The Spinners' Book of Fiction Part 34

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 s.p.a.ce. 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?' Subst.i.tute '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.' 'a.n.a.lytical 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sed her one morning, she gave him the curious open-eyed stare of a deer, bade him a pleasant "_Buenos dias, Senor!_" 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 cla.s.s 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 s.e.xless 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 t.i.the 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 pa.s.sion. 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.