Deuces Wild/Chapter 1

HIS is a story of two stories, separate yet inseparable, of wheels agog and of wheels awhir, the frolic and the business of life. What a woman's switch is to her glory, this tale is to that; but at night, when the game (which really fools nobody is over, the false one may be taken from the true and laid aside.

It all began that day when Forbes wondered who she was. He was always wondering who she was, the blonde, the brunette, the Venetian-red, the October-brown, on the street, at the play, in the restaurant. It was a habit. And why not? It was his bread-and-butter to send the argosies of his imaginative glance scouring the seas for treasure; and whenever he saw a pretty woman, bows-on he followed in her wake. He was an illustrator; he drew exquisite colored covers for the magazines and full-page drawings for the celebrated love-stories of Mr. Popular Piffle. Indeed, he shared honors with Piffle, and made quite as much money.

His pencil rolled from his board, unobserved; and the red-brown dachel under his chair pounced upon it joyously, gurgling over the delicious pungency of the cedar. As a gourmet adores his pâté of goose-livers and truffles, his cobwebbed bottles of Burgundy, so this merry-eyed, long-bodied, short-legged Bavarian puppy adored his master's pencils, the big, fat, unvarnished ones. He made short work of them; they disappeared with the amazing rapidity of those popcorn-balls one tosses on the sacred fish-pond in Rangoon. When Forbes dropped a pencil these days, he reached for a fresh one, having recognized the futility of crawling on his hands and knees over rugs in search of something which had ceased to exist.

Every day now for a week, between three and four in the afternoon, she had gone by, slim, trig, supple. She looked like Somebody; she must be Somebody, for nobody but Somebody could have carried her head the way she did. Where her journey began, where it ended, he had never bothered himself to inquire. It satisfied his needs to expect her at such a time each day and to realize his expectations. Her hair burned like a copper-beech in the sunshine, and her face was as white as milk.

By George! He stood up, pushed aside his board, and accidentally trod on Herr Fritz's tail. Music. Presently it died away, pianissimo, under the divan. Ordinarily Forbes would have consoled his comrade; but his mind was busy with the girl across the street. If he went out now he could follow her. All he wished to know was where she lived. His ingenuity would find means of meeting her, inoffensively. He knew women tolerably well. From the pretty little milliner's assistant, all the way up to the stately czarina of all the Russias, their vanity cried out for perpetuation on canvas.

Ting-a-ling! Confound the telephone at such a moment!

“Hello, hello!... Yes, this is Forbes talking.... Oh, that you, Jillson? ... What? Eight till twelve?... Deuces what? Oh, deuces wild. Sure, I understand. A quiet little game of poker, with the poor artist paying for the cigars and liquors. Deuces wild; I know; you can make the two-spot anything you please.... What? Opening your apartment to-night?... In the Dryden? Where's that?... Why, that's only a block or so away.... Oh, I'll be there. Rather play poker than eat. By-by!”

Forbes made a dash for his hat, rushed out of the studio and down the two flights, madly and recklessly. Too late! She was gone. He dashed Jillson and his poker party breathlessly but fluently. Supposing she never walked past again? It would be just his luck.

As a matter of fact, the unknown meant nothing to Forbes aside from the commercial value of her face and hair. He was always hunting for a new face. Like Piffle, he could work over his ideas just so many times; after that, fresh invention must be called into play; the retroussé nose must give way to the Grecian, and so on and so forth. It was a busy life, for competition was terrific. He had to be on the lookout for the latest capillary wave, the latest style of collars, hats and trinkets. It was he who brought back the Grecian band; and immediately schoolgirls and shop-girls and show-girls went to and fro with heads that looked for all the world like those little fern-pots tasteful housewives place in the center of their dining-tables.

However, Forbes was a mighty sensible chap. He did not take his work seriously; nor more did his confrère, Mr. Popular Piffle. They had had many a laugh and jest together. They carried about in their heads no nonsense about this thing which some wag has called “poor lar” {L'art pour l'art); it was a legitimate business, and together they entertained a vast audience with innocuous pleasure. So then, why paint a Madonna of the Chair, why write a Pere Goriot, which nobody would buy? As it was, they were making splendid incomes; and who cared if Raffael and Balzac writhed in their tombs?

