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THE RESTLESS SEX
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/license. If you are not located in the United
States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are
located before using this ebook.
Title: The Restless Sex
Author: Robert W. Chambers
Release Date: October 15, 2016 [EBook #53289]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESTLESS SEX ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: She nodded listlessly, kneeling beside his chair. (Page
135)]
*The
Restless Sex*
*By ROBERT W. CHAMBERS*
AUTHOR OF
"Barbarians," "The Dark Star," "The Girl Philippa,"
"Who Goes There," Etc.
With Frontispiece
By W. D. STEVENS
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with D. APPLETON & COMPANY
Copyright, 1918, by
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Copyright, 1917, 1918, by The International Magazine Company
Printed in the United States of America
To
MILDRED SISSON
*THE RESTLESS SEX*
*PREFACE*
Created complete, equipped for sporadic multiplication and later for
auto-fertilization, the restless sex, intensely bored by the process of
procreation, presently invented an auxiliary and labeled him [male
symbol].
A fool proceeding, for the inherited mania for invention obsessed him
and he began to invent gods. The only kind of gods that his imagination
could conceive were various varieties of supermen, stronger, more cruel,
craftier than he. And with these he continued to derive satisfaction by
scaring himself.
But the restless sex remained restless; the invention of the sign of
Mars ([Mars symbol]), far from bringing content, merely increased the
capacity of the sex for fidgeting. And its insatiate curiosity
concerning its own handiwork increased.
This handiwork, however, fulfilled rather casually the purpose of its
inventor, and devoted the most of its time to the invention of gods,
endowing the most powerful of them with all its own cowardice, vanity,
intolerance and ferocity.
"He made us," they explained with a modesty attributable only to
forgetfulness.
"Believe in him or he'll damn you. And if he doesn't, we will!" they
shouted to one another. And appointed representatives of various
denominations to deal exclusively in damnation.
Cede Deo! And so, in conformity with the edict of this man-created
creator, about a decade before the Great Administration began, a little
girl was born.
She should not have been born, because she was not wanted, being merely
the by-product of an itinerant actor--Harry Quest, juveniles--stimulated
to casual procreation by idleness, whiskey, and phthisis.
The other partner in this shiftless affair was an uneducated and very
young girl named Conway, who tinted photographs for a Utica photographer
while daylight lasted, and doubled her small salary by doing fancy
skating at a local "Ice Palace" in the evenings. So it is very plain
that the by-product of this partnership hadn't much chance in the world
which awaited her; for, being neither expected nor desired, and,
moreover, being already a prenatal heiress to obscure, unknown traits
scarcely as yet even developed in the pair responsible for her advent on
earth, what she might turn into must remain a problem to be solved by
time alone.
Harry Quest, the father of this unborn baby, was an actor. Without
marked talent and totally without morals, but well educated and of
agreeable manners, he was a natural born swindler, not only of others
but of himself. In other words, an optimist.
His father, the Reverend Anthony Quest, retired, was celebrated for his
wealth, his library, and his amazing and heartless parsimony. And his
morals. No wonder he had grimly kicked out his only son who had none.
The parents of the mother of this little child not yet born, lived in
Utica, over a stationery and toy shop which they kept. Patrick Conway
was the man's name. He had a pension for being injured on the railway,
and sat in a peculiarly constructed wheeled chair, moving himself about
by pushing the rubber-tired wheels with both hands and steering with his
remaining foot.
He had married a woman rather older than himself, named Jessie Grismer,
a school teacher living in Herkimer.
To Utica drifted young Quest, equipped only with the remains of one
lung, and out of a job as usual. At the local rink he picked up Laura
Conway, after a mindless flirtation, and ultimately went to board with
her family over the stationery shop.
So the affair in question was a case of propinquity as much as anything,
and was consummated with all the detached irresponsibility of two
sparrows.
However, Quest, willing now to be supported, married the girl without
protest. She continued to tint photographs and skate as long as she was
able to be about; he loafed in front of theatres and hotels, with a
quarter in change in his pockets, but always came back to meals. On
sunny afternoons, when he felt well, he strolled about the residence
section or reposed in his room waiting, probably, for Opportunity to
knock and enter.
But nothing came except the baby.
About that time, too, both lungs being in bad condition, young Quest
began those various and exhaustive experiments in narcotics, which
sooner or later interest such men. And he finally discovered heroin.
