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The Country of Elusion

Short Stories

"Fox-in-the-Morning"

A Bird of Bagdad

A Blackjack Bargainer

A Call Loan

A Chaparral Christmas Gift

A Chaparral Prince

A Comedy in Rubber

A Cosmopolite in a Cafe

A Departmental Case

A Dinner at--------*

A Double-Dyed Deceiver

A Fog in Santone

A Harlem Tragedy

A Lickpenny Lover

A Little Local Colour

A Little Talk about Mobs

A Madison Square Arabian Night

A Matter of Mean Elevation

A Midsummer Knight's Dream

A Midsummer Masquerade

A Municipal Report

A Newspaper Story

A Night in New Arabia

A Philistine in Bohemia

A Poor Rule

A Ramble in Aphasia

A Retrieved Reformation

A Ruler of Men

A Sacrifice Hit

A Service of Love

A Snapshot at the President

A Strange Story

A Technical Error

A Tempered Wind

According to Their Lights

After Twenty Years

An Adjustment of Nature

An Afternoon Miracle

An Apology

An Unfinished Christmas Story

An Unfinished Story

Aristocracy Versus Hash

Art and the Bronco

At Arms With Morpheus

Babes in the Jungle

Best-Seller

Between Rounds

Bexar Scrip No. 2692

Blind Man's Holiday

Brickdust Row

Buried Treasure

By Courier

Calloway's Code

Caught

Cherchez La Femme

Christmas by Injunction

Compliments of the Season

Confessions of a Humorist

Conscience in Art

Cupid a La Carte

Cupid's Exile Number Two

Dickey

Dougherty's Eye-Opener

Elsie in New York

Extradited from Bohemia

Fickle Fortune or How Gladys Hustled

Friends in San Rosario

From Each According to His Ability

From the Cabby's Seat

Georgia's Ruling

Girl

He Also Serves

Hearts and Crosses

Hearts and Hands

Helping the Other Fellow

Holding Up a Train

Hostages to Momus

Hygeia at the Solito

Innocents of Broadway

Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet

Jimmy Hayes and Muriel

Law and Order

Let Me Feel Your Pulse

Little Speck in Garnered Fruit

Lord Oakhurst's Curse

Lost on Dress Parade

Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches

Makes the Whole World Kin

Mammon and the Archer

Man About Town

Masters of Arts

Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

Modern Rural Sports

Money Maze

Nemesis and the Candy Man

New York by Camp Fire Light

Next to Reading Matter

No Story

October and June

On Behalf of the Management

One Dollar's Worth

One Thousand Dollars

Out of Nazareth

Past One at Rooney's

Phoebe

Proof of the Pudding

Psyche and the Pskyscraper

Queries and Answers

Roads of Destiny

Roses, Ruses and Romance

Rouge et Noir

Round the Circle

Rus in Urbe

Schools and Schools

Seats of the Haughty

Shearing the Wolf

Ships

Shoes

Sisters of the Golden Circle

Smith

Sociology in Serge and Straw

Sound and Fury

Springtime a La Carte

Squaring the Circle

Strictly Business

Strictly Business

Suite Homes and Their Romance

Telemachus, Friend

The Admiral

The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes

The Assessor of Success

The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear

The Badge of Policeman O'Roon

The Brief Debut of Tildy

The Buyer From Cactus City

The Caballero's Way

The Cactus

The Caliph and the Cad

The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock

The Call of the Tame

The Chair of Philanthromathematics

The Champion of the Weather

The Church with an Overshot-Wheel

The City of Dreadful Night

The Clarion Call

The Coming-Out of Maggie

The Complete Life of John Hopkins

The Cop and the Anthem

The Count and the Wedding Guest

The Country of Elusion

The Day Resurgent

The Day We Celebrate

The Defeat of the City

The Detective Detector

The Diamond of Kali

The Discounters of Money

The Dog and the Playlet

The Door of Unrest

The Dream

The Duel

The Duplicity of Hargraves

The Easter of the Soul

The Emancipation of Billy

The Enchanted Kiss

The Enchanted Profile

The Ethics of Pig

The Exact Science of Matrimony

The Ferry of Unfulfilment

The Fifth Wheel

The Flag Paramount

The Fool-Killer

The Foreign Policy of Company 99

The Fourth in Salvador

