The Popular Magazine/The Green Hour/Part 1

CHAPTER I.

Mr. Van Gruenberg Luyties; His Parentage and His Name.

There were four and twenty clerks in the office of Popson & Co.; but only one had any imagination. His name was not pretty. He had inherited the patronymic of Luyties from some forgotten Dutch ancestor, and his parents additionally insulted him with Van Gruenberg—although they did not know it was an insult, remembering in a vague sort of way something of red billed, black-tailed storks standing on stone-thatched, moss-grown roofs, with a foot tucked under a wing, and looking over long, silver-threaded countries of brown marsh, where the houses had eaves that overhung the low-browed doors, and where white ducks and noisy yellow-billed ducklings paddled in the canals.

Van's parents inherited these memories from an old grandmother who, sitting around the kitchen stove in winter, had told them tales of the Low Countries; and the name Van Gruenberg Luyties seemed to suggest to Van's mother one of the heavy-handed lords who had wandered restlessly through gran'mère's fragmentary narratives. Van was an only child, and his parents wanted to do their best by him, but they were very poor people, their name and their memories being all their inheritance.

Now, as they had no hopes for themselves, being accustomed to very hard work and very little food, such stunted imagination as they were capable of was given to Van's future—the boy with the aristocratic but ugly name. Falling into the common error of laboring folk, whose hands are coarse and red, they kept Van's smooth and white, and sent him to school in shirts and cuffs as spotless as those Mrs. Luyties washed in the Popsons' back kitchen on Mondays and Tuesdays. Indeed, they were of the same material and make, for Mrs. Luyties' lady employer had a little boy about Van's age, and, as her servants were too lazy to count the pieces, and her little boy had so much fine linen, who was to tell if a little was missing! As for worn knickerbockers and soiled jackets, Mrs. Popson was only too glad to sell them to Van's mother for more than the old-clothes man would have given her.

So Van grew up, a trifle frayed, perhaps, but always smartly dressed and spotlessly clean. He did not know that his mother was a washerwoman; he thought she was a seamstress. His father's occupation—he was a digger of graves—was dignified by the name of “sexton”—which name Van afterward saw upon little gilt-lettered boards on the gray ivy-covered walls of churches, and just beneath the name of rector or priest; so there was some dignity to that, and Van tried to pretend it did not mean the same as “janitor.” If he had known the truth, his father was no sexton at all, but only a laborer employed by a sexton.

His parents died from overwork and underfeeding before Van was fifteen, so he never discovered their deception. Van was left as a legacy in a note his mother wrote with infinite care and much misgiving just before her death to the lady whose washerwoman she had been. This note, which Mrs. Popson would have preserved as a curio, had she been other than kind-hearted, contained, beside an infinite variety of phonetic spelling and awkward phrasing, an impassioned request that her employer should not allow Van to know, what to him would have been, his mother's shamefully low occupation.

Mrs. Popson found something in the note that she called “pathos” when she told her husband of it, requesting that a place be made for Van in Mr. Popson's warehouse. So Van went to work as an office boy; and, now he was twenty-one, and a shipping clerk, receiving eighteen dollars a week, most of which he spent for clothes as nearly copies of those of the gorgeous young Mr. Popson as the difference in their means would allow.

He discovered Mr. Popson's tailor, and from him bought one suit each year; all he could afford, when the price was equal to a month of his salary. Young Mr. Popson's bootmaker, too, was requisitioned for a pair of tan boots each Christmas when Mr. Popson, senior, gave each of his employees a remembrance of the season.

For socks, shirts, neckties, and hats, Van did his best; but never on any occasion had the young shipping clerk felt more than half dressed; for when his suit was new, his boots were cracking; when the boots came home, fragrant of fine tanning, the suit was wearing shiny at the elbows and the cuffs of his trousers were fraying; and at no time had he ever possessed a complete outfit of collar, tie, shirt, and hat that was worthy to companion the work of his tailor or his bootmaker.

To make matters worse, it frequently happened that he had just put by enough lunch money and bought a certain style of collar, hat, or tie that the gorgeous young Mr. Popson was wearing, when the wholesale manufacturers of collars, hats, or ties who advertise largely in public places, put out a cheap imitation of the article, and the gorgeous Mr. Popson discarded it. Poor Van would have liked to discard it, too, but he could not afford to do so, and what is bitterer than wearing an article that has cost four times as much as the thing your bootblack is wearing, yet which seems exactly the same, and which—also—seems to put you in a class with your bootblack?