Finding it an agreeable road to hell, the symptomatic characteristics of
an addict presently began to develop in him, and he induced his young
wife to share the pleasures of his pharmaceutical discovery.
They and their baby continued to encumber the apartment for a year or
two before the old people died--of weariness perhaps, perhaps of old
age--or grief--or some similar disease so fatal to the aged.
Anyway, they died, and there remained nothing in the estate not subject
to creditors. And, as tinted photographs had gone out of fashion even
in Utica, and as the advent of moving pictures was beginning to kill
vaudeville everywhere except in New York, the ever-provincial, thither
the Quest family drifted. And there, through the next few years, they
sifted downward through stratum after stratum of the metropolitan
purlieus, always toward some darker substratum--always a little lower.
The childishly attractive mother, in blue velvet and white cat's fur,
still did fancy skating at rink and Hippodrome. The father sometimes
sat dazed and coughing in the chilly waiting rooms of theatrical
agencies. Fortified by drugs and by a shabby fur overcoat, he sometimes
managed to make the rounds in pleasant weather; and continued to die
rather slowly, considering his physical condition.
But his father, who had so long ago disowned him--the Reverend Anthony
Quest--being in perfect moral condition, caught a slight cold in his
large, warm library, and died of pneumonia in forty-eight hours--a
frightful example of earthly injustice, doubtless made all right in
Heaven.
Young Quest, forbidden the presence for years, came skulking around
after a while with a Jew lawyer, only to find that his one living
relative, a predatory aunt, had assimilated everything and was perfectly
qualified to keep it under the terms of his father's will.
Her attorneys made short work of the shyster. She herself, many times a
victim to her nephew's deceit in former years, and once having stood
between him and prison concerning the matter of a signature for
thousands of dollars--the said signature not being hers but by her
recognised for the miserable young man's sake--this formidable and
acidulous old lady wrote to her nephew in reply to a letter of his:
You always were a liar. I do not believe you are married. I do not
believe you have a baby. I send you--not a cheque, because you'd
probably raise it--but enough money to start you properly.
Keep away from me. You are what you are partly through your father's
failure to do his duty by you. An optimist taken at birth and patiently
trained can be saved. Nobody saved you; you were merely punished. And
you, naturally, became a swindler.
But I can't help that now. It's too late. I can only send you money.
And if it's true you have a child, for God's sake take her in time or
she'll turn into what you are.
And _that_ is why I send you any money at all--on the remote chance that
you are not lying. Keep away from me, Harry.
ROSALINDA QUEST.
So he did not trouble her, he knew her of old; and besides he was too
ill, too dazed with drugs to bother with such things.
He lost every penny of the money in Quint's gambling house within a
month.
So the Quest family, father, mother and little daughter sifted through
the wide, coarse meshes of the very last social stratum that same
winter, and landed on the ultimate mundane dump heap.
Quest now lay all day across a broken iron bed, sometimes stupefied,
sometimes violent; his wife, dismissed from the Hippodrome for flagrant
cause, now picked up an intermittent living and other things in an
east-side rink. The child still remained about, somewhere, anywhere--a
dirty, ragged, bruised, furtive little thing, long accustomed to
extremes of maudlin demonstration and drug-crazed cruelty, frightened
witness of dreadful altercations and of more dreadful reconciliations,
yet still more stunned than awakened, more undeveloped than precocious,
as though the steady accumulation of domestic horrors had checked mental
growth rather than sharpened her wits with cynicism and undesirable
knowledge.
Not yet had her environment distorted and tainted her speech, for her
father had been an educated man, and what was left of him still employed
grammatical English, often correcting the nasal, up-state vocabulary of
the mother--the beginning of many a terrible quarrel.
So the child skulked about, alternately ignored or whined over, cursed
or caressed, petted or beaten, sometimes into insensibility.
Otherwise she followed them about instinctively, like a crippled kitten.
Then there came one stifling night in that earthly hell called a New
York tenement, when little Stephanie Quest, tortured by prickly heat,
gasping for the relief which the western lightning promised, crept out
to the fire escape and lay there gasping like a minnow.
Fate, lurking in the reeking room behind her, where her drugged parents
lay in merciful stupor, unloosed a sudden breeze from the thunderous
west, which blew the door shut with a crash. It did not awaken the man.