The Friendly Call

The Furnished Room

The Gift of the Magi

The Girl and the Graft

The Girl and the Habit

The Gold That Glittered

The Greater Coney

The Green Door

The Guardian of the Accolade

The Guilty Party - An East Side Tragedy

The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss

The Hand that Riles the World

The Handbook of Hymen

The Harbinger

The Head-Hunter

The Hiding of Black Bill

The Higher Abdication

The Higher Pragmatism

The Hypotheses of Failure

The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson

The Lady Higher Up

The Last Leaf

The Last of the Troubadours

The Lonesome Road

The Lost Blend

The Lotus And The Bottle

The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

The Making of a New Yorker

The Man Higher Up

The Marionettes

The Marquis and Miss Sally

The Marry Month of May

The Memento

The Missing Chord

The Moment of Victory

The Octopus Marooned

The Passing of Black Eagle

The Pendulum

The Phonograph and the Graft

The Pimienta Pancakes

The Plutonian Fire

The Poet and the Peasant

The Pride of the Cities

The Princess and the Puma

The Prisoner of Zembla

The Proem

The Purple Dress

The Ransom of Mack

The Ransom of Red Chief

The Rathskeller and the Rose

The Red Roses of Tonia

The Reformation of Calliope

The Remnants of the Code

The Renaissance at Charleroi

The Roads We Take

The Robe of Peace

The Romance of a Busy Broker

The Rose of Dixie

The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball

The Rubber Plant's Story

The Shamrock and the Palm

The Shocks of Doom

The Skylight Room

The Sleuths

The Snow Man

The Social Triangle

The Song and the Sergeant

The Sparrows in Madison Square

The Sphinx Apple

The Tale of a Tainted Tenner

The Theory and the Hound

The Thing's the Play

The Third Ingredient

The Trimmed Lamp

The Unknown Quantity

The Unprofitable Servant

The Venturers

The Vitagraphoscope

The Voice of the City

The Whirligig of Life

The World and the Door

Thimble, Thimble

Tictocq

To Him Who Waits

Tobin's Palm

Tommy's Burglar

Tracked to Doom

Transformation of Martin Burney

Transients in Arcadia

Two Recalls

Two Renegades

Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen

Ulysses and the Dogman

Vanity and Some Sables

What You Want

While the Auto Waits

Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking

Witches' Loaves







The cunning writer will choose an indefinable subject, for he
can then set down his theory of what it is; and next, at length,
his conception of what it is not--and lo! his paper is covered.
Therefore let us follow the prolix and unmapable trail into that
mooted country, Bohemia.

Grainger, sub-editor of _Doc's Magazine_, closed his roll-top desk,
put on his hat, walked into the hall, punched the "down" button, and
waited for the elevator.

Grainger's day had been trying. The chief had tried to ruin the
magazine a dozen times by going against Grainger's ideas for running
it. A lady whose grandfather had fought with McClellan had brought a
portfolio of poems in person.

Grainger was curator of the Lion's House of the magazine. That day
he had "lunched" an Arctic explorer, a short-story writer, and the
famous conductor of a slaughter-house expose. Consequently his mind
was in a whirl of icebergs, Maupassant, and trichinosis.

But there was a surcease and a recourse; there was Bohemia. He would
seek distraction there; and, let's see--he would call by for Mary
Adrian.

Half an hour later he threaded his way like a Brazilian orchid-hunter
through the palm forest in the tiled entrance hall of the "Idealia"
apartment-house. One day the christeners of apartment-houses and the
cognominators of sleeping-cars will meet, and there will be some
jealous and sanguinary knifing.

The clerk breathed Grainger's name so languidly into the house
telephone that it seemed it must surely drop, from sheer inertia,
down to the janitor's regions. But, at length, it soared dilatorily
up to Miss Adrian's ear. Certainly, Mr. Grainger was to come up
immediately.