Van was a boy, and such things seemed important to him.

The worst of it all was that, when he was dressed as nearly as possible to his ideal, he was welcome in none of the places befitting such dressing.

If he wished to see depicted for him on the stage the manners and customs of the people he admired, he must hasten through his meager dinner at some inexpensive eating house, and take up his place outside the entrance to a theater at an early hour, to wait until the gallery doors should be opened, a fair mark for the jests of rougher and simpler folk with similar incomes, but less imagination and pretensions in attire. Waiting, then, again close onto another hour on the hard seats of a bleak and cheerless balcony, while fine ladies and gentlemen lingered over their dinners, their motors and carriages ready to whisk them magic-carpetlike to soft seats below held ready for them.

When the curtain was up, Van leaned his chin on the rail of the gallery, and, no matter how bad play or actors might be, they were so much better than the life and people he knew, that he lost himself among them, lived their lives, hoped, dreamed, and mingled with them, courtly, witty, admired. But with the curtain down, he dared not leave his seat for fear one of the orange-eating ladies or their loud-voiced escorts would preëmpt it; so he must stay, rudely brought out of that other land by inept criticisms and comments, and the insistent cries of those who peddled fruit, candy, and gum along the aisles. So, after a while he took to going seldom, seeing but one performance for a price he had hitherto paid for three.

He had a dog, as lonely as himself, that he had bought from a street vender because it seemed so cold and pitiable, and this dog had come to be his only companion. It had grown up somewhat long-legged for a fox terrier, but with large, intelligent eyes, and a well shaped head; with Fox at his heels, Van tramped around the Westchester Hills and the Berkshires on Sundays, and had his dinner at some fashionable inn to which motorists drove up in great, swift cars, with engines pounding and thumping under them.

He was satisfied that no one took exception to his presence; that no one lifted eyebrows and thought it was strange he should be there. No one ever spoke to him except the waiters, but he heard the men and women talking among themselves about horses, dogs, European travel, polo, theaters, and the stock market. Through this eavesdropping, the witnessing of plays, and the reading of books, he developed a vocabulary and a diction not unlike, if not superior to, that of the gorgeous young Mr. Popson's.

For the other days in the week, he hunted around through the old quarters of New York for table d'hôte dinners in foreign languages; where complete meals were served, from horse radish to cheese, and sometimes with some stuff in a bottle euphemistically dubbed Chianti, compris, for a price that has passed into American slang as a derisive simile for cheapness. In these places, too, he was undisturbed, for English is not spoken in the restaurants that lie just south of Washington Square, or along Houston and Grand Streets, where, half a century ago, New York's fast life was led.

In the warehouse, only, did he have much need for speech; and, in Mr. Popson's warehouse, despite “old Pop's” unromantic name, and the proverbial prosaic nature of business, and the twenty-three unimaginative clerks, were many things to lull Van into dreaming.

For Mr. Popson was an importer of teas, and sugars, and spices, and Van's days were spent in an atmosphere as aromatic as any Eastern potentate's. The very things he handled had been handled by adventurous and highly colored peoples six thousand miles or more away. Tea from Ceylon, where the men wear sunflower hats and trot ahead of little pony gigs they call jinrikishas; where the pearling boats go out and bring in great masses of shell, and the merchants sit around in their robes, their turbans, and their caftans, and bid for it; turning their servants, on their purchase, to hack it to pieces with great shining knives that flash the sun's burning rays onto their brown, naked bodies; and they gut the shell, and pour its tiny treasures—pink, yellow, black, and white—at the feet of their masters. Tea from the banks of the Irawadi, where the dacoits worship a hideous blind goddess of the jungle, and carry a strangling cord to kill victims in her name.

Russian tea, too, that has crossed the great desert of Gobi on the backs of humped camels, who have kind eyes, and whose masters jog along atop the tea, with guns inlaid in mother-of-pearl lying across their knees, one hand shielding their eyes from the sun that they may search the golden sand for the approach of fierce Tartar robbers on shaggy little horses that kill their riders if they can.

