Chapter 20
"I regret to report that things are in a chaos," it ran. "All of the regular advertising has been withdrawn. The usual entertainment money for salesmen classed under this head has been stopped. In consequence, our city trade has tumbled fearfully--and you know how bad it was before. The worst news I have to offer is in regard to Mr. Brainard personally. Our detective reports that his time outside is spent in most questionable company. He has been seen drinking at roof-gardens with a certain dissipated pugilist named Little Sullivan, and was traced with this man to the apartment of a song-and-dance woman named Violette. He seems to be spending money extravagantly and visits certain bohemian quarters in the vicinity of Jones Street, where he puts in his time with disreputable-looking men. I beg leave to advise immediate action.--Mowbray."
"My God!" groaned Houghton. This explained that derisive offer of fifty-one from Consolidated Pepsin.
"And you kept this from me?"
"They said not to worry you," she said. "I--I've had enough for two. Besides, I answered it."
"You did! What----?"
"I told them to wait a little longer."
The father groaned again.
"I just _had_ to, daddy; and then today this letter came."
He seized it eagerly. It read: "You were right about waiting. Suspend all action."
"What does it mean?" she asked.
"We'll find out tomorrow," he answered grimly.
The 4:30 train gave John Houghton just time to reach the office before it closed. Dorothy went home. Her father, roused by the evil news of the day before, had impressed her with all that it might mean in a material way. As though that mattered!--as though anything could hurt her more! She would have been willing to go with Tom Brainard in rags before--but now!
She sat by the telephone with clenched fists, her traveling veil still pushed up on her hat, the lines that had come into her face during the past week deepening with the dusk. At last--a long, sharp ring! "Yes--father--not dine at home--meet you at the Yolland--a guest. Yes--but about Tom--what?--7:30--But about Tom, daddy? Good-by?!! But, daddy!!!"
It was no use. He had hung up. She called feverishly for the office, but the reply was, "They do not answer." Mechanically she went up to her room. "The blue mousseline, Susan," she said.
As the maid laid it out, she walked the floor. Through the window the park lay green and inviting. She longed to fly to the cool grass and run--and run----
From below came the loud, rasping notes of a street-piano that, in some incomprehensible fashion, had wandered to the deserted row of houses. The noise, for all that there was a pleasing swing to the air, irritated her. She threw the man a quarter. "Go away," she waved.
At last the maid said her mistress was ready, and Dorothy, without questioning the decision, allowed herself to be put into the brougham.
The drive seemed hours long, and then--her father's face told her nothing. Without a word, he led her to a reception-room. As they entered, a figure sprang to meet them.
For a moment she hesitated. Then, "Tom!" she cried, and caught his hand.
He saw the whiteness of her face, and all the yearnings of their separation matched it upon his.
"Dorothy!" he faltered.
Her father interrupted. "Tom is to explain how he has quadrupled our business in the last week."
A sudden weakness seized her. She followed them unsteadily. Seated at a table, however, she was able to smile again. At that moment, the orchestra, striking up, suddenly caught her attention. "Tum--tum-tum--tum-tum--tum"--that haunting, swinging melody of the street-piano.
"What tune is that?" she asked.
Brainard smiled. "_That_ is a tune that has suddenly become popular. Any night you may see hundreds of East Side children dancing on the asphalt and singing it."
"Yes," she said. "I heard it on a street-piano."
"It's called," he went on, '"My Lulu Tulu Girl.' All the grinders have it. Billy Tompkins, Noughty-three, who lives in the Jones Street social settlement, worked that for me. Those dagoes worship him--saved a kid's life or something."
A light came into John Houghton's eyes.
"That's part of the scheme. Aspwell wrote the song. I found him down in bohemia working on an opera. But, for the sake of old days in the senior extravaganza, he turned off 'My Lulu Tulu Girl.' You know those orders on your desk are for our new brand, 'Lulu Tulu.' The song was introduced two weeks ago at the Metropolitan Roof by Violette, a young lady who married our old football trainer, Little Sullivan. We'll hear her later--I have tickets. Then we'll go to Leith's; there's a turn there by 'Jim Bailey and his Six Lulu Tulu Girls'--rather vulgar (while they dance they chew the gum and perform calisthenics with it) but it seems to go. Then----"
"Tom!"
