Christopher Morley

“ The two chattered with such abandon, smoked so many cigarettes, and seemed so thoroughly at home that Lester envied them their savoir. Manoeuvring his spaghetti and parmesan, his gaze passed as direct as the cartoonist's dotted line to the charming contour of the stenographer's cheek and neck. His equanimity was quite overset. Never before had he gazed with seeing eye upon the demure creature sorting out Mr. Arundel's mind into paragraphs. Human nature is what it is; let Lester's first thought be confessed: “I wonder if she knows what my salary is?” ”

“ The place reminded me of the little café in Jamaica where Sylvia and Edwards and I had eaten together.
My mind was full of the picture of the two, and his face as he leaned across the table toward her. I thought that I had never seen a couple who so deserved happiness, or who had fought harder to earn it. What was the subtle appeal in this play that made it react so strangely upon him? The tragedy of Dunbar in the piece, the sacrifice of the poor, well-meaning fellow whose virtue always seemed to turn and rend him, did this echo some secret experience in his own life? ”

“ Perhaps you don't know what it is to be thrown, ignorant and timid, into a place where everything is utterly strange—particularly a place as huge, violent, and hasty as New York. Judy, aged twenty-one, from a little village near Queenstown, was incapable of distinguishing, in the roaring voice of the city, that undertone of helpful kindness that is really there. On the same steamer came the widow of a famous Irish recusant and hungerstriker, and there were ten thousand people massed in West Street to cheer her. Judy heard the shouts of the crowd, and saw the lines of policemen on the pier. ”

“ I think Love ought to be sacred, not used as mere circulation bait for a newspaper.”
Ann was a high-spirited girl, and this blunt criticism touched her in that vivid, quivering region of the mind where no woman stops to reason. But she made an honest attempt to be patient.
“But, Arthur,” she said; “there's nothing really cheap and degraded in trying to help others who haven't had the same advantages we have. I know a lot of the letters I print are silly and absurd, but not more so than some of the books you publish.” ”

“ THE CURIOUS CASE OF KENELM DIGBY WE HAD been dining together at the Hotel Ansonia, and as we walked up the shining breezy channel of Broadwhat is the commonest phrase of the detectives? To put two and two together. What else, I ask you, is the poet doing all the time but putting two and two together—two rhymes, and then two rhymes more, and making a quatrain.
He swung his stick, puffed strongly at his cigar, and amorously surveyed the deep blue of the night, against which the huge blocks of apartment houses spread their random patterns of lighted windows. ”

“ Harry Bennett sipped his breakfast coffee grimly. Its savour had departed: for ninety seconds earlier Mrs. Bennett had fled upstairs in a flush of anger and tears. In five minutes he would have to run for the train; and what man can soothe an outraged wife in five minutes? He ate his toast without relish, gazing sourly on the blue-and-white imitation Copenhagen china, the pretty little porcelain marmalade pot, and the big silver coffee-urn. ”

“ From sheer force of habit, her heart lightened a little as she climbed the stairs and entered the familiar place, where festoons of red and green paper decoration criss-crossed above the warm, soup-flavoured, tobacco-fogged room. There was a clatter of thick dishes and a clamour of talk.
“One?” said the head waiter, his wiry black hair standing erect as though in surprise.
She nodded, and followed him down the narrow aisle. There was the little table, in the corner under the stair, where they had always sat. A man was there, reading a newspaper.... ”

“ They have all grown, in one mood or another, out of the various life of Grub Street, suggested by adventures with publishers, booksellers, magazine editors, newspaper men, theatrical producers, commuters, and poets major and minor. If they have any appeal at all, it must be as an honest (though perhaps sometimes too jocular) picture of the excitements that gratify the career of young men who embark upon the ocean of ink, and (let us not forget) those much-enduring Titanias who consent to share their vicissitudes. ”