More tea that floated down the Pearl River with an armed guard aboard it in blue coats with red letters upon them, passing the crystal boats of mandarins who lie asleep and have twenty beautiful, golden-skinned, slant-eyed wives to wave off the flies and the gnats with fans made of the long tail feathers of the ostrich; past the boats where fifty slaves are imprisoned inside a wheel like squirrels in a cage, jumping on its spokes and making it go round and round until the boat ripples swiftly through the water; past the boats of the opium smugglers that steal warily through the shadows, a gun near every bale of the gum; perhaps narrowly missing the swift, terrible pirate junks.

These were the things Van thought of as he sat in his cool, airy cellar near the docks, below the hum of the street, seeing nothing but the great bales of tea, and wondering about their adventures before they reached Popson's. He wrote his figures and added up his columns as a machine does, and all the while he was in company with drowsy, nodding mandarins and lucky pearl fishers, with bearded Russian merchants and Tartar robbers who had straggly whiskers floating in the desert wind, with singsong girls of the river boats and the pigtailed gamblers of gilded Macao.

It was only when he stepped from his tea cellar that he stepped back to the unromantic ugliness that confronts an eighteen-dollar-a-week clerk who must do without lunches for a week to afford the theater.

But when he got home sometimes of a dark winter evening, and went to his room and to bed, letting up the blind so that the moon could fill the room with its light—he loved the moon, she was such a great traveler—he liked to hark back to the exploits of his forefathers, the vikings, who swept down from their pines and cedars to take what they wanted from the sunny countries of the vine and the olive, and carry it back to their great blazing fires of the North. Or of those Dutch freebooters, his other ancestors, who conquered the Islands of Spice in the names of their good housewives, who remained at home in their spotlessly clean red-brick houses with their wind mills and their tulips. For was he not a Van Gruenberg and a Luyties?

“Well, I was somebody in those days, anyhow,” he would murmur sleepily; and then he would pass into a dominion where the poorest clerk may have the strangest and most surprising adventures.

So his parents had done something for him, after all, by giving him an ugly aristocratic name, and calling themselves sexton and seamstress, when they were really laborer and washerwoman. Distinguished ancestors and great tradition, satin-lined clothes and an education had accomplished his parents' purpose. In attire, in speech, in deportment, Van would have passed anywhere as that exotic bird—a gentleman. He had made himself one—which shows, really, how very easy it is.

CHAPTER II.

“The Night of the Great Adventure.”

It certainly was a snowy winter. Van seldom remembered the city so white as it had been during the past few months. He joyed in the fall of the snow, for he had been born in the winter, and all his grandmère's tales had been of frozen dikes and armies marching over snowy rivers; of great wood fires at which stalwart men at arms in sober, buff uniforms stood warming themselves, with the firelight finding their shining breast plates; of ships caught in the ice and beating off the coasts of the Norse countries, with the northern lights steel-blue and ghastly upon the faces of their crews.

Great falls of snow and great blazing fires—Van loved the thought of them, and, as he could not have the fires himself, he often wandered all about the vicinity of North Washington Square and lower Fifth Avenue, where some of the great families still keep to ancient ways and customs, and the windowpanes were stained a ruddy hue by the dancing of the red horses of the grate.

He smiled gleefully this night as he came up toward the square from Bleecker Street; and he thought of François Villon wandering over such a virgin foothold as this, afraid of the watch carrying lanterns full of orange light. Van was always pretending to be somebody; so to-night he pretended he was Villon, and shivered at the possibility of the wolves entering Paris; peering suspiciously into the faces of perfectly dull, plodding passers-by, as though he feared they were bent on some errand that had to do with his undoing.

It was a bright night, as well as a white one. A winter moon, like half a golden melon, swung uncertainly in a halo of trembling white sky gauze; and the snowflakes danced about its face, playing little games, like baby-white hornets just out of a hive, and stringing together like white popcorn occasionally to assault some helpless pedestrian. They were dancing merrilly enough over the golden cross of “St.” Judson, and covering up the gnarled branches of the trees hastily, as though, with averted faces, they found the wintry nakedness of those branches shameless. Also, they had filigreed the tinier offshoots of the trees after intricate silver patterns known only to the Snow Queen, and quaint snow flowers hung like stars and gilded swords upon them.

A lady's white-gloved hand rested on the outside of her limousine car as Van came up; it was the one touch necessary to complete the picture. He stood in rapt admiration of it, watching the drifting snow, the golden-melon moon, and the winking balls of crystal light that studded the trees of the square as they do in the forests of France and the parks of Paris.

