“About that time Merryweather showed up. Some one had telephoned him, and he had come down in his car. He was a little frightened and pleasurably excited. He has the truly journalistic mind — saving your presence, gentlemen — and he likes anything that bites on the tongue. He looked things over and ducked his head and grinned good-naturedly. ‘Well, I guess you’ve got your new cabling out of me now, huh, Freddy?’ he said to me. I went up to the car with him. His hand shook a little as he shielded a match to light his cigarette. ‘Don’t get shaky, Freddy. That wasn’t so worse,’ he said, as he stepped into his car.

  “For the next few days I was busy seeing that the boy didn’t get buried in a trench with a brass tag around his neck. On Saturday night I got his pay envelope, and he was paid for only half of the night he was killed; the accident happened about eleven o’clock. I didn’t fool with any paymaster. On Monday morning I went straight to Merryweather’s office, stormed his bower of rose and gold, and put that envelope on the mahogany between us. ‘Merryweather,’ said I, ‘this is going to cost you something. I hear the relatives of the other fellows have all signed off for a few hundred, but this little dago hadn’t any relatives here, and he’s going to have the best lawyers in New York to prosecute his claim for him.’

  “Stanley flew into one of his quick tempers. ‘What business is it of yours, and what are you out to do us for?’

  “‘I’m out to get every cent that’s coming to this boy’s family.’

  “‘How in hell is that any concern of yours?’

  “‘Never mind that. But we’ve got one awfully good case, Stanley. I happen to be the man who reported to you on that cabling again and again. I have a copy of the letter I wrote you about it when you were at Mount Desert, and I have your reply.’

  “STANLEY whirled around in his swivel chair and reached for his checkbook. ‘How much are you gouging for?’ he asked with his baronical pout.

  “‘Just all the courts will give me. I want it settled there,’ I said, and I got up to go.

  “‘Well, you’ve chosen your class, sir,’ he broke out, ruffling up red. ‘You can stay in a hole with the guineas till the end of time for all of me. That’s where you’ve put yourself.’

  “I got my money out of that concern and sent it off to the old woman in Ischia, and that’s the end of the story. You all know Merryweather. He’s the first man in my business since his uncle died, but we manage to keep clear of each other. The Mont Blanc was a milestone for me; one road ended there and another began. It was only a little accident, such as happens in New York every day in the year, but that one happened near me. There’s a lot of waste about building a city. Usually the destruction all goes on in the cellar; it’s only when it hits high, as it did last night, that it sets us thinking. Wherever there is the greatest output of energy, wherever the blind human race is exerting itself most furiously, there’s bound to be tumult and disaster. Here we are, six men, with our pitiful few years to live and our one little chance for happiness, throwing everything we have into that conflagration on Manhattan Island, helping, with every nerve in us, with everything our brain cells can generate, with our very creature heat, to swell its glare, its noise, its luxury, and its power. Why do we do it? And why, in heaven’s name, do they do it? Ma, perche? as Cæsarino said that night in the hole. Why did he, from that lazy volcanic island, so tiny, so forgotten, where life is simple and pellucid and tranquil, shaping itself to tradition and ancestral manners as water shapes itself to the jar, why did he come so far to cast his little spark into the bonfire? And the thousands like him, from islands even smaller and more remote, why do they come, like iron dust to the magnet, like moths to the flame? There must be something wonderful coming. When the frenzy is over, when the furnace has cooled, what marvel will be left on Manhattan Island?”

  “What has been left often enough before,” said Zablowski dreamily. “What was left in India, only not half so much.”

  Hallet disregarded him. “What it will be is a new idea of some sort. That’s all that ever comes, really. That’s what we are all the slaves of, though we don’t know it. It’s the whip that cracks over us till we drop. Even Merryweather — and that’s where the gods have the laugh on him — every firm he crushes to the wall, every deal he puts through, every cocktail he pours down his throat, he does it in the service of this unborn Idea, that he will never know anything about. Some day it will dawn, serene and clear, and your Moloch on the Singer Tower over there will get down and do it Asian obeisance.”