"After we've dined, I'll show you our regular magazine and newspaper advertising in the reading-room--double space. You see, I couldn't ask you to increase, so I stopped it for a time and saved up. But I hope you'll stand for it regularly. It's mainly pictures of Miss. Lulu Tulu in a large Florodora hat, with verses below apostrophizing the poetry of motion of her jaws. Then there's a line of limericks about the adventures of the 'Lulu Tulu Gummies'--small gum-headed tykes--always in trouble until they find Lulu. I got Phillips to do that as a personal favor."
"Also Noughty-something, I suppose," remarked Houghton.
"Yes. But he graduated before my time. I knew his work in the college annual. He's in the magazines now. Then I got Professor Wheaton--'Jimmy the Grind' we used to call him--his folks wanted him to be a poet--imagine Jimmy a poet!--I got Professor Wheaton to give us some readers on 'Tulu as a Salivary Stimulant,' 'The Healthful Effect of Pure Saliva on Food Products' and 'The Degenerative Effect of Artificially Relieving an Organ of its Proper Functions.' That hits the Pepsin people, you see----"
And so it ran--until he had covered his plan fully, and Dorothy's face with happy smiles.
"Tom," said the father, "if I had opened that letter instead of Dolly!"
Dorothy suddenly became demure under their gaze and sought to change the subject. "Then you admit, daddy, that a college man is of some use?"
"I'll admit that Tom got the business. But that was because he is naturally clever and business-like, not because----"
"Just a moment," said Brainard. "I think I can show that you're mistaken. I found out that Pepper was doing the wrong thing--by the first rule of criticism (freshman English): 'What is the author trying to do? Does he do it? Is it worth doing?' Substitute 'advertising man' for 'author' and you have a business that is worth doing (since you continue it)--and by the other two questions I saw his incongruity of subject-matter and expression.' My economics taught me the 'law of supply and demand.' 'Analytical research of original authorities' taught me where the demand was. There was only the problem of a cause to stimulate it. Through deductive logic' and 'psychology' I got the cause that would appeal, and the effect worked out in an increased demand which we were ready to supply--just like a problem in math."
The elder man smiled. "I don't understand a word you say, but it seems to have _worked_ well. In the future, bring in as many of your Noughty friends as we need. I'll answer for Kaufmann."
The other shook his head. "I'm not sure they would be any too anxious."
Houghton gasped in surprise. "What's that--they wouldn't be anxious to go into _business_! Why not?"
"Why not?" There was equal amazement in the younger man's tone. "Would you be anxious to leave a place where you're surrounded by friends you've tried--friends that won't stab you in the back the next minute and call it a 'business deal'--where you're respected and in control of things, and plunge out to become a freshman in the world-life, to do the sorting and trying all over again?"
"I remember--I remember----"
"And besides, what right has any one to assume that _business_ is above art, charity or even mere learning? Billy Tompkins, in the slums helping dagoes, is a failure to his father--so is Aspwell with his opera--so is Williams with his spectacles in his lab. But--who knows--when the Great Business is finally balanced----" He stopped, conscious that he was growing too rhetorical.
"If you loved college ideals so much more than business," observed Houghton, "then why did you come to us?"
A different light stole into the younger man's eyes. "Because"--he answered, "because I loved something else better than either." And he reached his hand under the cloth to one who understood.
That is all--except that the next offer of Consolidated Pepsin was, "Will you please name your own terms?"
