The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) by Marshall P. Wilder (read full novel txt) 📕

dresser at home where our clean shirts, and collars and cuffs, and socks and handkerchiefs, are put every week by our wife. We also recall as we go about our stone den, with its odor of former corned beef, and the ghost of some bloody-handed predecessor's snore still moaning in the walls, the picture of green grass by our own doorway, and the apples that were just ripening, when the bench warrant came.

The time from 6:30 to breakfast is occupied by the average, or non-paying inmate, in doing the chamberwork and tidying up his state-room. I do not know how others feel about it, but I dislike chamberwork most heartily, especially when I am in jail. Nothing has done more to keep me out of jail, I guess, than the fact that while there I have to make up my bed and dust the piano.[Pg 1508]

Breakfast is generally table d'hôte and consists of bread. A tin-cup of coffee takes the taste of the bread out of your mouth, and then if you have some Limburger cheese in your pocket you can with that remove the taste of the coffee.

Dinner is served at 12 o'clock, and consists of more bread with soup. This soup has everything in it except nourishment. The bead on this soup is noticeable for quite a distance. It is disagreeable. Several days ago I heard that the Mayor was in the soup, but I didn't realize it before. I thought it was a newspaper yarn. There is everything in this soup, from shop-worn rice up to neat's-foot oil. Once I thought I detected cuisine in it.

The dinner menu is changed on Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, on which days you get the soup first and the bread afterward. In this way the bread is saved.

Three days in a week each man gets at dinner a potato containing a thousand-legged worm. At 6 o'clock comes supper with toast and responses. Bread is served at supper time, together with a cup of tea. To those who dislike bread and never eat soup, or do not drink tea or coffee, life at Ludlow Street Jail is indeed irksome.

I asked for kumiss and a pony of Benedictine, as my stone boudoir made me feel rocky, but it has not yet been sent up.

Somehow, while here, I can not forget poor old man Dorrit, the Master of the Marshalsea, and how the Debtors' Prison preyed upon his mind till he didn't enjoy anything except to stand off and admire himself. Ludlow Street Jail is a good deal like it in many ways, and I can see how in time the canker of unrest and the bitter memories of those who did us wrong but who are basking in the bright and bracing air, while we, to meet their ob[Pg 1509]ligations, sacrifice our money, our health and at last our minds, would kill hope and ambition.

In a few weeks I believe I should also get a preying on my mind. That is about the last thing I would think of preying on, but a man must eat something.

Before closing this brief and incomplete account as a guest at Ludlow Street Jail I ought, in justice to my family, to say, perhaps, that I came down this morning to see a friend of mine who is here because he refuses to pay alimony to his recreant and morbidly sociable wife. He says he is quite content to stay here, so long as his wife is on the outside. He is writing a small ready-reference book on his side of the great problem, "Is Marriage a Failure?"

With this I shake him by the hand and in a moment the big iron storm-door clangs behind me, the big lock clicks in its hoarse, black throat and I welcome even the air of Ludlow street so long as the blue sky is above it.[Pg 1510]

THE ENCHANTED HAT The Adventure of My Lady's Letter BY HAROLD MACGRATH

It was half-after six when I entered Martin's from the Broadway side. I chose a table by the north wall and sat down on the cushioned seat. I ordered dinner, and the ample proportions of it completely hoodwinked the waiter as to the condition of my cardiac affliction: being, as I was, desperately and hopelessly and miserably in love. Old owls say that a man can not eat when he is in love. He can if he is mad at the way the object of his affections has treated him; and I was mad. To be sure, I can not recall what my order was, but the amount of the waiter's check is still vivid to my recollection.

I glanced about. The café was crowded, as it usually is at this hour. Here and there I caught glimpses of celebrities and familiar faces: journalists, musicians, authors, artists and actors. This is the time they drop in to be pointed out to strangers from out of town. It's a capital advertisement. To-night, however, none of these interested me in the slightest degree; rather, their animated countenances angered me. How could they laugh and look happy!

At my left sat a young man about my own age. He was also in evening dress. At my right a benevolent old gentleman, whose eye-glasses balanced neatly upon the[Pg 1511] end of his nose, was deeply interested in The Law Journal and a pint pf mineral water. A little beyond my table was an exiled Frenchman, and the irritating odor of absinthe drifted at times across my nostrils.

With my coffee I ordered a glass of Dantzic, and watched the flakes of beaten gold waver and settle; and presently I devoted myself entirely to my own particularly miserable thoughts.... To be in love and in debt! To be with the gods one moment and hunted by a bill-collector the next! To have the girl you love snub and dismiss you for no more lucid reason than that you did not attend the dance at the Country Club when you promised you would! It did not matter that you had a case on that night from which depended a large slice of your bread and butter; no, that did not matter. Neither did the fact that you had mixed the dates. You had promised to go, and you hadn't gone or notified the girl that you wouldn't go. Your apologetic telegram she had torn into halves and returned the following morning, together with a curt note to the effect that she could not value the friendship of a man who made and broke a promise so easily. It was all over. It was a dashed hard world. How the deuce do you win a girl, anyhow?