But, among other things, it did jar loose a worn-out gas jet.... That
was the verdict, anyway.
Pluris est oculatus testis unus quam auriti decem.
But, as always, the Most High remained silent, offering no testimony to
the contrary.
This episode in the career of Stephanie Quest happened in the days of
the Great Administration, an administration not great in the sense of
material national prosperity, great only in spirit and in things of the
mind and soul.
Even the carpenter, Albrecht Schmidt, across the hallway in the
tenement, rose to the level of some unexplored spiritual stratum, for he
had a wife and five children and only his wages, and he did not work
every week.
"Nein," he said, when approached for contributions toward the funeral,
"I haff no money for dead people. I don't giff, I don't lend. Vat it
iss dot Shakespeare says? Don't neffer borrow und don't neffer lend
noddings.... But I tell you what I do! I take dot leedle child!"
The slim, emaciated child, frightened white, had flattened herself
against the dirty wall of the hallway to let the policemen and ambulance
surgeon pass.
The trampling, staring inmates of the tenement crowded the stairs, a
stench of cabbage and of gas possessed the place.
The carpenter's wife, a string around her shapeless middle, and looking
as though she might add to her progeny at any minute, came to the door
of her two-room kennel.
"Poor little Stephanie," she said, "you come right in and make you'self
at home along of us!"
And, as the child did not stir, seemingly frozen there against the
stained and battered wall, the carpenter said:
"_Du_! Stephanie! Hey you, Steve! Come home und get you some
breakfast right away quick!"
"Is that their kid?" inquired a policeman coming out of the place of
death and wiping the sweat from his face.
"Sure. I take her in."
"Well, you'll have to fix that matter later----"
"I fix it now. I take dot little Steve for mine----"
The policeman yawned over the note book in which he was writing.
"It ain't done that way, I'm tellin' you! Well, all _right_! You can
keep her until the thing is fixed up----" He went on writing.
The carpenter strode over to the child; his blond hair bristled, his
beard was fearsome and like an ogre's. But his voice trembled with
Teuton sentiment.
"You got a new mamma, Steve!" he rumbled. "Now, you run in und cry mit
her so much as you like." He pulled the little girl gently toward his
rooms; the morbid crowd murmured on the stairs at the sight of the child
of suicides.
"Mamma, here iss our little Steve alretty!" growled Schmidt. "Now, py
Gott! I got to go to my job! A hellofa business iss it!
Schade--immer--schade! Another mouth to feed, py Gott!"
*FOREWORD*
On the Christmas-tide train which carried homeward those Saint James
schoolboys who resided in or near New York, Cleland Junior sat
chattering with his comrades in a drawing-room car entirely devoted to
the Saint James boys, and resounding with the racket of their
interminable gossip and laughter.
The last number of their school paper had come out on the morning of
their departure for Christmas holidays at home; every boy had a copy and
was trying to read it aloud to his neighbour; shrieks of mirth
resounded, high, shrill arguments, hot disputes, shouts of approval or
of protest.
"Read this! Say, did you get this!" cried a tall boy named Grismer.
"Jim Cleland wrote it! What do you know about our own pet novelist----"
"_Shut_ up!" retorted Cleland Junior, blushing and abashed by accusation
of authorship.
"He wrote it all right!" repeated Grismer exultantly. "Oh, girls! Just
listen to this mush about the birds and the bees and the bright blue
sky----"
"Jim, you're all right! That's the stuff!" shouted another. "The girl
in the story's a peach, and the battle scene is great!"
"Say, Jim, where do you get your battle stuff?" inquired another lad
respectfully.
"Out of the papers, of course," replied Cleland Junior. "All you have
to do is to read 'em, and you can think out the way it really looks."
The only master in the car, a young Harvard graduate, got up from his
revolving chair and came over to Cleland Junior.
The boy rose immediately, standing slender and handsome in the dark suit
of mourning which he still wore after two years.
"Sit down, Jim," said Grayson, the master, seating himself on the arm of
the boy's chair. And, as the boy diffidently resumed his seat: "Nice
little story of yours, this. Just finished it. Co you still think of
making writing your profession?"
"I'd like to, sir."
"Many are called, you know," remarked the master with a smile.
"I know, sir. I shall have to take my chance."