A colored maid with an Eliza-crossing-the-ice expression opened
the door of the apartment for him. Grainger walked sideways down
the narrow hall. A bunch of burnt umber hair and a sea-green eye
appeared in the crack of a door. A long, white, undraped arm came
out, barring the way.

"So glad you came, Ricky, instead of any of the others," said
the eye. "Light a cigarette and give it to me. Going to take me
to dinner? Fine. Go into the front room till I finish dressing.
But don't sit in your usual chair. There's pie in it--Meringue.
Kappelman threw it at Reeves last evening while he was reciting.
Sophy has just come to straighten up. Is it lit? Thanks. There's
Scotch on the mantel--oh, no, it isn't,--that's chartreuse. Ask
Sophy to find you some. I won't be long."

Grainger escaped the meringue. As he waited his spirits sank still
lower. The atmosphere of the room was as vapid as a zephyr wandering
over a Vesuvian lava-bed. Relics of some feast lay about the room,
scattered in places where even a prowling cat would have been
surprised to find them. A straggling cluster of deep red roses in
a marmalade jar bowed their heads over tobacco ashes and unwashed
goblets. A chafing-dish stood on the piano; a leaf of sheet music
supported a stack of sandwiches in a chair.

Mary came in, dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black
fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to
summon visions ranging between the extremes of man's experience.
Spelled with an "e" it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous
dreams; with an "a" it drapes lamentation and woe.

That evening they went to the Cafe Andre. And, as people would
confide to you in a whisper that Andre's was the only truly Bohemian
restaurant in town, it may be well to follow them.

Andre began his professional career as a waiter in a Bowery ten-cent
eating-house. Had you seen him there you would have called him
tough--to yourself. Not aloud, for he would have "soaked" you as
quickly as he would have soaked his thumb in your coffee. He saved
money and started a basement _table d'hote_ in Eighth (or Ninth)
Street. One afternoon Andre drank too much absinthe. He announced to
his startled family that he was the Grand Llama of Thibet, therefore
requiring an empty audience hall in which to be worshiped. He moved
all the tables and chairs from the restaurant into the back yard,
wrapped a red table-cloth around himself, and sat on a step-ladder
for a throne. When the diners began to arrive, madame, in a flurry of
despair, laid cloths and ushered them, trembling, outside. Between
the tables clothes-lines were stretched, bearing the family wash. A
party of Bohemia hunters greeted the artistic innovation with shrieks
and acclamations of delight. That week's washing was not taken in for
two years. When Andre came to his senses he had the menu printed on
stiffly starched cuffs, and served the ices in little wooden tubs.
Next he took down his sign and darkened the front of the house.
When you went there to dine you fumbled for an electric button and
pressed it. A lookout slid open a panel in the door, looked at you
suspiciously, and asked if you were acquainted with Senator Herodotus
Q. McMilligan, of the Chickasaw Nation. If you were, you were
admitted and allowed to dine. If you were not, you were admitted and
allowed to dine. There you have one of the abiding principles of
Bohemia. When Andre had accumulated $20,000 he moved up-town, near
Broadway, in the fierce light that beats upon the thrown-down.
There we find him and leave him, with customers in pearls and
automobile veils, striving to catch his excellently graduated nod
of recognition.

There is a large round table in the northeast corner of Andre's at
which six can sit. To this table Grainger and Mary Adrian made their
way. Kappelman and Reeves were already there. And Miss Tooker, who
designed the May cover for the _Ladies' Notathome Magazine_. And Mrs.
Pothunter, who never drank anything but black and white highballs,
being in mourning for her husband, who--oh, I've forgotten what he
did--died, like as not.

Spaghetti-weary reader, wouldst take one penny-in-the-slot peep into
the fair land of Bohemia? Then look; and when you think you have
seen it you have not. And it is neither thimbleriggery nor
astigmatism.

The walls of the Cafe Andre were covered with original sketches by
the artists who furnished much of the color and sound of the place.
Fair woman furnished the theme for the bulk of the drawings. When
you say "sirens and siphons" you come near to estimating the
alliterative atmosphere of Andre's.