Supposing, besides, that you possessed a rich uncle who said that on the day of your wedding he would make over to you fifty thousand in Government three per cents? Hard, wasn't it? Suppose that you were earning about two thousand a year, and that the struggle to keep up smart appearances was a keen one. Wouldn't you have been eager to marry, especially the girl you loved? A man can not buy flowers twice a week, dine before and take supper after the theater twice a week, belong (and pay dues and house-accounts) to a country club, a town club and keep respectable bachelor apartments on two[Pg 1512] thousand ... and save anything. And suppose the girl was independently rich? Heigh-ho!

I find that a man needs more money in love than he does in debt. This is not to say that I was ever very hard pressed; but I hated to pay ten dollars "on account" when the total was only twenty. You understand me, don't you? If you don't, somebody who reads this will. Of course, the girl knew nothing about these things. A young man always falls into the fault of magnifying his earning capacity to the girl he loves. You see, I hadn't told her yet that I loved her, though I was studying up somebody on Moral and Physical Courage for that purpose.

And now it was all over!

I did not care so much about my uncle's gold-bonds, but I did think a powerful lot of the girl. Why, when I recall the annoyances I've put up with from that kid brother of hers!... Pshaw, what's the use?

His mother called him "Toddy-One-Boy," in memory of a book she had read long years ago. He was six years old, and I never think of him without that jingle coming to mind:

"Little Willie choked his sister,
She was dead before they missed her.
Willie's always up to tricks.
Ain't he cute, he's only six!"

He had the face of a Bouguereau cherub, and mild blue eyes such as we are told inhabit the countenances of angels. He was the most innocent-looking chap you ever set eyes on. His mother called him an angel; I should hate to tell you what the neighbors called him. He lacked none of that subtle humor so familiar in child-life. Heavens! the deeds I could (if I dared) enumerate.[Pg 1513] They turned him loose among the comic supplements one Sunday, and after that it was all over.

Hadn't he emptied his grandma's medicine capsules and substituted cotton? And hadn't dear old grandma come down stairs three days later, saying that she felt much improved? Hadn't he beaten out the brains of his toy bank and bought up the peanut man on the corner? Yes, indeed! And hadn't he taken my few letters from his sister's desk and played postman up and down the street? His papa thought it all a huge joke till one of the neighbors brought back a dunning dressmaker's bill that had lain on the said neighbor's porch. It was altogether a different matter then. Toddy-One-Boy crawled under the bed that night, and only his mother's tears saved him from a hiding.

All these I thought over as I sat at my table. She knew that I would have gone had it been possible. Women and logic are only cousins german. Six months ago I hadn't been in love with any one but myself, and now the Virgil of love's dream was leading me like a new Dante through his Inferno, and was pointing out the foster-brother of Sisyphus (if he had a foster-brother), pushing the stone of my lady's favor up the steeps of Forlorn Hope. Well, I would go up to the club, and if I didn't get home till mor-r-ning, who was there to care?

The Frenchman had gone, and the benevolent old gentleman. The crowd was thinning out. The young man at my left rose, and I rose also. We both stared thoughtfully at the hat-rack. There hung two hats: an opera-hat and a dilapidated old stovepipe. The young fellow reached up and, quite naturally, selected the opera-hat. He glanced into it, and immediately a wrinkle of annoyance darkened his brow. He held the hat toward me.

"Is this yours?" he asked.[Pg 1514]

I looked at the label.

"No." The wrinkle of annoyance sprang from his brow to mine. My opera-hat had cost me eight dollars.

The young fellow laughed rather lamely. "Do you live in New York?" he asked.

I nodded.

"So do I," he continued; "and yet it is evident that both of us have been neatly caught." He thought for a moment, then brightened. "I'll tell you what; let's match for the good one."

I gazed indignantly at the rusty stovepipe. "Done!" said I.

I lost; I knew that I should; and the young fellow walked off with the good hat. Then, with the relic in my hand, a waiter and myself began a systematic search. My hat was nowhere to be found. How the deuce was I to get up town to the club? I couldn't wear the old plug; I wasn't rich enough for such an eccentricity. I had nothing but a silk hat at the apartment, and I hated it because it was always in the way when I entered carriages and elevators.

Angrily, I strode up to the cashier's desk and explained the situation, leaving my address and the number of my apartment; my name wasn't necessary.

Troubles never come singly. Here I had lost my girl and my hat, to say nothing of my temper—of the three the most certain to be found again. I passed out of the café, bareheaded and hotheaded. I hailed a cab and climbed in. I had finally determined to return to my rooms and study. I simply could not afford to be seen with that stovepipe hat either on my head or under my arm. Had I been green from college it is probable that I should have worn it proudly and defiantly.