Phil Grayson, baseball idol of the Saint James boys, and himself guilty
of several delicate verses in the Century and Scribner's, sat on the
padded arm of the revolving chair and touched his slight moustache
thoughtfully.
"One's profession, Jim, ought to be one's ruling passion. To choose a
profession, choose what you most care to do in your leisure moments.
That should be your business in life."
The boy said:
"I like about everything, Mr. Grayson, but I think I had rather write
than anything else."
John Belter, a rotund youth, listening and drawing caricatures on the
back of the school paper, suggested that perhaps Cleland Junior was
destined to write the Great American Novel.
Grayson said pleasantly:
"It was the great American ass who first made inquiries concerning the
Great American Novel."
"Oh, what a knock!" shouted Oswald Grismer, delighted.
But young Belter joined in the roars of laughter, undisturbed, saying
very coolly:
"Do you mean, sir, that the Great American Novel will never be written,
or that it has already been written several times, or that there isn't
any such thing?"
"I mean all three, Jack," explained Grayson, smiling. "Let me see that
caricature you have been so busy over."
"It's--it's _you_, sir."
"What of it?" retorted the young master. "Do you think I can't laugh at
myself?"
He took the paper so reluctantly tendered:
"Jack, you _are_ a terror! You young rascal, you've made me look like a
wax-faced clothing dummy!"
"Tribute to your faultless apparel, sir, and equally faultless
features----"
A shriek of laughter from the boys who had crowded around to see;
Grayson himself laughing unfeignedly and long; then the babel of eager,
boyish voices again, loud, emphatic, merciless in discussion of the
theme of the moment.
Into the swaying car and down the aisle came a negro in spotless white,
repeating invitingly:
"First call for luncheon, gentlemen! Luncheon served in the dining car
forward!"
His agreeable voice was drowned in the cheering of three dozen famished
boys, stampeding.
Cleland Junior came last with the master.
"I hope you'll have a happy holiday, Jim," said Grayson, with quiet
cordiality.
"I'm crazy to see father," said the boy. "I'm sure I'll have a good
time."
At the vestibule he stepped aside, but the master bade him precede him.
And as the fair, slender boy passed out into the forward car, the breeze
ruffling his blond hair, and his brown eyes still smiling with the
anticipation of home coming, he passed Fate, Chance, and Destiny,
whispering together in the corner of the platform. But the boy could
not see them; could not know that they were discussing him.
*CHAPTER I*
An average New York house on a side street in winter is a dark affair;
daylight comes reluctantly and late into the city; the south side of a
street catches the first winter sun rays when there are any; the north
side remains shadowy and chilly.
Cleland Senior's old-fashioned house stood on the north side of 80th
Street; and on the last morning of Cleland Junior's Christmas vacation,
while the first bars of sunshine fell across the brown stone façades on
the opposite side of the street, the Clelands' breakfast room still
remained dim, bathed in the silvery gray dusk of morning.
Father and son had finished breakfast, but Cleland Senior, whose other
names were John and William, had not yet lighted the cigar which he held
between thumb and forefinger and contemplated in portentous silence. Nor
had he opened the morning paper to read paragraphs of interest to
Cleland Junior, comment upon them, and encourage discussion, as was his
wont when his son happened to be home from school.
The house was one of those twenty-foot brown stone
houses--architecturally featureless--which was all there was to New York
architecture fifty years ago.
But John William Cleland's dead wife had managed to make a gem of the
interior, and the breakfast room on the second floor front, once his
wife's bedroom, was charming with its lovely early American furniture
and silver, and its mellow, old-time prints in colour.
Cleland Junior continued to look rather soberly at the familiar
pictures, now, as he sat in silence opposite his father, his heart of a
boy oppressed by the approaching parting.
"So you think you'll make writing a profession, Jim?" repeated John
Cleland, not removing his eyes from the cigar he was turning over and
over.
"Yes, father."
"All right. Then a general education is the thing, and Harvard the
place--unless you prefer another university."
"The fellows are going to Harvard--most of them," said the boy.
"A boy usually desires to go where his school friends go.... It's all
right, Jim."
Cleland Junior's fresh, smooth face of a school boy had been slowly
growing more and more solemn. Sometimes he looked at the prints on the
wall; sometimes he glanced across the table at his father, who still sat
absently turning over and over the unlighted cigar between his fingers.
