“Yes,” said the great Myers, when the door was opened and Doctor Prince began to ooze out with the smoke, “I think you have come to the right decision. As long as none of the persons concerned has any suspicion of the truth, and is happy in the present circumstances, I don’t think it necessary to inform him that the feuditis Beallorum et Rankinorum—how’s the Latin, doctor?—has only been driven to Miss Rankin’s brain.”
The Elusive Tenderloin
There is no Tenderloin. There never was. That is, none that you could run a tapeline around. The word really implies a condition or a quality—much as you would say “reprehensibility” or “cold feet.”
Metes and bounds have been assigned to it. I know. Realists have prated of “from Fourteenth to Forty-second,” and “as far west as” etc., but the larger meaning of the word remains with me.
Confirmation of my interpretation of the famous slaughterhouse noun-adjective came to me from Bill Jeremy, a friend out of the West. Bill lives in a town on the edge of the prairie-dog country. At times Bill yearns to maintain the tradition that “ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth.” He brought his last yearning to New York. And it devolved upon me. You know what that means.
I took Bill to see the cavity that has been drilled in the city’s tooth, soon to be filled with the new gold subway; and the Eden Musée, and the Flatiron and the crack in the front windowpane of Russell Sage’s house, and the old man that threw the stone that did it when he was a boy—and I asked Bill what he thought of New York.
“You may mean well,” said Bill, with gentle reproach, “but you’ve got in a groove. You thought I was underwear buyer for the Blue-Front Dry Goods Emporium of Pine Knob, NC, didn’t you? Or the junior partner of Slowcoach & Green, of Geegeewocomee, State of Goobers, come on for the fall stock of jeans, lingerie, and whetstones? Don’t treat me like a business friend.
“Do you suppose the wild, insensate longing I feel for metropolitan gayety is going to be satisfied by waxworks and razorback architecture? Now you get out the old envelope with the itinerary on it, and cross out the Brooklyn Bridge and the cab that Morgan rides home in and the remaining objects of interest, for I am going it alone. The Tenderloin, well done, is what I shall admire for to see.”
Bill Jeremy has a way of doing as he says he will. So I did not urge upon him the bridge, or Carnegie Hall or the great Tomb—wonders that the unselfish New Yorker reserves, unseen, for his friends.
That evening Bill descended, unprotected, upon the Tenderloin. The next day he came and put his feet upon my desk and told me about it.