  WE reflected upon this while the launch, returning toward the city, ruffled through the dark furrows of water that kept rolling up into the light. Johnson looked back at the black sea road and said quietly:

  “Well, anyhow, we are the people who are doing it, and whatever it is, it will be ours.”

  Hallet laughed. “Don’t call anything ours, Johnson, while Zablowski is around.”

  “Zablowski,” Johnson said irritably, “why don’t you ever hit back?”

  A Gold Slipper

  MARSHALL MCKANN FOLLOWED his wife and her friend Mrs. Post down the aisle and up the steps to the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall with an ill-concealed feeling of grievance. Heaven knew he never went to concerts, and to be mounted upon the stage in this fashion, as if he were a crank from Sewickley, or some unfortunate with a musical wife, was ludicrous. A man went to concerts when he was courting, while he was a junior partner. When he became a person of substance he stopped that sort of nonsense. His wife, too, was a sensible person, the daughter of an old Pittsburg family as solid and well-rooted as the McKanns. She would never have bothered him about this concert had not the meddlesome Mrs. Post arrived to pay her a visit. Mrs. Post was an old school friend of Mrs. McKann, and because she lived in Cincinnati she was always keeping up with the world and talking about things in which no one else was interested, music among them. She was an aggressive lady, with weighty opinions, and a deep voice like a jovial bassoon. She had arrived only last night, and at dinner she brought it out that she could on no account miss Kitty Ayrshire’s recital; it was, she said, the sort of thing one couldn’t afford to miss.

  When McKann went into town in the morning he found that every seat in the music-hall was sold. He telephoned his wife to that effect, and, thinking he had settled the matter, made his reservation on the 11.25 train for New York. He was unable to get a drawing-room because this same Kitty Ayrshire had taken the last one. He had not intended going to New York until the following week, but he preferred to be absent during Mrs. Post’s incumbency.

  In the middle of the morning, when he was deep in his correspondence, his wife called him up to say the enterprising Mrs. Post had telephoned some musical friends in Sewickley and had found that two hundred folding-chairs were to be placed on the stage of the concert-hall, behind the piano, and that they would be on sale at noon. Would he please get seats in the front row? McKann asked if they would not excuse him, since he was going over to New York on the late train, would be tired, and would not have time to dress, etc. No, not at all. It would be foolish for two women to trail up to the stage unattended. Mrs. Post’s husband always accompanied her to concerts, and she expected that much attention from her host. He needn’t dress, and he could take a taxi from the concert-hall to the East Liberty station.

  The outcome of it all was that, though his bag was at the station, here was McKann, in the worst possible humor, facing the large audience to which he was well known, and sitting among a lot of music students and excitable old maids. Only the desperately zealous or the morbidly curious would endure two hours in those wooden chairs, and he sat in the front row of this hectic body, somehow made a party to a transaction for which he had the utmost contempt.

  When McKann had been in Paris, Kitty Ayrshire was singing at the Comique, and he wouldn’t go to hear her — even there, where one found so little that was better to do. She was too much talked about, too much advertised; always being thrust in an American’s face as if she were something to be proud of. Perfumes and petticoats and cutlets were named for her. Some one had pointed Kitty out to him one afternoon when she was driving in the Bois with a French composer — old enough, he judged, to be her father — who was said to be infatuated, overwhelmed with her, and had told him that this was one of the historic passions of old age. McKann had looked at her, but she was so befrilled and befeathered that he caught nothing but a graceful outline and a small, dark head above a white ostrich boa. He noted with disgust the stooped shoulders and white imperial of the silk-hatted man beside her, and the senescent line of his back. McKann had told his wife about this unpleasing sight the night before, while he was undressing, when he was making every possible effort to avert this concert party. But Bessie only looked superior and said she wished to hear Kitty Ayrshire sing, and that her “private life” was something in which she had no interest.