THE TEWANA
BY
HERMAN WHITAKER
Reprinted from _The Blue Mule_ _A Western Magazine of Stories_, of February, 1906 by permission
SHE WAS a Tewana of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a primal woman, round-armed, deep-breasted, shapely as the dream on which Canova modeled Venus. Her skin was of the rich gold hue that marks the blood unmuddied by Spanish strain; to see her, poised on a rich hip by the river's brink, wringing her tresses after the morning bath, it were justifiable to mistake her for some beautiful bronze. Moreover, it were easy to see her, for, in Tehuantepec, innocence is thoughtless as in old Eden. When Paul Steiner passed her one morning, she gave him the curious open-eyed stare of a deer, bade him a pleasant "_Buenos días, Señor!_" and would have proceeded, undisturbed, with her toilet, but that he spoke. In this he was greatly mistaken. Gringos there are--praise the saints!--who can judge Tehuantepec by the insight of kindred purity, but Paul had to learn by the more uncomfortable method of a stone in the face.
He ought not, however, to be too severely handled for his dulness. Though a mining engineer, nature had endowed him with little beyond the algebraic qualities necessary to the profession; a German-American, a dull birth and heredity had predestined him for that class which clothes its morality in fusty black and finds safety in following its neighbor in the cut of its clothes and conduct. As then, he was not planned for original thinking, it is not at all surprising that he should--when pitchforked by Opportunity into the depths of tropical jungles--lose his moral bearings, fail to recognize a virtue that went in her own golden skin, and so go down before a temptation that, of old, populated the sexless desert.
That his error continued in the face of Andrea's stone is certainly more remarkable, though this also should be charged rather against her mismarksmanship than to the wearing quality of his electro-plate morality. It is doubtful if even the ancient Jews had found "stoning" as efficacious a "cure for souls" had they thrown wide as she. Anyway, Paul stood "unconvicted," as the revivalists have it, and being moved to chagrin instead of shame, he carried the story of Andrea's surprising modesty to Bachelder.
Here was a man of other parts. An artist, he had traced the spinning meridians over desert and sea, following the fluttering wing of the muse till she rewarded his deathless hope by pausing for him in this small Indian town. Expecting to stay a week, he had remained fifteen years, failing to exhaust in that long time a tithe of its form and color. Screened by tropical jungle, a mask of dark palms laced with twining _bejucas_, it sat like a wonderfully blazoned cup in a wide green saucer that was edged with the purple of low environing hills--a brimming cup of inspiration. Save where some oaken grill supplied an ashen note, its adobe streets burned in smoldering rose, purple and gold--the latter always predominant. It glowed in the molten sunlight, shone in the soft satin of a woman's skin; the very dust rose in auriferous clouds from the wooden-wheeled ox-carts. But for its magenta tiling, the pillared market stood, a huge monochrome, its deep yellows splashed here and there with the crimson of the female hucksters' dresses. This was their every-day wear--a sleeveless bodice, cut low over the matchless amplitudes and so short that the smooth waist showed at each uplift of the round, bronze arms; a skirt that was little more than a cloth wound about the limbs; a shawl, all of deep blood color. Small wonder that he had stayed on, and on, and on, while the weeks merged into months, and months into years.
He lived in the town's great house, an old feudal hacienda with walls two yards thick, recessed windows oaken grilled, and a pleasant patio where the hidalgo could take his ease under cocoanut palms and lemon trees while governments went to smash without. Here Bachelder was always to be found in the heat of the day, and here he listened with huge disgust to Paul's story. Because of their faith, strength and purity--according to their standards--he had always sworn by the Tewana women, setting them above all others, and though a frank sinner against accepted moral codes, he would never have confused nudity with vice.
"Man!" he exclaimed--so loudly that Rosa, his housekeeper, imagined that something was going wrong again with the painting--"Man! all the dollars you will ever earn would buy nothing more than her stone! If you want her, you will have to marry her."
"Oh, don't look so chopfallen!" he went on, scornfully, when Paul blinked. "I mean marriage as she counts it. You will have to court her for a couple of months--flowers, little gifts, small courtesies, that sort of thing; then, if she likes you, she will come and keep your house. When, later, you feel like settling down in the bosom of respectability, there won't be a shred of law to hold you."