He stood there so long, and had so many adventures—as Villon—that he did not realize he was half frozen until, actually, he was. When he set off to walk again at a brisk trot, his feet pained him; but, in spite of that, he stopped again to have a last look at the square before he turned into University Place, and to fashion another adventure for the character he was playing.

Frequently, thereafter, he alternately cursed and blessed Master Francis of Paris for leading him into temptation; for had Van not been translating himself into sixteenth-century French, and venturing into taverns of the Fir Cone, and the Jibing Ass, the sight of the French tavern that lay in his path up University Place would not have affected him so compellingly as to force him to enter it.

He had no business in such places as this in the middle of the week—that was his Sunday luxury; but the phrases, “stoup of ale” and “flagon of wine” were running through his head, and he was summoning up pictures of gentlemen in jerkin and hose stamping themselves free of snow and striding to the fire, calling for drink in quantities.

Now, the tavern just ahead of him was indubitably French—a bit of the boulevards set down in the midst of the old and crumbling dwellings of dead aristocrats. It had been there when all the wit and fashion of Manhattan centered about the lordly square to the south of it; and it remained the same, unaffected by neighborhood changes, for Paris was Paris, and here only in all New York could it be found.

Van found excuse enough in his half-frozen feet and hands to enter, and to stride to the blazing fire at one end of the cabaret, as his character would have done. Many men, with their hair clipped close to their heads, with pointed beards and small, upturned mustaches, sat at small tables playing dominoes, or reading last week's news from the Grande Boulevards. There were women, too, little gay women, who smiled at what the men said, but themselves spoke little. Here and there were Messieurs the Artists—painters, poets, playwrights, fictioneers—who came here to lose for the moment the depressing haste found elsewhere that ill accorded with lives of meditation.

On the tables, before each and every one of the assembled party, stood a greenish-yellow drink that showed all the other colors of opal and rainbow when the lights fell transversely upon it. Van looked in vain for the lowly beer which it had been his intention to purchase. On no table was there a glass of anything except the opalescent drink that gleamed and glittered. And he noted also, that in carrying this drink to their mouths, the gentlemen of the tavern observed a certain courtesy toward it, taking it sip after sip, and apparently finding each thimbleful full-flavored. And, Van noted, those whose glasses were closest to emptiness were the merriest; but an elegant sort of merriness it was, in which one did courtly things and invented graceful turns of speech.

“Here's to the 'Green Hour,'” said Filibert Coney, who sat near the fire. “May it grow to be sixty-five minutes long.”

“Why so parsimonious?” asked his neighbor, a poet.

“Because I am a realist, and deal in possibilities,” returned Mr. Coney, and he called for bottle, glass, and sugar, and Van saw whence the drink came. Its preparation by Coney consumed a lengthy time of breathless suspense on his part; as the water dripped from the white lump into the black liqueur, and caused little waves of cloudy milk to form, waves that curled and swayed until they had caught the colors of the night's lights.

“The Green Hour—vive l'heure vert,” he said.

Van looked at the clock. It was nearing seven, and dinner; which was not to be purchased in such a place as this, where prices were for those who dined, not for those who merely ate to satisfy hunger. But the fascinating riddle of the colored hour and the curious drink held him, and he sat down and called the waiter, asking for its like; when it came, handling its ingredients in slavish imitation of Mr. Coney, whom he had watched narrowly.

He did not find the taste of the mixture to his liking; so he sat long over the drinking of it; and, as he sat, he began to forget that he was hungry, and that this place was not for him. He became as bold as any habitué, and even exchanged a glance or two over the pages of Le Rire with a lady who had young pomegranate blossoms in her hat, and who smiled to herself and thought he was a nice boy, for there was nothing in his glances except excited curiosity.

The pictures of the flaneurs, with their little glasses in their eyes, and their bulging bosoms of snow-white shirt, watching gauzy-garbed maidens of the ballet, set him to pondering on what performance he should witness that night, not considering that he could afford to attend none, for his room for the week was unpaid for, and his laundry yet to come. But his ability to pay he questioned not at all. He arose and went back to the snowy streets, humming a gay little air, an air he would hear again to-night. He had forgotten all about his dinner, and was as light and carefree as any young man of millions.

