelley!” said the General, feelingly and finally, “is it that you have never eaten of the corned beef hash that Madame O’Brien she make?” III BABES IN THE JUNGLE Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: “If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York. In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in chunks of roe—you can’t count ’em!” Two years afterward I found that I couldn’t remember the names of the Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear; so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver’s advice. I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up Broadway. And I run against Silver himself, all encompassed up in a spacious kind of haberdashery, leaning against a hotel and rubbing the half-moons on his nails with a silk handkerchief. “Paresis or superannuated?” I asks him. “Hello, Billy,” says Silver; “I’m glad to see you. Yes, it seemed to me that the West was accumulating a little too much wiseness. I’ve been saving New York for dessert. I know it’s a low-down trick to take things from these people. They only know this and that and pass to and fro and think ever and anon. I’d hate for my mother to know I was skinning these weak-minded ones. She raised me better.” “Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms of the old doctor that does skin grafting?” I asks. “Well, no,” says Silver; “you needn’t back Epidermis to win to-day. I’ve only been here a month. But I’m ready to begin; and the members of Willie Manhattan’s Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well send their photos to the _Evening Daily_. “I’ve been studying the town,” says Silver, “and reading the papers every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an O’Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and kick when you are the least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up in my room and I’ll tell you. We’ll work the town together, Billy, for the sake of old times.” Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant objects lying about. “There’s more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,” says Silver, “than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, S. C. They’ll bite at anything. The brains of most of ’em commute. The wiser they are in intelligence the less perception of cognizance they have. Why, didn’t a man the other day sell J. P. Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller, Jr., for Andrea del Sarto’s celebrated painting of the young Saint John! “You see that bundle of printed stuff in the corner, Billy? That’s gold mining stock. I started out one day to sell that, but I quit it in two hours. Why? Got arrested for blocking the street. People fought to buy it. I sold the policeman a block of it on the way to the station-house, and then I took it off the market. I don’t want people to give me their money. I want some little consideration connected with the transaction to keep my pride from being hurt. I want ’em to guess the missing letter in Chic—go, or draw to a pair of nines before they pay me a cent of money. “Now there’s another little scheme that worked so easy I had to quit it. You see that bottle of blue ink on the table? I tattooed an anchor on the back of my hand and went to a bank and told ’em I was Admiral Dewey’s nephew. They offered to cash my draft on him for a thousand, but I didn’t know my uncle’s first name. It shows, though, what an easy town it is. As for burglars, they won’t go in a house now unless there’s a hot supper ready and a few college students to wait on ’em. They’re slugging citizens all over the upper part of the city and I guess, taking the town from end to end, it’s a plain case of assault and Battery.” “Monty,” says I, when Silver had slacked, up, “you may have Manhattan correctly discriminated in your perorative, but I doubt it. I’ve only been in town two hours, but it don’t dawn upon me that it’s ours with a cherry in it. There ain’t enough rus in urbe about it to suit me. I’d be a good deal much better satisfied if the citizens had a straw or more in their hair, and run more to velveteen vests and buckeye watch charms. They don’t look easy to me.” “You’ve got it, Billy,” says Silver. “All emigrants have it. New York’s bigger than Little Rock or Europe, and it frightens a foreigner. You’ll be all right. I tell you I feel like slapping the people here because they don’t send me all their money in laundry baskets, with germicide sprinkled over it. I hate
{'title': 'Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million by O. Henry', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}