  Well, here he was, hot and uncomfortable, in a chair much too small for him, with a row of blinding footlights glaring in his eyes. Suddenly the door at his right elbow opened. Their seats were at one end of the front row; he had thought they would be less conspicuous there than in the center, and he had not foreseen that the singer would walk over him every time she came upon the stage. Her velvet train brushed against his trousers as she passed him. The applause which greeted her was neither overwhelming nor prolonged. Her conservative audience did not know exactly how to accept her toilette. They were accustomed to dignified concert gowns, like those which Pittsburg matrons wore at their daughters’ coming-out tea. Kitty’s gown that evening was really quite outrageous — the repartee of a conscienceless Parisian designer who took her hint that she wished something that would be entirely novel in the States. To-day, after we have all of us, even in the uttermost provinces, been educated by Baskt and the various Ballets Russes, we would accept such a gown without distrust; but then it was a little disconcerting, even to the well-disposed. It was constructed of a yard or two of green velvet — a reviling, shrieking green which would have made a fright of any woman who had not inextinguishable beauty — and it was made without armholes, a device to which we were then so unaccustomed that it was nothing less than alarming. The velvet skirt split back from a transparent gold-lace petticoat, gold stockings, gold slippers. The narrow train was, apparently, looped to both ankles, and it kept curling about her feet like a serpent’s tail, turning up its gold lining as if it were squirming over on its back. It was not, we felt, a costume in which to sing Mozart and Handel and Beethoven. Kitty felt the chill in the air, and it amused her. She liked to be thought a brilliant artist by other artists, but by the world at large she liked to be thought a daring creature. She had every reason to believe, from experience and from example, that to shock the great crowd was the surest way to get its money and to make her name a household word. Nobody ever became a household word by being an artist, surely, and you were not a thoroughly paying proposition until your name meant something on the sidewalk and in the barber-shop. Kitty studied her audience with an appraising eye. She liked the stimulus of this disapprobation. There was some zest about getting through to a hard-shelled public. She felt keen and interested; she knew that she would give such a recital as cannot often be heard for money. She nodded gaily to the young man at the piano, fell into an attitude of seriousness, and began the group of Beethoven and Mozart songs.

  Though McKann would not have admitted it, there were really a great many people in the concert-hall who knew what the prodigal daughter of their country was singing, and how well she was doing it. They thawed gradually under the beauty of her voice and the subtlety of her interpretation. She had sung seldom in concert then, and they had supposed her very dependent upon the accessories of opera. Clean singing, finished artistry, were not what they expected from her. They began to feel, even, the wayward charm of her personality.

  McKann, who stared coldly up at the balconies during her first song, during the second began to glance cautiously at the green apparition before him. He was vexed with her for having retained a débutante figure. He comfortably classed all singers — especially operatic singers — as “fat Dutchwomen” or “shifty Sadies,” and Kitty would not fit into his clever generalization. She displayed, under his nose, the only kind of figure he considered worth looking at — that of a very young girl, supple and sinuous and quicksilverish; thin, eager shoulders, polished white arms that were nowhere too fat and nowhere too thin. McKann found it agreeable to look at Kitty, but when he saw that the authoritative Mrs. Post, red as a turkey-cock with opinions she was bursting to impart, was studying and appraising the singer through her lorgnette, he looked indifferently out into the house again. He felt for his watch, but his wife touched him warningly with her elbow — which he noticed was not at all like Kitty’s.