The moon looked cheerful, and the snow was piling up under it like little white hills in a frozen meadow. Van, when he thought no one was looking, ran a little, and then slid as far as the impetus of his start would take him. Occasionally, when people passed, he would remember he was Villon, and look at them shiftily.

Trotting on in this wise, he came to a pawnbroker's shop in a side street, near where he lived, whose windows always fascinated him, because there were so many stories one could read in the curious articles exposed for sale. Van had bought a strangely beautiful plate there only a few weeks ago—beautiful to him, that is, so bizarre was it—of a vivid green stone oddly carved with Chinese letters, that resembled little pagoda-roofed tea houses running away. He stopped now before the window where he had first seen his plate—six. sisters they had been, all green and all carved so. He was thinking how well that one plate looked on his mantel, and how much better two of them would look. Of course, he could not afford to buy it now, but he would ask the pawnbroker to set it aside and keep it until he could economize on some things he did not really want so much; for that plate helped vivify his dearly beloved China, where his tea came from, and where his mandarins nodded, and their servants beat on gongs.

Van saw the old pawnbroker moving uncertainly through the shop; the folds of an old and tattered dressing gown falling back from a skinny yellow wrist as he held up a candle that flickered in the drafty ramshackle old depository of yesterdays' goods. He was grumbling and whining over his rheumatism, as usual, and he snarled at his visitant; snarled until Van stated the object of his visit in an imperious tone, according with the character of Master François of Paris; and then the pawnbroker opened his rheumy eyes a little wider, and the candle dipped like a ship in a heavy sea.

“You bought a plate?” he said. “A green plate with Chinese marks on it—funny little Chinese pictures?”

“One of six,” said Van; “and I want to buy another.”

The old man did not seem to hear, he was so busy winking his eyes and swallowing something in his throat. He made Van go ahead of him through the cluttered-up shop to his little back parlor, where a small fire of red-hot coals swung in an iron basket held up with chains; and this, you may be sure, pleased Master Van mightily, for he was very fond of real fires, and would have had one himself if he could have afforded it. The very loud-ticking clock in a mahogany case, with a mirror on which was painted a blue sea scape, stood between some pots of dried fern and grasses, and it struck seven very loudly and importantly as Van warmed his hands.

“What do you want?” asked Van. “It is late, and I am going to the theater, and I must eat and put on my dress clothes.”

He said all this very casually, as though putting on dress clothes and going to the theater were the sort of thing he did each night. It was the stuff he had drunk during the Green Hour that made him so careless; which was well for him, since it gave the old pawnbroker an idea that money was plentiful with him, and that he did not need any. The old pawnbroker was still finding some difficulty in speaking—he talked, when he did talk, as though he had died like a sucking pig with a whole round apple in his throat.

“The lady who sold those plates—she wants them back again—which is unforchunat; me having sold them. I got heirlooms myself and I got feelings. If she'd told me, I wouldn't sell—not me—not old Daddy Durand. He ain't that sort, Daddy ain't. So I'll buy your plate back, young gentleman.”

“Not you,” said Van. “I like it myself. I want another like it.”

“Which is unforchunat,” said the old man, rubbing his yellow hands that looked like the ivories in his show case. “Very unforchunat, young gentleman. And you're not the sort of young gentleman not to oblige a lady? So sell me the plate back, and I'll give you twice what you paid.”

Van remembered the pictures he could summon up by the aid of the queer little tea-house letters, and he shook his head.

“I'm not going to sell it at all,” he said, and doggedly repeated: “I want to buy another.”

For the first time the old pawnbroker viewed him quickly and with suspicion.

“Somebody's been calling on you trying to buy that plate,” he affirmed. “The stranger who was here the other night—who made out a list of all I sold the plates to—and then burned my ledger so I wouldn't give it to anybody else.”

And he went off suddenly into strange and terrible oaths that betrayed the Whitechapel and Seven Dials ancestry of him, invoking weird paralyses of mind and limb upon the stranger and those of his third and fourth generation; but quieted down just as suddenly, and cringed and fawned on Van as before, while the basket of live coals swung a livid light athwart his yellow nostrils that were pinched into a point with rage.

“I'm old and I'm poor, but a gentleman at 'art,” he said, in his wheedling way, trying to paw Van's shoulder. “And I'd give them plates to that poor little gal, yes, if fifty million duchesses of poor men's sweat was to come tapping on my winders with thousand-dollar gold pieces, and wanting them for their marble 'alls—so I would. And you ain't going to be less the gentleman than a poor tradesman—not a fine young gentleman like you. A hundred dollars!”