The approaching separation was weighing on them both. That, and the
empty third chair by the bay window, inclined them to caution in speech,
lest memory strike them suddenly, deep and unawares, and their voices
betray their men's hearts to each other--which is not an inclination
between men.
Cleland Senior glanced involuntarily from the empty chair to the table,
where, as always, a third place had been laid by Meachem, and, as
always, a fresh flower lay beside the service plate.
No matter what the occasion, under all circumstances and invariably
Meachem laid a fresh blossom of some sort beside the place which nobody
used.
Cleland Senior gazed at the frail cluster of frisia in silence.
Through the second floor hallway landing, in the library beyond, the boy
could see his suitcase, and, lying against it, his hockey stick.
Cleland Senior's preoccupied glance also, at intervals, reverted to
these two significant objects. Presently he got up and walked out into
the little library, followed in silence by Cleland Junior.
There was a very tall clock in that room, which had been made by one of
the Willards many years before the elder Cleland's birth; but it ticked
now as aggressively and bumptiously as though it were brand new.
The father wandered about for a while, perhaps with the vague idea of
finding a match for his cigar; the son's clear gaze followed his
father's restless movements until the clock struck the half hour.
"Father?"
"Yes, dear--yes, old chap?"--with forced carelessness which deceived
neither.
"It's half past nine."
"All right, Jim--any time you're ready."
"I hate to go back and leave you all alone here!" broke out the boy
impulsively.
It was a moment of painful tension.
Cleland Senior did not reply; and the boy, conscious of the emotion
which his voice had betrayed, and suddenly shy about it, turned his head
and gazed out into the back yard.
Father and son still wore mourning; the black garments made the boy's
hair and skin seem fairer than they really were--as fair as his dead
mother's.
When Cleland Senior concluded that he was able to speak in a perfectly
casual and steady voice, he said:
"Have you had a pretty good holiday, Jim?"
"Fine, father!"
"That's good. That's as it should be. We've enjoyed a pretty good time
together, my son; haven't we?"
"Great! It was a dandy vacation!"
There came another silence. On the boy's face lingered a slight
retrospective smile, as he mentally reviewed the two weeks now ending
with the impending departure for school. Certainly he had had a
splendid time. His father had engineered all sorts of parties and
amusements for him--schoolboy gatherings at the Ice Rink; luncheons and
little dances in their own home, to which school comrades and children
of old friends were bidden; trips to the Bronx, to the Aquarium, to the
Natural History Museum; wonderful evenings at home together.
The boy had gone with his father to see the "Wizard of Oz," to see
Nazimova in "The Comet"--a doubtful experiment, but in line with
theories of Cleland Senior--to see "The Fall of Port Arthur" at the
Hippodrome; to hear Calvé at the Opera.
Together they had strolled on Fifth Avenue, viewed the progress of the
new marble tower then being built on Madison Square, had lunched
together at Delmonico's, dined at Sherry's, motored through all the
parks, visited Governor's Island and the Navy Yard--the latter
rendezvous somewhat empty of interest since the great battle fleet had
started on its pacific voyage around the globe.
Always they had been together since the boy returned from Saint James
school for the Christmas holidays; and Cleland Senior had striven to
fill every waking hour of his son's day with something pleasant to be
remembered.
Always at breakfast he had read aloud the items of interest--news
concerning President Roosevelt--the boy's hero--and his administration;
Governor Hughes and _his_ administration; the cumberous coming of Mr.
Taft from distant climes; local squabbles concerning projected subways.
All that an intelligent and growing boy ought to know and begin to think
about, Cleland Senior read aloud at the breakfast table--for this
reason, and also to fill in every minute with pleasant interest lest the
dear grief, now two years old, and yet forever fresh, creep in between
words and threaten the silences between them with sudden tears.
But two years is a long, long time in the life of the young--in the life
of a fourteen-year-old boy; and yet, the delicate shadow of his mother
still often dimmed for him the sunny sparkle of the winter's holiday.
It fell across his clear young eyes now, where he sat thinking, and made
them sombre and a deeper brown.
For he was going back to boarding school; and old memories were uneasily
astir again; and Cleland Senior saw the shadow on the boy's face;
understood; but now chose to remain silent, not intervening.