“ The desperate inequality of married life pierced his heart. Why should he have to accept in silence tart remarks uttered by his wife, while the least savagery of his own was cause for tears?
He rushed upstairs to say a few consoling words. The bedroom door was locked. Compassion fled, and he growled furiously through the panels. Then he ran hotly for the train.
It seems unreasonable: but the lives of human beings are not guided by reason. Harry had come to the conclusion that the silver coffee-urn was at the bottom of all their squabbles. ”

“ Has he no feeling at all for art?” Pearl laughed—the pure, musical laugh of careless girlishness, but the recording angel caught in the nimble chords a faint overtone of something else—like the tinkle of ice in a misty tumbler. “Oh, he has his own ideas about art,” she said. “He's taken to writing poetry himself. You never heard such stuff—I've been meaning to tell you. What does 'pullulate' mean?”
Lester's valiant heart, Lester's manly hands that had acted as a muff on a Riverside Drive bus, trembled and stiffened. “It 'pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme,” she quoted gayly. ”

“ Flaherty, the lodging-house lady in Brooklyn, was telephoned to, and promised to send her small boy to meet the girl at the station.
It happened to be the eve of the genial Saint Valentine's Day. Shop windows were gay with pleasantly exaggerated symbols of his romantic power. Winter afternoons in the city are cruel to the unfortunate, for the throng of the streets the light and lure of the scene, make loneliness all the worse if there is trouble in your heart.
Judy sat in the waiting room of the Long Island terminal in Brooklyn, and tears were on her face. ”

“ Up to the present time, as far as I know, Basswood remains the only bookseller who has ever been electrocuted.
GLORIA AND THE GARDEN OF SWEDEN IT WAS one of those gilded October days when the serene sunshine is as soft and tawny as candle-light; when the air is thin and sharp in the early mornings, but the noontime is as comfortably genial as the radiance of a hearth reddened with hickory embers. ”

“ Vesey's house used to resound night and morning with the agonies of our gymnastics. There was one exercise that Gloria told us she found particularly helpful. It was to lie down with the feet under a bureau or any other heavy piece of furniture, extend the arms behind the head, and then raise and lower the body a hundred times, pivoting from the waist. This was only one of fifty or more laborious accomplishments that we undertook for the sake of our goddess. No woman was ever wooed with more honest pangs, or with more repeated genuflections. ”

“ At lunch-time Mr. Veal went up to the club as usual. Swinging up the street, in the bright sun and pellucid air, he felt quite cheerful, and stopped to buy himself a rhinoceros cane. In the dining room of the club he met Edwards, and they sat down together.
“Hello, old man,” said Edwards. “You're looking chipper for a veteran. Played any golf yet this year?”
“I don't play,” said Mr. Veal.
“Don't you? That's a mistake. It's the only game for us older fellows. Of course we can't score like the youngsters; but still we can get round and have a deal of fun——”
Mr. Veal clenched his fists. ”

“ Well, that first night I was at the chop-house I noticed a very fine, fat cat browsing about under the tables. I was amused at the corpulence of the animal. I said to myself that a cat as large as that must surely get some meat somewhere, because, while vegetarian protose food may be all right for Swedes, a cat is a realist in the matter of carnal meals. And when I went to the desk to pay my check, wanting some excuse to get into talk with the superb Gloria—who was, of course, the old man's daughter—I remarked on the sleek, healthy appearance of her cat. ”

“ He turned to Mr. Birdlip. “I find that in these busy days one has to attend to some of one's work even on the train. It is about the only place where one is never interrupted.”
“Did I hear you say something about Circulation?” said Mr. Birdlip. “Are you specially interested in that problem?”
“I have given it a good deal of thought,” said Sanford. “But I would hardly dignify it by calling it a problem. It is perfectly simple. It is purely a matter of taking the right attitude toward it. So many newspaper proprietors regard it merely as a problem in addition. ”

“ Get great personalities for your editors, and watch the circulation rise. Of course the right kind of editors must be very highly paid.”
This was a strange doctrine to Mr. Birdlip, who never read the editorial page of his own paper, and secretly wondered how the editors found so much to write about.
“The great error that so many newspaper owners make,” said Sanford, sonorously, “is to think of their product as they would of any other article of commerce which is turned out day by day, in standardized units, from a factory. A newspaper is not standardized. It is born anew every issue. ”