Now if Paul lacked wit to analyze and apply to his own government a moral law that has evolved from the painful travail of the generations, it does not follow that he was too stupid to feel irony. Reddening, he put forth the usual declaimer of honorable intention with the glib tongue of passion. He meant well by the girl! Would give her a good home, find her better than she had ever been found in her life! As for marrying? He was not of the marrying kind! Never would! and so on, finishing with a vital question--did Bachelder know where she lived?
His color deepened under the artist's sarcastic glance. "So that's what you're after? I wondered why you picked me for a father confessor. Well, I don't, but you won't have any trouble in finding her. All the women sell something; she's sure to be on the market in the morning. You will get her quite easily. The girls seem to take pride in keeping a Gringo's house--I don't know why, unless it be that they are so dazzled by the things we have that they cannot see us for what we are."
* * * * *
A thousand crimson figures were weaving in and out the market's chrome pillars when Paul entered next morning, but though it was hard to single one person from the red confusion, luck led him almost immediately to where Andrea stood, a basket of tortillas at her feet. Lacking customers, just then, she leaned against a pillar, her scarlet flaming against its chrome, thoughtful, pensive, as Bachelder painted her for "The Enganchada," the girl sold for debt. Her shawl lay beside her basket, so her hair, that had flown loose since the morning bath, fell in a cataract over the polished amplitudes of bosom and shoulders. Save when feeling shot them with tawny flashes--as waving branches filter mottled sunlight on brown waters--her eyes were dark as the pools of Lethe, wherein men plunge and forget the past. They brought forgetfulness to Paul of his moral tradition, racial pride, the carefully conned apology which he did not remember until, an hour later, he fed her entire stock in trade to his dog. It was better so. Black, brown or white women are alike sensitive to the language of flowers, and the lilies he left in her basket served him more sweetly than could his stammering tongue. Next morning, curiosity replaced hostility in her glance, and when he left the market, her brown gaze followed him beyond the portals. Needs not, however, to linger over the courtship. Sufficient that color of skin does not affect the feminine trait that forgiveness comes easier when the offense was provoked by one's own beauty; the story goes on from the time that Andrea moved into his house with a stock of household gear that extorted musical exclamations from all her girl friends.
To their housekeeping Andrea contributed only her handsome body with a contained cargo of unsuspected qualities and virtues that simply dazzled Paul as they cropped out upon the surface. In public a Tewana bears herself staidly, carrying a certain dignity of expression that of itself reveals how, of old, her forbears came to place limits to the ambition of the conquering Aztec and made even Spanish dominion little more than an uncomfortable name. Though, through courtship, Andrea's stern composure had shown no trace of a thaw, it yet melted like snow under a south wind when she was once ensconced in their little home. Moreover, she unmasked undreamed of batteries, bewildering Paul with infinite variety of feminine complexities. She would be arch, gay, saucy, and in the next breath fall into one of love's warm silences, watching him with eyes of molten bronze. She taught him the love of the tropics without transcending modesty. Also she astonished him, negatively, by the absence of those wide differences of nature and feeling between her and the cultured women of his own land that reading in the primal school of fiction had led him to expect. He learned from her that woman is always woman under any clime or epoch. The greater strength of her physique lessened, perhaps, the vine-like tendency, yet she clung sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating, with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm, however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull his head to her bosom with such a squeeze as a loving mother gives her son.
Yet, under even this mood, her laughter lay close to the surface, and nothing tapped its merry flow quicker than Paul's Spanish. Picking up the language haphazard, he had somehow learned to apply the verb _tumblar_ to describe the pouring out of coffee, and he clung to it after correction with a persistence that surely inhered in his dogged German blood. "_Tumbarlo el café_!" he would say, and she would repeat it, faithfully mimicking his accent.
"Tumble out the coffee!" following it with peals of laughter. Or, turning up a saucy face, she would ask, "Shall I tumble out more coffee?" and again the laughter which came as readily at her own misfit attempts at English.