He spoke of the money sharply and quickly as he saw the shadow of some one about to enter the shop door lying on the floor in the light of the single shop candle.

A hundred dollars was to Van a new and complete outfit of the clothes he loved so well; he saw himself arrayed in a piece of goods—a tweed that had caught his eye in the exclusive tailors months ago. He knew of a tie that would bring out its colors to perfection; and there was a sale of shifts, wonderful silken bargains, at his haberdasher's. He took so long to accept, consequent upon picturing himself in this brave array seated in Woodmansten Inn of a Sunday, that the old man snapped out again quickly:

“Hunner' an' fifty——”

Van turned and saw him, a vulture like old figure, with an evil, anxious leer about him, and hands like unclean talons. He had read too much in books of valuable curios sold by mistake to fortunate individuals to speculate any longer over the pawnbroker's ignorance; and the wickedness of the old man's leer drove away any belief in his benevolence toward the mythical young lady of his tale.

Van was a dreamer of great dreams. He had waited many years for the portal of Romance to be lifted for him, and now that it was, he should dig his fingers into a treasure chest of golden doubloons, not of copper-penny bits. Some men do not know the face of Romance when her cheek turned to them, but Van recognized her in that old back parlor, swinging to and fro a basket of fiery-red rubies. He would be worthy of her; in the colloquy of his day, “no piker.”

“A thousand wouldn't buy it,” he said lightly.

The old pawnbroker's face became shocking to behold, and his language terse and terrible.

“You know, then?” he asked with a wicked oath.

Van knew well enough by all the rules of such a situation that he must nod, and pretend largely that he did; and he did so, and smiled, and reached for a cigarette which he lighted with a live coal, a thing he had read about and had often longed to do.

“You leave it to me,” said the old pawnbroker, nodding as the great Sphinx of the Desert might nod—as one who knows a sufficiency of all things. “We'll share, you and I. You get me the plate back. I'll sell it for you, and we'll divide it like an apple, you and I? Eh?”

“Like a crab apple,” agreed Van.

Now, as everybody knows, a crab apple generally splits into four quarters.

“You'll get twenty-five per cent,” said Van, explaining. “And I'll be at the sale and bring my plate, then. There's my address, uncle, and you can send for me when you're ready.”

He saw himself leaning over the rail of a tea ship bound for the land where the mandarins nod, and up the river where the pirate junks spread their bamboo sails. But outwardly he was calm and self-possessed as one worthy of Fortune's smiling; although the smell of the East was in his nostrils, and Mister Rudyard was ringing special temple bells to call him, and his heart was ringing a response.

“I'll take something on account, now,” he said. This was the night of nights—the goddess Fortune must have her altar candles and her punk sticks burned to her.

“Say, a hundred,” he went on coolly.

He had often wondered how it felt to jump carelessly into vehicles and bid drivers take him to places where the priceless fruits, and games, and wines of all countries were to be had; and to order of these same as much as the occasion demanded, without so much as a glance at the price of them. To loll back luxuriously in a chair in a velvet-draped stage box, and exchange personal glances with young ladies of beauty and charm, who diversified a dull life of dancing and singing in unison by occasionally accepting the invitations of young men in stage boxes to sup in gorgeous restaurants—or, at least, so Van had heard. Fortune should find him no hoarding, scraping bourgeois knave. Her gifts should be well distributed.

“Yes—about a hundred,” he said again. “Otherwise I'll do business direct, and leave you in the cold. But I imagine you could get me a better price, you old rogue! Do I get the hundred?”

It is improbable that he would have found speech such a ready servant to him if he had not drunken at the Green Hour. Here was he, a modest shipping clerk at eighteen dollars per week, coolly asking for more than a month's wages, and on security of which he knew nothing. Surely, it was a “Villonery” worthy of Francis himself. Van was beginning to take pride in his portrayal.

“And what do I know but that you'll never turn your toes this way again?” demanded the old pawnbroker morosely.

“You heard me, uncle,” said Van lightly, and prepared to go back to the snowy streets; but the old man caught him by the shoulder, wheedling, fawning, and cringing as at first—though distrust was at his vitals, and the fear of being cozened of that “century” frosted his stomach and made him faint and ill. In the end, however, he counted it out in odds and ends and scraps of coin, and Van stowed them away blithely, whistling as though such sums sagged his pockets more than infrequently.

