The Scarlet Car

by Richard Harding Davis

"We're just here," said the young lady, "and we ought to reach home, which is just about there, in an hour."

"I see," said Schwab. But all he saw was a finger in a white glove, and long eyelashes tangled in a gray veil.

For many minutes, or for all Schwab knew, for many miles, the young lady pointed out to him the places along the Hudson, of which he had read in the public school history, and quaint old manor houses set in glorious lawns; and told him who lived in them. Schwab knew the names as belonging to down-town streets, and up-town clubs. He became nervously humble, intensely polite, he felt he was being carried as an honored guest into the very heart of the Four Hundred, and when the car jogged slowly down the main street of Yonkers, although a policeman stood idly within a yard of him, instead of shrieking to him for help, "Izzy" Schwab looked at him scornfully across the social gulf that separated them, with all the intolerance he believed becoming in the upper classes.

"Those bicycle cops," he said confidentially to Miss Forbes, "are too chesty."

The car turned in between stone pillars, and under an arch of red and golden leaves, and swept up a long avenue to a house of innumerable roofs. It was the grandest house Mr. Schwab had ever entered, and when two young men in striped waistcoats and many brass buttons ran down the stone steps and threw open the door of the car, his heart fluttered between fear and pleasure.

Lounging before an open fire in the hall were a number of young men, who welcomed Winthrop delightedly and, to all of whom Mr. Schwab was formally presented. As he was introduced he held each by the hand and elbow and said impressively, and much to the other's embarrassment, "WHAT name, please?"

Then one of the servants conducted him to a room opening on the hall, from whence he heard stifled exclamations and laughter, and some one saying "Hush." But "Izzy" Schwab did not care. The slave in brass buttons was proffering him ivory-backed hair-brushes, and obsequiously removing the dust from his coat collar. Mr. Schwab explained to him that he was not dressed for automobiling, as Mr. Winthrop had invited him quite informally. The man was most charmingly sympathetic. And when he returned to the hall every one received him with the most genial, friendly interest. Would he play golf, or tennis, or pool, or walk over the farm, or just look on? It seemed the wish of each to be his escort. Never had he been so popular.

He said he would "just look on." And so, during the last and decisive day of the "whirlwind" campaign, while in Eighth Avenue voters were being challenged, beaten, and bribed, bonfires were burning, and "extras" were appearing every half hour, "Izzy" Schwab, the Tammany henchman, with a secret worth twenty thousand votes, sat a prisoner, in a wicker chair, with a drink and a cigar, guarded by four young men in flannels, who played tennis violently at five dollars a corner.

It was always a great day in the life of "Izzy" Schwab. After a luncheon, which, as he later informed his friends, could not have cost less than "two dollars a plate and drink all you like," Sam Forbes took him on at pool. Mr. Schwab had learned the game in the cellars of Eighth Avenue at two and a half cents a cue, and now, even in Columbus Circle he was a star. So, before the sun had set, Mr. Forbes, who at pool rather fancied himself, was seventy-five dollars poorer, and Mr. Schwab just that much to the good. Then there followed a strange ceremony called tea, or, if you preferred it, whiskey and soda; and the tall footman bent before him with huge silver salvers laden down with flickering silver lamps, and bubbling soda bottles, and cigars, and cigarettes.

"You could have filled your pockets with twenty-five cent Havanas, and nobody would have said nothing!" declared Mr. Schwab, and his friends who never had enjoyed his chance to study at such close quarters the truly rich, nodded enviously.