First, I want you to meet my friend, Miss Adrian. Miss Tooker and
Mrs. Pothunter you already know. While she tucks in the fingers of
her elbow gloves you shall have her daguerreotype. So faint and
uncertain shall the portrait be:

Age, somewhere between twenty-seven and highneck evening dresses.
Camaraderie in large bunches--whatever the fearful word may mean.
Habitat--anywhere from Seattle to Terra del Fuego. Temperament
uncharted--she let Reeves squeeze her hand after he recited one of
his poems; but she counted the change after sending him out with a
dollar to buy some pickled pig's feet. Deportment 75 out of a
possible 100. Morals 100.

Mary was one of the princesses of Bohemia. In the first place, it
was a royal and a daring thing to have been named Mary. There are
twenty Fifines and Heloises to one Mary in the Country of Elusion.

Now her gloves are tucked in. Miss Tooker has assumed a June poster
pose; Mrs. Pothunter has bitten her lips to make the red show;
Reeves has several times felt his coat to make sure that his latest
poem is in the pocket. (It had been neatly typewritten; but he has
copied it on the backs of letters with a pencil.) Kappelman is
underhandedly watching the clock. It is ten minutes to nine. When
the hour comes it is to remind him of a story. Synopsis: A French
girl says to her suitor: "Did you ask my father for my hand at nine
o'clock this morning, as you said you would?" "I did not," he.
replies. "At nine o'clock I was fighting a duel with swords in the
Bois de Boulogne." "Coward!" she hisses.

The dinner was ordered. You know how the Bohemian feast of reason
keeps up with the courses. Humor with the oysters; wit with the
soup; repartee with the entree; brag with the roast; knocks for
Whistler and Kipling with the salad; songs with the coffee; the
slapsticks with the cordials.

Between Miss Adrian's eyebrows was the pucker that shows the intense
strain it requires to be at ease in Bohemia. Pat must come each
sally, _mot_, and epigram. Every second of deliberation upon a reply
costs you a bay leaf. Fine as a hair, a line began to curve from her
nostrils to her mouth. To hold her own not a chance must be missed.
A sentence addressed to her must be as a piccolo, each word of it
a stop, which she must be prepared to seize upon and play. And she
must always be quicker than a Micmac Indian to paddle the light
canoe of conversation away from the rocks in the rapids that flow
from the Pierian spring. For, plodding reader, the handwriting on
the wall in the banquet hall of Bohemia is "_Laisser faire_." The
gray ghost that sometimes peeps through the rings of smoke is that
of slain old King Convention. Freedom is the tyrant that holds them
in slavery.

As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather
than for the shaker of Attic salt. Miss Tooker, with an elbow to
business, leaned across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her
glass of wine.

"Now while you are fed and in good humor," she said, "I want to
make a suggestion to you about a new cover."

"A good idea," said Grainger, mopping the tablecloth with his
napkin. "I'll speak to the waiter about it."

Kappelman, the painter, was the cut-up. As a piece of delicate
Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room
with a waiter. That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous,
worthy, tax-paying, art-despising biped, released himself from
the unequal encounter, carried his professional smile back to the
dumb-waiter and dropped it down the shaft to eternal oblivion.
Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave. Mrs. Pothunter told
the story of the man who met the widow on the train. Miss Adrian
hummed what is still called a _chanson_ in the cafes of Bridgeport.
Grainger edited each individual effort with his assistant editor's
smile, which meant: "Great! but you'll have to send them in through
the regular channels. If I were the chief now--but you know how it
is."

And soon the head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that
the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so
out all trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with
gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed
by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world.

Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of
the Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small
hand-bag, 'phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station,
boarded a 12.55 commuter's train, rode four hours with her
burnt-umber head bobbing against the red-plush back of the seat,
and landed during a fresh, stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted
station, the size of a peach crate, called Crocusville.

She walked a mile and clicked the latch of a gate. A bare, brown
cottage stood twenty yards back; an old man with a pearl-white,
Calvinistic face and clothes dyed blacker than a raven in a
coal-mine was washing his hands in a tin basin on the front porch.