“To-morrow morning—at nine o'clock,” said the old man, rubbing his misgiving stomach, and smelling thimblerigging with his peaked fox's nose. He stood in the door, holding his candle, smiling in wintry fashion with a mouth that was never meant for mirth.

“At noon, uncle,” yawned Van. “Merry Christmas to you”—and he went off, winking at the golden-melon moon, and, at the next corner, was so mightily amused at the jest he shared with the man up there, that he laughed loudly, and slapped a freezing leg.

“Ho—there—you,” said he to a tramp taximan, who was nursing a disgruntled face as he stood near his battered car. “Take me home,” said Mr. Van Gruenberg Luyties.

CHAPTER III.

Enter Delilah in Lamb's Fleece.

Now picture, if you can, the thoughts that were crowding in upon Van as he stood before a mirror attending deftly and adroitly to the needs of evening dress. There was between him and any millionaire of great Babylon on the Hudson no difference on this night of nights; for spending, as should a gentleman, and not asking too much in return, his hundred dollars was adequate, and to-morrow his plate and he would part company to the tune of a score of hundreds, perhaps, and he knew of a tea ship sailing late in the afternoon for the Cathay of Marco Polo, which was what the country of Confucius meant to him. To-morrow, while his fellow clerks arose betimes, to hasten to the docks, he would lie awake, but peaceful, smoking his matutinal cigarette, and, arising, dress in leisurely fashion befitting one who was that day to become intimately acquainted with coin of the realm in large quantities.

He had completed his toilet, and now, fearing to leave the plate that had written upon it in pagodaed tea houses his whole future, he opened the bosom of his stiff dress shirt—for, alas! although he knew fashion now decreed a soft one of ruffles and pleats, he had these others, and must, perforce, wear them until they frayed—and placed the precious thing within it, so that the waistband of his trousers held it in place; and, then, as he was about to extinguish his single jet of gas light, a tap came to his door, and, when he opened it, there was standing in the hall quite the most beautiful girl he had ever observed at close range; and, moreover, she was dressed in soft silks and nestling furs, and a chain showed upon her bare neck that would indicate the presence of a precious pendant hanging below it.

Now, the house where Van lived was of decent appearance, and of some age, and in it were the studios of artists and the rooms of old bachelors who disliked change and had stayed there before the neighborhood fell on evil ways, so that there was something picturesque to it, and living there did not necessitate poverty. Van had the smallest of small hall rooms for his all, but on its walls hung pictures of his beloved tea countries and draperies of Japanese design, which, though cheaply bought, looked mysterious and expensive in half lights.

As for Van, in his courtly clothes, he must needs pretend that this chamber was only his sleeping closet, and that he had other and various rooms on either side of it. All this he explained before he thought to consider why this young lady with the young and beautiful face, and the soft and expensive clothes, should come a-tapping at his door; but when one has drunken at the Green Hour and is living in imagination, no gift of Lady Fortune seems strange or incredible.

“You are Mr. Van Gruenberg Luyties?” asked the young lady.

“I am,” he said, placing a chair for her, and pushing the Japanese screen before his bed so that it was hidden.

“I am Miss Holly Lea,” she said, acknowledging his bow with a little courtly one of her own. “I have a list here”—and she took it out and showed it to him. It was a fair copy in carbon, and his own name and address were written there plainly.

“Some time ago I was very, very poor, and I sold some plates to a pawnbroker. He has sold them to different people, now, and I am trying to get them back. The other night a list of the buyers was made by a friend of mine from the pawnshop ledger, and your name is among them. Believe me, sir,” and she stretched forward two thin, girlish arms in long white mousquetaire gloves, “it is not for myself I want these plates. There is a terrible thing written on them—a very terrible thing that endangers the lives and happiness of many people. So I am buying them back to destroy them. If they fall into the hands of another person who wants them, many, many people will suffer. So I want you to sell me yours. You will, won't you? Oh, I know you will!”