Forbes was philosophical, too. When he was dead he would be very dead; the Hall of Fame and the Temple of Forgetfulness would be all the same to him. At present he liked travel, good clothes, good food, curios; he liked to give expensive teas in his beautiful studio; he rather liked the innocent admiration of the schoolgirls et al.; and he wasn't too proud to accept an occasional thousand from the breakfast-food people and the tinted-soap manufacturers.

“Give us a new fiz, Forbes,” said the editors; “this one is growing stale.”

Ah, those editorial degrees of enthusiasm, which began with slaps on the back, paused at luncheons, and finally petered down to the non-committal “umums!” A new face; he must have it; and for two weeks he had combed the town in vain. Popularity had its drawbacks; one had continually to find new props to keep the thing from tumbling about one's ears. Popularity, the new-collar, the new-hat, the new-shoe kind of popularity, which changes completely every six months, which has to be renewed and twisted about and readjusted. And besides, there were those younger chaps always bobbing up, with fresh invention, a touch of the unusual, a new color.

He renewed his bitter arraignment of Jillson and his bally house-warming. For now he was sure that the girl with the milk-white skin and the copper-beech hair had been fortune, knocking at his door for a whole week with that persistence which she accords only her favorites, often unmeritedly. And all he had done had been to sit tight in his chair and wonder who she was! Well, she might pass again to-morrow. He would throw formality to the winds, rush across the street and speak to her, plead with her to help a poor devil of an illustrator who was working like sixty to hold his job, who in the best of times (during the sale of some beauty-book) never made more than twenty-five thousand the year.

He climbed back to the studio. He found the dachel munching the soft lead which had such a funny, cool, sweet taste; of the cedar there remained no evidences whatever. The puppy growled an invitation for a romp, which the artist accepted; and a great time they had, sliding over rugs, banging against the walls, behind tapestries, over sofas and chairs and divans, till at last Forbes, dizzy and breathless, subsided upon a divan. The tireless puppy jumped up beside him and licked his face. He was a very valuable dog. Only last week he had almost ruined a superb digestion while lunching on a five-hundred-dollar drawing which his master had carelessly forgotten to put back into the portfolio.

The elevator-boy opened the door and tossed in the evening newspaper. Thereupon Forbes filled his calabash, sought the comfy-chair under the reading lamp and idly went over the day's events. The puppy, sniffing the tobacco smoke which he thoroughly detested, retreated under the divan where he had his lion's den of bones, palate-knives, old tubes, brashes and what-nots. From time to time Forbes could hear him rattling round something.

Births, deaths and divorces; murder, robbery and graft; strikes, wars and plagues; the subject-matter never varied, only the names and places could be called news. He read with lazy interest a warmed-over yarn about the clever gentleman-thief who had baffled the metropolitan police for nearly a year. A well-known amateur detective was giving the reporter an exposition of his views. Here was an artist. (Forbes crackled the newspaper peevishly: was there anything left to which this term had not been applied? Anybody who did his work well was an artist. Rot!)

The thief, declared the amateur, was not a professional. He was a man of infinite patience, of infernal cleverness, never took money, had made three daring raids and ceased further to apply his talents. To date the man had taken over a hundred thousand dollars' worth of jewels. His career had begun and ended within three months.

So far, not a single part of the loot had been offered to the known “fences,” here or abroad. This was the phase which puzzled and baffled the police. Now he (Mr. Amateur) held to the theory that the thief was a man who moved in the exclusive circles (two more words Forbes hated) from which the jewels had been purloined. Even the police admitted that he possessed an intimate and accurate knowledge of the habits of his victims. But the genius of the man was made manifest in his ability to wait. Was there a woman? Was there unlucky speculation? Horses and cards? Or was it what he (Mr. Amateur) had stated in a previous article: simply a brilliant hoax, a practical joke, a careless wager by an idle rich young man, who, when the time arrived, would quietly restore the jewels, give a dinner and then search about for some new abnormality? At any rate, in his opinion the Bertillon system would never get hold of the man to measure him for future identification.

In this Mr. Amateur was perfectly correct. They never got hold of the man. Almost, however; only an arm's length away; a clutch, a distance misjudged, and off he went, into space, like an exploded atom.