“Yes, it’s me, Miss Devereux. Give me the dining-room, please.... Dining-room?... Yes, it’s Mr. Madden speaking. I want to order breakfast.... No, not grape-fruit, I said breakfast—Grilled kidney and bacon, toast and Ceylon tea. That’s all, thank you.”
In parenthesis I may say I do my best work on kidney and bacon. There is, I find, a remarkable affinity between what I eat and what I write. Before tackling a scene of blood I indulge in a slab of beefsteak, extra rare; for tender sentiment I find there is nothing like a previous debauch on angel cake and orange pekoe; while if I have to kill any one I usually prime myself with coffee and caviare sandwiches. But as far as ordinary narrative is concerned I find kidney and bacon an excellent stimulus.
“How extremely agreeable this life is,” I reflected as I resumed dressing. “No care, no responsibility, neither jolt nor jar in the machinery. It’s almost too pleasant to be natural. Now, if I had a house, servants, a wife, the trouble would just be beginning at this time. As it is everything conspires to save me from friction. But it’ll soon be all over. I never quite realised that. My last day of gilded ease. To-day a young man of fashion in a New York club, to-morrow a skulking tramp in the steerage of an ocean liner. Yes, I’ll go in the steerage.”
Perhaps it was to heighten the contrast that I dressed with unusual care. From a score of lounging suits I selected a soft one of slatey grey; shirt, tie and socks to match; cuff-links of antique silver, and a scarf-pin of a pearl clutched in a silver claw; a hat of grey velour, and shoes with grey cloth uppers. Thus panoplied I sallied forth, a very symphony in grey.
At this early hour the dining-room was empty, and three girls flew to wait on me. For the first time it struck me as being odd. Surely, I thought, if things were as they should be, woman would not be waiting on man. Here am I, a strong, healthy brute of a male, lolling back like a lord, while these frail females fly like slaves to fulfil my desires. Yet I work three hours a day, they ten. I am rich, they painfully poor. There’s something all wrong with the world; but we’re so used to looking at wrong we’ve come to think it right.
A strange spirit of dissatisfaction was stirring in me, of desire to see life from the other side. As I took my breakfast I studied the girls, trying to imagine what they thought, how they lived. Although there were no other members in the dining-room at that moment, each waitress was obliged to remain at her post. How deadly monotonous, standing there at attention! How tired they must be by the end of the day! Then I noticed that one of them, under cover of her apron, was taking surreptitious peeps at a yellow-covered book. At that moment the lynx-eyed lady superintendent entered, caught her in the act, and proceeded to rate her soundly. I hate scenes of any kind, and this particularly pained me, for I saw that the all-too-tempting volume was a cheap edition of The Haunted Taxicab.
Then that moving picture imagination of mine began to flicker. The girl had gone from the room with tears in her eyes. Surely, thought I, she has been dismissed. A blur came between me and my plate and the film unreeled....
Ah! I see her trying to get other employment, failing again and again, sinking deeper into the mire of misery and despair. Then at last the time comes when the brave, proud heart is broken; the proud, sweet eyes flinch at another day of bitterness and failure. They recognise, they accent the end.
It is a freezing night of mid-winter, and I am walking down Broadway. Suddenly I am accosted by a girl with a hard, painted face, a girl who smiles the forced smile of fallen womanhood.
“Silvia!” I gasp.