“ She had long been waiting the adroit moment to push her employer for a raise, which was indeed due her. She determined that this was the psychological day. When the sign of the Ram is ascendant in the zodiac, let employers tremble. This is when even the most faithful and long-enduring wage-earner dreams seditiously of a fatter manila envelope. Miss Stafford's typewriter had sung like a zither for a number of years, she had orchestrated many curious harmonies on it, and now she had reached the point where she was almost as indispensable to the business as Mr. Veal himself. ”

“ Keith Brooks will play the leading rôle, supported by Lillian Llewellyn, Sylvia Cunningham, Morgan Edwards, and other distinguished players.
I had a feeling of cheerfulness that evening. The cursed novel was no longer on my mind, there would be a hundred dollars due me the next week, and I was about to satisfy my long-standing curiosity to know something about the theatre from the inside. It was one of those typical evenings of New York loveliness: a rich, tawny, lingering light, a dry, clear air, warm enough to be pleasantly soft and yet with a sharp tingle in the breeze. ”

“ It was true: she had made use of Love for mere newspaper circulation; and now Love had died between her hands. Well, this was the end. No matter what happened, she could not go on with the job. Cold and trembling with nervousness, she returned to her desk, to finish her column for the next day.
On her typewriter lay some letters, which had come in while she was out. She opened one, and read.
Dear Cynthia:
I am in great trouble, please help me. I am in love with a fellow and know he is all right and we would be very happy together. We were engaged to be married, and everything was lovely. ”

“ I had just a little money, so I shut myself up in a hall room at the top of a cheap lodging-house on Seventy-fifth Street, hired a typewriter, and set about to butt my bead against all the walls that hem in the beginner.
“It was one of those old four-story dwellings that are now mostly boarding-houses, and it was run by a good-hearted widow who would let her rooms only to men, because she said they were less trouble than women. Her house was clean and incredibly cheap, and almost all the lodgers were young fellows like myself—students, or starveling artists, or chaps with literary ambitions. ”

“ Dulcet paid no heed, but, holding my arm, urged me along the pavement to an animal shop on the western side of Broadway. The window was full of puppies and long-haired cats. All down the aisle of the establishment were tiers of birdcages, covered with curtains while the birds slept. In lucid bowls persevering goldfish pursued their glittering and improfitable round.
“Those guinea pigs I ordered,” said Dulcet to the man, “are they ready?”
“All ready, sir,” he said, and took out a cage from under the counter. “Very fine pigs, sir, strong and hearty; they will stand a great deal.” ”

“ It seemed to me that a defeat for their fine and honourable passion would be a defeat for Love everywhere, and for all who believe in the worthy aspirations of the heart. I don't suppose any press agent ever pondered more generous philosophies than I did that night, over my lunch-counter supper.
Time went so fast that it was after eight when I got to the theatre. I went in and took a seat in the last row. The house, to my surprise, was crowded. I could see Upton's big bald head, well down in front, beside a massively carved lady, all bust and beads, whom I supposed to be Mrs. Upton. ”

“ She fled, aghast, ran down to another floor so as not to be seen, and took the elevator. Out on the street she walked mechanically along Park Row and found herself opposite St. Paul's. She wandered in and sat down on a bench. It was a chilly day, and the churchyard was nearly empty.
So this was Sikes's friendliness; and she, utterly innocent even in thought, was already the subject of vulgar office gossip. For the first time there broke in upon her, with bitter force, the knowledge that no matter how easy it may be to counsel others, few of us are wise in our own affairs. ”

“ When you can get a minor poet in an autobioloquacious mood, it is well to encourage him. No one takes life so seriously as the minor poet, and consequently his memoirs make fine sport for the disinterested bystander.
“No,” he said, blowing a waft of tobacco smoke into the soft, sun-brimmed air, and settling down into the curve of the bench. “The association was even more obvious than that of coal and diamonds. I always think of Gloria when winter begins to come in.” ”