So memory gently enveloped them both, leaving them very still together,
there in the library.
For the boy's mother had been so intimately associated with preparations
for returning to school in those blessed days which already had begun to
seem distant and a little unreal to Cleland Junior--so tenderly and
vitally a part of them--that now, when the old pain, the loneliness, the
eternal desire for her was again possessing father and son in the
imminence of familiar departure, Cleland Senior let it come to the boy,
not caring to avert it.
Thinking of the same thing, both sat gazing into the back yard. There
was a cat on the whitewashed fence. Lizzie, the laundress--probably the
last of the race of old-time family laundresses--stood bare-armed in the
cold, pinning damp clothing to the lines, her Irish mouth full of wooden
clothes-pins, her parboiled arms steaming.
At length Cleland Senior's glance fell again upon the tall clock. He
swallowed nothing, stared grimly at the painted dial where a ship
circumnavigated the sun, then squaring his big shoulders he rose with
decision.
The boy got up too.
In the front hall they assisted each other with overcoats; the little,
withered butler took the boy's luggage down the brown-stone steps to the
car. A moment later father and son were spinning along Fifth Avenue
toward Forty-second Street.
As usual, this ordeal of departure forced John Cleland to an unnatural,
off-hand gaiety at the crisis, as though the parting amounted to
nothing.
"Going to be a good kid in school, Jim?" he asked, casually humorous.
The boy nodded and smiled.
"That's right. And, Jim, stick to your Algebra, no matter how you hate
it. I hated it too.... Going to get on your class hockey team?"
"I'll do my best."
"Right. Try for the ball team, too. And, Jim?"
"Yes, father?"
"You're all right so far. You know what's good and what's bad."
"Yes, sir."
"No matter what happens, you can always come to me. You thoroughly
understand that."
"Yes, father."
"You've never known what it is to be afraid of me, have you?"
The boy smiled broadly; said no.
"Never be afraid of me, Jim. That's one thing I couldn't stand. I'm
always here. All I'm here on earth for is you! Do you really
understand me?"
"Yes, father."
Red-capped porter, father and son halted near the crowded train gate
inside the vast railroad station.
Cleland Senior said briskly:
"Good-bye, old chap. See you at Easter. Good luck! Send me anything
you write in the way of verses and stories."
Their clasped hands fell apart; the boy went through the gate, followed
by his porter and by numerous respectable and negligible travelling
citizens, male and female, bound for destinations doubtless interesting
to them. To John Cleland they were merely mechanically moving
impedimenta which obscured the retreating figure of his only son and
irritated him to that extent. And when the schoolboy cap of that only
son disappeared, engulfed in the crowd, John Cleland went back to his
car, back to his empty, old-fashioned brownstone house, seated himself
in the library that his wife had made lovely, and picked up the _Times_,
which he had not read aloud at breakfast.
He had been sitting there more than an hour before he thought of reading
the paper so rigidly spread across his knees. But he was not interested
in what he read. The battle fleet, it seemed, was preparing to sail
from Port-of-Spain; Mr. Taft was preparing to launch his ponderous
candidacy at the fat head of the Republican party; a woman had been
murdered in the Newark marshes; the subway muddle threatened to become
more muddled; somebody desired to motor from New York to Paris;
President Roosevelt and Mr. Cortelyou had been in consultation about
something or other; German newspapers accused the United States of
wasting its natural resources; Scotti was singing _Scarpia_ in "Tosca";
a new music hall had been built in the Bronx----
Cleland Senior laid the paper aside, stared at the pale winter sunshine
on the back fence till things suddenly blurred, then he resumed his
paper, sharply, and gazed hard at the print until his dead wife's
smiling eyes faded from the page.
But in the paper there seemed nothing to hold his attention. He turned
to the editorials, then to the last page. This, he noticed, was still
entirely devoted to the "Hundred Neediest Cases"--the yearly
Christmastide appeal in behalf of specific examples of extreme distress.
The United Charities Organization of the Metropolitan district always
made this appeal every year.
Now, Cleland Senior had already sent various sums to that particular
charity; and his eyes followed rather listlessly the paragraphs
describing certain cases which still were totally unrelieved or only
partially aided by charitable subscriptions. He read on as a man reads
whose heart is still sore within him--not without a certain half
irritable sense of sympathy, perhaps, but with an interest still dulled
by the oppression which separation from his son always brought.