These, few and simple, were learned of Bachelder's woman, and sprung on Paul as surprises on his return from visiting the mining properties, which required his frequent presence. For instance, slipping to his knee on one such occasion, with the great heart of her pulsing against him, she sighed: "I love thee, lovest thou me?"
A lesson from Bachelder pleased him less. Knowing Paul's pride in his German ancestry, and having been present when, in seasons of swollen pride, he had reflected invidiously in Andrea's presence on Mexico and all things Mexican, the artist, in a wicked moment, taught her to lisp "_Hoch der Kaiser_!" _lèse-majesté_ that almost caused Paul a fainting-fit.
"You shouldn't have taught her that," he said to Bachelder. But the mischief was done. Whenever, thereafter, through torment of insect or obsession of national pride, he animadverted on her country, she silenced him with the treasonable expression.
She learned other than English from Bachelder's woman, sweating out the dog days in Rosa's kitchen, experimenting with the barbaric dishes Gringos love. She slaved for his comfort, keeping his linen, her house and self so spotlessly clean that as Paul's passion waned, affection grew up in its place--the respectful affection that, at home, would have afforded a permanent basis for a happy marriage. When, a year later, their baby came, no northern benedict could have been more proudly happy.
Watching him playing with the child, Bachelder would wonder if his union also would terminate like all the others of his long experience. In her, for it was a girl baby, Paul's fairness worked out, as she grew, in marvelous delicacies of cream and rose, weaving, moreover, a golden woof through the brown of her hair. From her mother she took a lithe perfection of form. At two she was well started for a raving beauty, and as much through his love for her as for Andrea, Paul had come, like Bachelder, to swear by the Tewana women.
He might have been swearing by them yet, but his company's business suddenly called him north, and no man could have bidden a white wife more affectionate farewell or have been more sure of his own return. "It is a comfort to know that your woman won't go gadding while you are away, and that is more than a fellow can make sure of at home." These were his last words to Bachelder.
He was to be absent two months, but after he had reported adversely on a mine in Sonora, he was ordered to expert a group in far Guerrera, where the mountains turn on edge and earth tosses in horrible tumult. Then came a third order to report in New York for personal conference. Thus the months did sums in simple addition while Andrea waited, serenely confident of his return. Not that she lacked experience of deserted wives, or based hope on her own attractions. Her furious mother love simply could not form, much less harbor, the possibility of Paul's deserting their pretty Lola.
And, barring her loneliness, the year was kind to her, feeding her mother love with small social triumphs. For one, Lola was chosen to sit with three other tots, the most beautiful of Tewana's children, at the feet of the Virgin in the Theophany of the "Black Christ" at the eastern fiesta. From morning to mirk midnight, it was a hard vigil. By day the vaulted church reeked incense; by night a thousand candles guttered under the dark arches, sorely afflicting small, weary eyelids; yet Lola sat it out like a small thoroughbred, earning thereby the priest's kindly pat and her mother's devoted worship.
Then, on her third saint day, the small girl donned her first fiesta costume, a miniature of the heirlooms which descend from mother to daughter, each generation striving to increase the magnificence of the costume just as it strove to add to the gold pieces in the chain which did triple duty as hoard, dowry and necklace. Andrea subtracted several English sovereigns from her own to start Lola's, and, with the American gold eagle, the gift of Bachelder, her _padrino_, godfather, they made an affluent beginning for so small a girl. As for the costume? Its silk, plush, velours, were worked by Andrea's clever fingers curiously and wondrously, even when judged by difficult Tewana standards. Bachelder painted the small thing, kneeling by her mother's side before the great gold altar. Her starched skirt, with its band of red velours, stands of itself leveling her head, so that she looks for all the world like a serious cherub peering out from a wonderfully embroidered bath-cabinet. But ah! the serious devotion of the faces! The muse Bachelder had followed so faithfully was hovering closely when his soul flamed out upon that canvas. It ranks with his "Enganchada." Either would bring him fame, yet they rest, face to face, in a dusty locker, awaiting the day when time or death shall cure the ache that a glimpse of either brings him.