  When Miss Ayrshire finished her first group of songs, her audience expressed its approval positively, but guardedly. She smiled bewitchingly upon the people in front of her, glanced up at the balconies, and then turned to the company huddled on the stage behind her. After her gay and careless bows, she retreated toward the stage door. As she passed McKann, she again brushed lightly against him, and this time she paused long enough to glance down at him and murmur, “Pardon.” In the moment her bright, curious eyes rested upon him McKann seemed to see himself as if she were holding a mirror up before him. He beheld himself a heavy, solid figure, unsuitably clad for the time and place, with a florid, square face, well-vizored with good living and sane opinions — an inexpressive countenance. Not a rock face, exactly, but a kind of pressed-brick-and-cement face, a “business” face upon which years and feelings had made no mark — in which cocktails might eventually blast out a few hollows. He had never seen himself so distinctly in his shaving-glass as he did in that instant when Kitty Ayrshire’s liquid eye held him, when her bright, inquiring glance roamed over his person. When her prehensile train curled over his boot and she was gone, his wife turned to him and said in the tone of approbation one uses when an infant manifests its groping intelligence, “Very gracious of her, I’m sure.” Mrs. Post nodded oracularly. McKann grunted.

  Kitty began her second number, a group of romantic German songs which were altogether more her affair than her first number. When she turned once to acknowledge the applause behind her, she caught McKann in the act of yawning behind his hand — he of course wore no gloves — and he thought she frowned a little. This did not embarrass him, but it somehow made him feel important. When she retired after the second part of the programme, she again looked him over curiously as she passed, and she took marked precaution that her dress did not touch him. Mrs. Post and his wife again remarked upon her consideration.

  The final number was made up of modern French songs which Kitty sang enchantingly, and at last had her way with her frigid public. While she was coming back again and again to smile and curtsy, McKann whispered to his wife that if there were to be encores he had better make a dash for his train.

  “Not at all,” put in Mrs. Post. “Kitty is going on the same train. She sings in ‘Faust’ at the opera to-morrow night, so she’ll take no chances.”

  McKann once more told himself how sorry he felt for Post. At last Miss Ayrshire returned, escorted by her accompanist, and gave the people what she of course knew they wanted, the most popular aria from the French opera of which the title-rôle had become synonymous with her name — an opera written for her and to her and round about her by the veteran French composer who so much admired her, the last and not the palest flash of his creative fire. This brought her audience all the way. They clamored for more of it, but she was not to be coerced. She had been unyielding through storms to which this was a summer breeze. She came on once more, shrugged her shoulders, blew them a kiss, and was gone. Her last smile was for that uncomfortable part of her audience seated behind her, and she looked with recognition at McKann and his ladies as she nodded good night to the wooden chairs.

  McKann hurried his charges into the foyer by the nearest exit and put them into his motor. Then he went over to the Schenley to have a glass of beer and a rarebit before train time. He had not, he admitted to himself, been so much bored as he pretended. The minx herself was well enough, but it was absurd in his fellow-townsmen to look owlish and uplifted about her. He had no rooted dislike for pretty women; he even didn’t deny that gay girls had their place in the world, but they ought to be kept in their place. He was born a Presbyterian, just as he was born a McKann. He sat in his pew in the First Church every Sunday, and he never missed a presbytery meeting when he was in town. His religion was not very spiritual, certainly, but it was substantial and concrete, made up of good, hard convictions and opinions. It had something to do with citizenship, with whom one ought to marry, with the coal business, in which his own name was powerful, with the Republican party, and with all majorities and established precedents. He was hostile to fads, to enthusiasms, to individualism, to all changes except in mining machinery and in methods of transportation.

  His equanimity restored by his lunch at the Schenley, McKann lit a big cigar, got into his taxi, and bowled off through the sleet. There was not a sound to be heard or a light to be seen. The ice glittered on the pavement and on the naked trees. No restless feet were abroad. At eleven o’clock the rows of small, comfortable houses looked as empty of the troublesome bubble of life as the Allegheny cemetery itself. Suddenly the cab stopped, and McKann thrust his head out of the window. A woman was standing in the middle of the street addressing his driver in a tone of excitement. Over against the curb a lone electric stood despondent in the storm. The young woman, her cloak blowing about her, turned from the driver to McKann himself, speaking rapidly and somewhat incoherently.