Havemeyer and Harriet
BY NEMESIS
IT is the old, old, story. Sporty married man, trustful or maybe designing girl, wool over her optics, girl finally gets wise, recriminations, breach of promise suit, and—?
Hector Havemeyer and Harriet Hearn comprise the alliterative couple in the calcium effulgence this time. Havemeyer is a scion of the sugar magnate; one of whose stunts was to ruin a competitor by bribing a workman in the rival plant to run a pipe from the syrup tank to the river and waste fifty or a hundred barrels a day. We mention this to show that Hector did not inherit a high standard of principle or regard for the rights of others.
Harriet eked out her truce with profiteering landlords and dry goods stores by digging muck from under the claws of such customers as presented themselves for the purpose. Her modest shingle swung in a barber shop in the Grand Central Station, Graftopolis-on-the-Harlem, generally known as New York. Hector came, he saw, he—well, you can guess the rest. Of course he proposed marriage. And of course Harriet sprung the old song and dance about it being “so sudden.” But when Hector offered as lagniappe to blow her to a whole slew of diamonds, a kolinsky cape and a trip South, his suddenness compared to hers as she Pisa-towered on his caoutchouc and celluloid, mooning: “Hector, I am thine!” was even as Congress controlling the trusts to a terrier kyoodle with a turpentine enema.
The fair Harriet was soon installed in a seven-dollar-a-day suite at a no-questions-asked hotel. Manicurists seldom can afford such things out of their own earnings, and we will give our readers three guesses as to who signed the checks for the rent. As long as Hector paid he naturally was entitled to call as often as he darn pleased, which was about once a day and then some. Not contented with that he would telephone so often to her at her place of business that her barber employer ultimatumed that she must either cut it out or take the gate. Hector also sent flowers and candy galore. His progenitor had acquired coin in the manner quoted above; a manner both easy and honorable, and passed it on to Hector to blow. Hector also pined for special messages from his Dulcinea del Toboso, and would employ the red cap porters at the station to go to her and beseech for him a missive of love to ease his near ruptured cardiac.
The strange part of it all is that at first Hector was too bashful to go like an avuncular just arrived from Canajoharie and have Harriet extract the Graftopolis real estate and microbes from the nether side of his hive-scratchers. Instead he sought the services of a New York Central detective as his John Alden, the fair Harriet states. But she fell for the detective presented proposition and consented to the introduction.
The promise of marriage, which Harriet claims was made, might have been either the last resort of a man dealing with a near-Pamela and cute minx combined, or else a gratuitous piece of calorified atmosphere. But as she had to know some day that he could not keep his word without committing bigamy, Hector preferred that it should be from him rather than from his vindictive investigating storm-and-strife, or the serpentine lollypop-licker of Mrs. Grundy. Having had preliminary practice in another way, he screwed up his courage and broke the news, although he let her down easy with the hoary classic bucolic cataplasm about his wife not understanding him, there would soon be a divorce, and then his Harriet would be IT. That was all Harriet wanted to hear. She flew the seven-dollar-a-day coop whose manager, as there were several times seven dollars of arrears, was so unkind as to retain her powder-rag, her tooth-brush, and other feminine impedimenta which we forbear to catalogue.
Harriet went back to finding her own rent-money, but nevertheless she did not break with her Hector. Instead she kept Hectoring him with special delivery letters and telegrams; ditto his wife, although she charges that in the latter case Hector had fixed all the apartment house help so that none of her retaliatory revelations would strike home. She says, too, that her Lothario had the St. Vitus dance even when she was not in proximity to him. Seeing that he had taken her all and given her in return nothing but candy, flowers and broken promises, she is going to try very hard to make him pay, and has brought suit for a hundred thousand dollars. She exults that she did not sell or give away all her old clothes and resign her position, as he urged her to do, and says she would not be in a Gehenna of a fix if she had.