Now, could a dream be more satisfying than was this one? He was successfully portraying the young aristocratic clubman in his chambers at night, visited by the unhappy, but beautiful, young lady with a secret; and she was crying him mercy. So he fell, straightway, into the spirit of his part, and wished he had a short upturned mustache to stroke, as he lounged, perfectly at his ease, in impeccable evening dress, and surveyed her tolerantly—yes, even with a certain air of patronage. He had, by the magic of a few well-told lies, metamorphosed his humble hall room into the sleeping closet of a luxurious studio apartment such as Blankinship—who had painted royalty—had upstairs; and now, quite surely, he was in no way related to a shipping clerk dreaming of China, but was a young man of money inclined to accede in a gentlemanly, courteous way to the solicitations of beauty in distress.

“You may have the plate—of course—dear lady,” he returned, stroking the place where the mustache should have been.

“And how much can I have it for?” she asked, fumbling with a bag of gold mesh.

“Dear lady!” he protested quickly. It was what a gentleman in his position must say—there was no alternative.

“Oh, you must take something,” she urged.

Now, what would a young, well-groomed clubman, who knew his book of Romance, say? Money? The thought was repulsive. But it was permitted that some fanciful graceful favor be asked, as homage to sovereign Beauty's Charm. He considered his position—here he was, a young gentleman of taste and means, attired for the evening, and about to take the usual pleasures of the town. Among such pleasures, there was one to be welcomed even by the most blasé member of the Racquet Club—the society of a lady so young, so tastefully attired, so beautiful.

“Perhaps my request will smack of impertinence, Miss Lea,” he rejoined pleasantly. “But, for an odd thing, I have no engagements to-night—I was to have dined alone at my club, where I hoped to pick up some good friend to take to theater and supper. To substitute you for that friend would be a reward beyond my wildest hopes——”

She blushed painfully, and turned her head away from him; so, discreetly and in well-bred fashion, he turned the conversation quickly, and asked if he might smoke.

“Confound Tiffany,” he said, perturbed. “I sent them my cigarette case two days ago to be repaired, and they've not sent it back.”

He knew gentlemen, such as he was at that moment, carried little flat and curved boxes of gold with jeweled monograms and crests worked upon them.

“One of the brilliants fell out of my crest,” he explained, smacking over the words as over some dainty morsel, as he went behind the bed screen and drew the plate from under the bosom of his dress shirt. There was no thought of the rail of a tea ship and a rapidly receding Manhattan sky line in his mind; those were the dreams of Van, the lucky shipping clerk, and the man who handed the plate to the young lady with an eighteenth-century bow was the young aristocrat, Van Gruenberg Luyties, standing in his studio apartment, and off to dine at his club.

“As you will, dear lady,” he said; “that is the only payment I can accept.”

“I will go with you,” she cried in a warm burst of gratitude, and hugged the plate close to her. “Wait for me,” she added, and ran out of the room. He could hear her pitpattering down the stairs.

At the curb stood a motor car, whose driver wore livery, and within sat a man whose elegancies of dress were the despair even of well-dressed kings. She gave him the plate, and she whispered long and earnestly until he nodded a somewhat unwilling assent; and then she ran back into the house, and back to Van Gruenberg Luyties again.

The man in the motor car got out and closed the door behind his tall, lean, and clear-cut form. He had hidden the plate in the same place on his own person that Van had found for it on his, and he walked several steps away from the house and stood out of view; from where he saw a slim youth and a slender girl emerge from Van's house and enter the motor, and heard the driver given instructions to take them to a great theater, where a Parisian revue, ballet, and spectacle lasted from eight to twelve.

The house caretaker, a woman with rough red arms that she held akimbo, watched them enter the motor with a look which, on her native heath, would have indicated that she had seen a thundering big hobgoblin; a look that endured until a taxicab throbbed to a standstill before the house, and another man in evening dress, seeing her there, propounded an excited question.

“Faith and the young gentleman's gone in a car the like of your own to one of thim theayters with a miss the like of which I've never laid me ould eyes upon, and him with the rint of his room not paid at all at all,” she said.

With the name of the theater on his mind, her questioner leaped back to his cab and bade his driver be off; and the silent watcher, the gentleman of the elegancies of dress, lighted a thin paper tube crested in gold, and, hearing trouble whistling like the wind in a ship's rigging, prepared to follow. But there was no hint of anything except an ample leisure in his movements, and he walked some distance before he hailed a taxicab.

The second and concluding part of this story will appear two weeks hence in the January Month-end POPULAR, on sale December 23rd.