And still his preoccupied mind plodded on as he glanced over the several
paragraphs of appeal, and after a while he yawned, wondering listlessly
that such pitiable cases of need had not been relieved by somebody among
the five million who so easily could give the trifles desired. For
example:
"Case No. 47. A young man, 25, hopelessly crippled and
bedridden, could learn to do useful work, sufficient to support
him, if $25 for equipment were sent to the United Charities
office."
Contributors were asked to mention Case No. 47 when sending cheques for
relief.
He read on mechanically:
"Case No. 108. This case has been partly relieved through
contributions, but thirty dollars are still required. Otherwise,
these two aged and helpless gentlewomen must lose their humble
little home and an institution will have to take care of them.
Neither one has many more years to live. A trifling aid, now,
means that the few remaining days left to these old people will
be tranquil days, free from the dread of separation and
destitution."
"Case 113. The father, consumptive and unable to work; the
mother still weak from childbirth; the only other wage-earner a
daughter aged sixteen, under arrest; four little children
dependent. Seventy dollars will tide them over until the mother
can recover and resume her wage-earning, which, with the
daughter's assistance, will be sufficient to keep the family
together. Three of the children are defectives; the oldest
sister, a cash-girl, has been arrested and held as a witness for
attending, at her mother's request, a clinic conducted by people
advocating birth-control; and the three dollars a week which she
brought to the family has been stopped indefinitely."
"Case 119. For this case no money at all has been received so
far. It is the case of a little child, Stephanie Quest, left an
orphan by the death or suicide of both drug-addicted parents,
and taken into the family of a kindly German carpenter two years
ago. It is the first permanent shelter the child has ever
known, the first kindness ever offered her, the first time she
has ever had sufficient nourishment in all her eleven years of
life. Now she is in danger of losing the only home she has ever
had. Stephanie is a pretty, delicate, winsome and engaging
little creature of eleven, whose only experience with life had
been savage cruelty, gross neglect, filth and immemorial
starvation until the carpenter took her into his own too
numerous family, and his wife cared for her as though she were
their own child.
"But they have five children of their own, and the wife is soon
to have another baby. Low wages, irregular employment, the
constantly increasing cost of living, now make it impossible for
them to feed and clothe an extra child.
"They are fond of the little girl; they are willing to keep and
care for her if fifty dollars could be contributed toward her
support. But if this sum be not forthcoming, little Stephanie
will have to go to an institution.
"The child is now physically healthy. She is of a winning
personality, but somewhat impulsive, unruly, and wilful at
times; and it would be far better for her future welfare to
continue to live with these sober, kindly, honest people who
love her, than to be sent to an orphanage."
"Case No. 123. A very old man, desperately poor and ill and
entirely----"
John Cleland dropped the paper suddenly across his knees. A fierce
distaste for suffering, an abrupt disinclination for such details
checked further perusal.
"Damnation!" he muttered, fumbling for another cigar.
His charities already had been attended to for the year. That portion
of his income devoted to such things was now entirely used up. But he
remained uneasily aware that the portion reserved for further
acquisition of Americana--books, prints, pictures, early American
silver, porcelains, furniture, was still intact for the new year now
beginning.
That was his only refuge from loneliness and the ever-living grief--the
plodding hunt for such things and the study connected with this pursuit.
Except for his son--his ruling passion--he had no other interest, now
that his wife was dead--nothing that particularly mattered to him in
life except this collecting of Americana.
And now his son had gone away again. The day had to be filled--filled
rather quickly, too; for the parting still hurt cruelly, and with a dull
persistence that he had not yet shaken off. He must busy himself with
something. He'd go out again presently, and mouse about among musty
stacks of furniture "in the rough." Then he'd prowl through auction
rooms and screw a jeweller's glass into his right eye and pore over
mezzotints.
He allowed himself just so much to spend on Americana; just so much to
spend on his establishment, so much to invest, so much to give to
charity----
"Damnation!" he repeated aloud.
It was the last morning of the exhibition at the Christensen Galleries
of early American furniture. That afternoon the sale was to begin. He
had not had time for preliminary investigation. He realized the
importance of the collection; knew that his friends would be there in
force; and hated the thought of losing such a chance.