"How are you, father?" said Mary timidly.

"I am as well as Providence permits, Mary Ann. You will find your
mother in the kitchen."

In the kitchen a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the
forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for
breakfast. Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with a
thrill in her heart.

For breakfast there were grace, cold bread, potatoes, bacon, and
tea.

"You are pursuing the same avocation in the city concerning which
you have advised us from time to time by letter, I trust," said her
father.

"Yes," said Mary, "I am still reviewing books for the same
publication."

After breakfast she helped wash the dishes, and then all three sat
in straight-back chairs in the bare-floored parlor.

"It is my custom," said the old man, "on the Sabbath day to read
aloud from the great work entitled the 'Apology for Authorized and
Set Forms of Liturgy,' by the ecclesiastical philosopher and revered
theologian, Jeremy Taylor."

"I know it," said Mary blissfully, folding her hands.

For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the
notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello. Mary sat gloating
in the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden
chair brought her. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect
as the martyr's. Jeremy's minor chords soothed her like the music of
a tom-tom. "Why, oh why," she said to herself, "does some one not
write words to it?"

At eleven they went to church in Crocusville. The back of the pine
bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would
have brought St. Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar. The
preacher singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head
the damnation of the world. At each side of her an adamant parent
held her rigidly to the bar of judgment. An ant crawled upon her
neck, but she dared not move. She lowered her eyes before the
congregation--a hundred-eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through
which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a
delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the clutch of
the tyrant, Freedom. Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent
cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child. She was
hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait-jacketed, silenced,
ordered. When they came out the minister stopped to greet them.
Mary could only hang her head and answer "Yes, sir," and "No, sir,"
to his questions. When she saw that the other women carried their
hymn-books at their waists with their left hands, she blushed and
moved hers there, too, from her right.

She took the three-o'clock train back to the city. At nine she sat
at the round table for dinner in the Cafe Andre. Nearly the same
crowd was there.

"Where have you been to-day?" asked Mrs. Pothunter. "I 'phoned to
you at twelve."

"I have been away in Bohemia," answered Mary, with a mystic smile.

There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax. For I
was to have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little
country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship
in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and
treasure and move away beyond the hills. It is a hillside that you
turn your head to peer at from the windows of the Through Express.

At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness
and slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her.
Instantly she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that
he shrank down, sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across
his leering features. And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of
great wings come upon a flock of chattering sparrows. One had broken
the paramount law of sham-Bohemia--the law of "_Laisser faire_." The
shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received.
With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the play-room of his
pupils was that blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves
and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at
their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it;
it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the
fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling-house doors of the
Heart.

With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exaggerated
pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange
of unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a light-hearted
exit I must take leave of my Bohemian party. Mary has robbed me of my
climax; and she may go.

But I am not defeated. Somewhere there exists a great vault miles
broad and miles long--more capacious than the champagne caves of
France. In that vault are stored the anticlimaxes that should have
been tagged to all the stories that have been told in the world. I
shall cheat that vault of one deposit.

Minnie Brown, with her aunt, came from Crocusville down to the city
to see the sights. And because she had escorted me to fishless trout
streams and exhibited to me open-plumbed waterfalls and broken my
camera while I Julyed in her village, I must escort her to the hives
containing the synthetic clover honey of town.

Especially did the custom-made Bohemia charm her. The spaghetti
wound its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her
belief in the existence of commercialism in the world; she was
dared and enchanted by the rugose wit that can be churned out of
California claret.

But one evening I got her away from the smell of halibut and
linoleum long enough to read to her the manuscript of this story,
which then ended before her entrance into it. I read it to her
because I knew that all the printing-presses in the world were
running to try to please her and some others. And I asked her about
it.

"I didn't quite catch the trains," said she. "How long was Mary in
Crocusville?"

"Ten hours and five minutes," I replied.

"Well, then, the story may do," said Minnie. "But if she had stayed
there a week Kappelman would have got his kiss."




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