«I wish you and the rest of the police force and all badges, horses, brass buttons and men who can't drink two glasses of brut without getting upset were at the devil,» said Remsen feelingly.
O'Roon smiled with evident satisfaction.
«Good old Remsen,» he said, affably, «I know all about it. They trailed me down and cornered me here two hours ago. There was a little row at home, you know, and I cut sticks just to show them. I don't believe I told you that my Governor was the Earl of Ardsley. Funny you should bob against them in the Park. If you damaged that horse of mine I'll never forgive you. I'm going to buy him and take him back with me. Oh, yes, and I think my sister—Lady Angela, you know—wants particularly for you to come up to the hotel with me this evening. Didn't lose my badge, did you, Remsen? I've got to turn that in at Headquarters when I resign.»
BRICKDUST ROW
Blinker was displeased. A man of less culture and poise and wealth would have sworn. But Blinker always remembered that he was a gentleman—a thing that no gentleman should do. So he merely looked bored and sardonic while he rode in a hansom to the center of disturbance, which was the Broadway office of Lawyer Oldport, who was agent for the Blinker estate.
«I don't see,» said Blinker, «why I should be always signing confounded papers. I am packed, and was to have left for the North Woods this morning. Now I must wait until to–morrow morning. I hate night trains. My best razors are, of course, at the bottom of some unidentifiable trunk. It is a plot to drive me to bay rum and a monologueing, thumb–handed barber. Give me a pen that doesn't scratch. I hate pens that scratch.»
«Sit down,» said double–chinned, gray Lawyer Oldport. «The worst has not been told you. Oh, the hardships of the rich! The papers are not yet ready to sign. They will be laid before you to–morrow at eleven. You will miss another day. Twice shall the barber tweak the helpless nose of a Blinker. Be thankful that your sorrows do not embrace a haircut.»
«If,» said Blinker, rising, «the act did not involve more signing of papers I would take my business out of your hands at once. Give me a cigar, please.»
«If,» said Lawyer Oldport, «I had cared to see an old friend's son gulped down at one mouthful by sharks I would have ordered you to take it away long ago. Now, let's quit fooling, Alexander. Besides the grinding task of signing your name some thirty times to–morrow, I must impose upon you the consideration of a matter of business—of business, and I may say humanity or right. I spoke to you about this five years ago, but you would not listen—you were in a hurry for a coaching trip, I think. The subject has come up again. The property — »
«Oh, property!» interrupted Blinker. «Dear Mr. Oldport, I think you mentioned to–morrow. Let's have it all at one dose to–morrow—signatures and property and snappy rubber bands and that smelly sealing–wax and all. Have luncheon with me? Well, I'll try to remember to drop in at eleven to–morrow. Morning.»
The Blinker wealth was in lands, tenements and hereditaments, as the legal phrase goes. Lawyer Oldport had once taken Alexander in his little pulmonary gasoline runabout to see the many buildings and rows of buildings that he owned in the city. For Alexander was sole heir. They had amused Blinker very much. The houses looked so incapable of producing the big sums of money that Lawyer Oldport kept piling up in banks for him to spend.
In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine. Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt. Everybody was out of town. But here he was kept in like a schoolboy to write his name over and over on pieces of paper. His wounds were deep.
Blinker turned his back on the fogies, and said to the club steward who had come forward with some nonsense about cold fresh salmon roe:
«Symons, I'm going to Coney Island.» He said it as one might say: «All's off; I'm going to jump into the river.»
The joke pleased Symons. He laughed within a sixteenth of a note of the audibility permitted by the laws governing employees.
«Certainly, sir,» he tittered. «Of course, sir, I think I can see you at Coney, Mr. Blinker.»
Blinker got a pager and looked up the movements of Sunday steamboats. Then he found a cab at the first corner and drove to a North River pier. He stood in line, as democratic as you or I, and bought a ticket, and was trampled upon and shoved forward until, at last, he found himself on the upper deck of the boat staring brazenly at a girl who sat alone upon a camp stool. But Blinker did not intend to be brazen; the girl was so wonderfully good looking that he forgot for one minute that he was the prince incog, and behaved just as he did in society.
She was looking at him, too, and not severely. A puff of wind threatened Blinker's straw hat. He caught it warily and settled it again. The movement gave the effect of a bow. The girl nodded and smiled, and in another instant he was seated at her side. She was dressed all in white, she was paler than Blinker imagined milkmaids and girls of humble stations to be, but she was as tidy as a cherry blossom, and her steady, supremely frank gray eyes looked out from the intrepid depths of an unshadowed and untroubled soul.
«How dare you raise your hat to me?» she asked, with a smile–redeemed severity.
«I didn't,» Blinker said, but he quickly covered the mistake by extending it to «I didn't know how to keep from it after I saw you.»
«I do not allow gentlemen to sit by me to whom I have not been introduced,» she said, with a sudden haughtiness that deceived him. He rose reluctantly, but her clear, teasing laugh brought him down to his chair again.
«I guess you weren't going far,» she declared, with beauty's magnificent self–confidence.
«Are you going to Coney Island?» asked Blinker.
«Me?» She turned upon him wide–open eyes full of bantering surprise. «Why, what a question! Can't you see that I'm riding a bicycle in the park?» Her drollery took the form of impertinence.
«And I am laying brick on a tall factory chimney,» said Blinker. «Mayn't we see Coney together? I'm all alone and I've never been there before.» «It depends,» said the girl, «on how nicely you behave. I'll consider your application until we get there.»
Blinker took pains to provide against the rejection of his application. He strove to please. To adopt the metaphor of his nonsensical phrase, he laid brick upon brick on the tall chimney of his devoirs until, at length, the structure was stable and complete. The manners of the best society come around finally to simplicity; and as the girl's way was that naturally, they were on a mutual plane of communication from the beginning.
He learned that she was twenty, and her name was Florence; that she trimmed hats in a millinery shop; that she lived in a furnished room with her best chum Ella, who was cashier in a shoe store; and that a glass of milk from the bottle on the window–sill and an egg that boils itself while you twist up your hair makes a breakfast good enough for any one. Florence laughed when she heard «Blinker.»
«Well,» she said. «It certainly slows that you have imagination. It gives the 'Smiths' a chance for a little rest, anyhow.»
They landed at Coney, and were dashed on the crest of a great human wave of mad pleasure–seekers into the walks and avenues of Fairyland gone into vaudeville.
With a curious eye, a critical mind and a fairly withheld judgment Blinker considered the temples, pagodas and kiosks of popularized delights. Hoi polloi trampled, hustled and crowded him. Basket parties bumped him; sticky children tumbled, howling, under his feet, candying his clothes. Insolent youths strolling among the booths with hard–won canes under one arm and easily won girls on the other, blew defiant smoke from cheap cigars into his face. The publicity gentlemen with megaphones, each before his own stupendous attraction, roared like Niagara in his ears. Music of all kinds that could be tortured from brass, reed, hide or string, fought in the air to grain space for its vibrations against its competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste, repelled him strongly.