Turning the leaves or his newspaper for the advertisement, he found
himself again confronted by the columns containing the dreary "Hundred
Neediest Cases." And against every inclination he re-read the details
of Case 119.
Odd, he thought to himself angrily, that there was nobody in the city to
contribute the few dollars necessary to this little girl. The case in
question required only fifty dollars. Fifty dollars meant a home,
possibly moral salvation, to this child with her winning disposition and
unruly ways.
He read the details again, more irritated than ever, yet grimly
interested to note that, as usual, it is the very poor with many burdens
who help the poor. This carpenter, living probably in a tenement, with
a wife, an unborn baby, and a herd of squalling children to support, had
still found room for another little waif, whose drug-sodden parents had
been kind to her only by dying.
John Cleland turned the page, searched for the advertisement of the
Christensen Galleries, discovered it, read it carefully. There were
some fine old prints advertised to be sold. His hated rivals would be
there--beloved friends yet hated rivals in the endless battle for
bargains in antiquities.
When he got into his car a few minutes later, he told the chauffeur to
drive to Christensen's and drive fast. Halfway there, he signalled and
spoke through the tube:
"Where is the United Charities Building? _Where_? Well, drive there
first."
"Damn!" he muttered, readjusting himself in the corner under the lynx
robe.
*CHAPTER II*
"Would you care to go there and see the child for yourself, Mr. Cleland?
A few moments might give you a much clearer idea of her than all that I
have told you," suggested the capable young woman to whom he had been
turned over in that vast labyrinth of offices tenemented by the "United
Charities Organizations of Manhattan and the Four Boroughs, Inc."
John Cleland signed the cheque which he had filled in, laid it on the
desk, closed his cheque-book, and shook his head.
"I'm a busy man," he said briefly.
"Oh, I'm sorry! I _wish_ you had time to see her for a moment. You may
obtain permission through the Manhattan Charities Concern, a separate
organization, winch turns over certain cases to the excellent
child-placing agency connected with our corporation."
"Thank you; I haven't time."
"Mr. Chiltern Grismer would be the best man to see--if you had time."
"Thank you."
There was a chilly silence; Cleland stood frowning at space, wrapped in
gloomy preoccupation.
"But," added the capable young woman, wistfully, "if you are so busy
that you have no time to bother with this case personally----"
"I _have_ time," snapped Cleland, turning red. For the man was burdened
with the inconvenient honesty of his race--a sort of tactless
truthfulness which characterized all Clelands. He said:
"When I informed you that I'm a busy man, I evidently but
unintentionally misled you. I'm not in business. I _have_ time. I
simply don't wish to go into the slums to see somebody's perfectly
strange offspring."
The amazed young woman listened, hesitated, then threw back her pretty
head and laughed:
"Mr. Cleland, your frankness is most refreshing! Certainly there is no
necessity for you to go if you don't wish to. The little girl will be
_most_ grateful to you for this generous cheque, and happy to be
relieved of the haunting terror that has made her almost ill at the
prospect of an orphanage. The child will be beside herself with joy
when she gets word from us that she need not lose the only home and the
only friends she has ever known. Thank you--for little Stephanie
Quest."
"What did the _other_ people do to her?" inquired John Cleland,
buttoning his gloves and still scowling absently at nothing.
"What people?"
"The ones who--her parents, I mean. What was it they did to her?"
"They were dreadfully inhuman----"
"_What_ did they do to the child? Do you know?"
"Yes, I know, Mr. Cleland. They beat her mercilessly when they happened
to be crazed by drugs; they neglected her when sober. The little thing
was a mass of cuts and sores and bruises when we investigated her case;
two of her ribs had been broken, somehow or other, and were not yet
healed----"
"Oh, Lord!" he interrupted sharply. "That's enough of such devilish
detail!---- I beg your pardon, but such things--annoy me. Also I've
some business that's waiting--or pleasure, whichever you choose to call
it----" He glanced at his watch, thinking of the exhibition at
Christensen's, and the several rival and hawk-like amateurs who
certainly would be prowling around there, deriding him for his absence
and looking for loot.
"Where does that child live?" he added carelessly, buttoning his
overcoat.
The capable young woman, who had been regarding him with suppressed
amusement, wrote out the address on a pad, tore off the leaf, and handed
it to him.
"--In case you ever become curious to see little Stephanie Quest, whom