The Girl and the Graft

Edition and rights: Complete original English text from Project Gutenberg ebook #2141. This edition is identified as public domain in the USA; the original author died in 1910, satisfying the ordinary Pakistan copyright term. This is the original work, not an AI retelling.

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THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT


The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a
conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the
Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from
speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden
toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to
a pulp.

Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he comes to New York for a
rest. He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and Thou in the
wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure to him as
sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft. “Give me,”
says Pogue, “a big city for my vacation. Especially New York. I’m not
much fond of New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only place on the
globe where I don’t find any.”

While in the metropolis Pogue can always be found at one of two places.
One is a little second-hand book-shop on Fourth Avenue, where he reads
books about his hobbies, Mahometanism and taxidermy. I found him at the
other—his hall bedroom in Eighteenth Street—where he sat in his
stocking feet trying to pluck “The Banks of the Wabash” out of a small
zither. Four years he has practised this tune without arriving near
enough to cast the longest trout line to the water’s edge. On the
dresser lay a blued-steel Colt’s forty-five and a tight roll of tens
and twenties large enough around to belong to the spring
rattlesnake-story class. A chambermaid with a room-cleaning air
fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized
by the stocking feet, aghast at the Colt’s, yet powerless, with her
metropolitan instincts, to remove herself beyond the magic influence of
the yellow-hued roll.

I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No one could be franker
or more candid in his conversation. Beside his expression the cry of
Henry James for lacteal nourishment at the age of one month would have
seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram. He told me stories of his profession
with pride, for he considered it an art. And I was curious enough to
ask him whether he had known any women who followed it.

“Ladies?” said Pogue, with Western chivalry. “Well, not to any great
extent. They don’t amount to much in special lines of graft, because
they’re all so busy in general lines. What? Why, they have to. Who’s
got the money in the world? The men. Did you ever know a man to give a
woman a dollar without any consideration? A man will shell out his dust
to another man free and easy and gratis. But if he drops a penny in one
of the machines run by the Madam Eve’s Daughters’ Amalgamated
Association and the pineapple chewing gum don’t fall out when he pulls
the lever you can hear him kick to the superintendent four blocks away.
Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go up against. He’s the
low-grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay. Two times
out of five she’s salted. She can’t put in crushers and costly
machinery. He’d notice ’em and be onto the game. They have to pan out
what they get, and it hurts their tender hands. Some of ’em are natural
sluice troughs and can carry out $1,000 to the ton. The dry-eyed ones
have to depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo
walk, cowhide whips, ability to cook, sentimental juries,
conversational powers, silk underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous
letters, violet sachet powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms,
carbolic acid, moonlight, cold cream and the evening newspapers.”

“You are outrageous, Ferg,” I said. “Surely there is none of this
‘graft’ as you call it, in a perfect and harmonious matrimonial union!”

“Well,” said Pogue, “nothing that would justify you every time in
calling Police Headquarters and ordering out the reserves and a
vaudeville manager on a dead run. But it’s this way: Suppose you’re a
Fifth Avenue millionaire, soaring high, on the right side of copper and
cappers.

“You come home at night and bring a $9,000,000 diamond brooch to the
lady who’s staked you for a claim. You hand it over. She says, ‘Oh,
George!’ and looks to see if it’s backed. She comes up and kisses you.
You’ve waited for it. You get it. All right. It’s graft.

“But I’m telling you about Artemisia Blye. She was from Kansas and she
suggested corn in all of its phases. Her hair was as yellow as the
silk; her form was as tall and graceful as a stalk in the low grounds
during a wet summer; her eyes were as big and startling as bunions, and
green was her favorite color.

“On my last trip into the cool recesses of your sequestered city I met
a human named Vaucross. He was worth—that is, he had a million. He told
me he was in business on the street. ‘A sidewalk merchant?’ says I,
sarcastic. ‘Exactly,’ says he, ‘Senior partner of a paving concern.’

“I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him on Broadway one
night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place. He was all silk
hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him
you would have only looked yourself in the face. I looked like a cross
between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster. I was out of luck. I had—but
let me lay my eyes on that dealer again.

“Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few minutes and then he took me to
a high-toned restaurant to eat dinner. There was music, and then some
Beethoven, and Bordelaise sauce, and cussing in French, and
frangipangi, and some hauteur and cigarettes. When I am flush I know
them places.

“I declare, I must have looked as bad as a magazine artist sitting
there without any money and my hair all rumpled like I was booked to
read a chapter from ‘Elsie’s School Days’ at a Brooklyn Bohemian
smoker. But Vaucross treated me like a bear hunter’s guide. He wasn’t
afraid of hurting the waiter’s feelings.

“‘Mr. Pogue,’ he explains to me, ‘I am using you.’

“‘Go on,’ says I; ‘I hope you don’t wake up.’

“And then he tells me, you know, the kind of man he was. He was a New
Yorker. His whole ambition was to be noticed. He wanted to be
conspicuous. He wanted people to point him out and bow to him, and tell
others who he was. He said it had been the desire of his life always.
He didn’t have but a million, so he couldn’t attract attention by
spending money. He said he tried to get into public notice one time by
planting a little public square on the east side with garlic for free
use of the poor; but Carnegie heard of it, and covered it over at once
with a library in the Gaelic language. Three times he had jumped in the
way of automobiles; but the only result was five broken ribs and a
notice in the papers that an unknown man, five feet ten, with four
amalgam-filled teeth, supposed to be the last of the famous Red Leary
gang had been run over.

“‘Ever try the reporters,’ I asked him.

“‘Last month,’ says Mr. Vaucross, ‘my expenditure for lunches to
reporters was $124.80.’

“‘Get anything out of that?’ I asks.

“‘That reminds me,’ says he; ‘add $8.50 for pepsin. Yes, I got
indigestion.’

“‘How am I supposed to push along your scramble for prominence?’ I
inquires. ‘Contrast?’

“‘Something of that sort to-night,’ says Vaucross. ‘It grieves me; but
I am forced to resort to eccentricity.’ And here he drops his napkin in
his soup and rises up and bows to a gent who is devastating a potato
under a palm across the room.

“‘The Police Commissioner,’ says my climber, gratified. ‘Friend’, says
I, in a hurry, ‘have ambitions but don’t kick a rung out of your
ladder. When you use me as a stepping stone to salute the police you
spoil my appetite on the grounds that I may be degraded and
incriminated. Be thoughtful.’

“At the Quaker City squab en casserole the idea about Artemisia Blye
comes to me.

“‘Suppose I can manage to get you in the papers,’ says I—‘a column or
two every day in all of ’em and your picture in most of ’em for a week.
How much would it be worth to you?’

“‘Ten thousand dollars,’ says Vaucross, warm in a minute. ‘But no
murder,’ says he; ‘and I won’t wear pink pants at a cotillon.’

“‘I wouldn’t ask you to,’ says I. ‘This is honorable, stylish and
uneffeminate. Tell the waiter to bring a demi tasse and some other
beans, and I will disclose to you the opus moderandi.’

“We closed the deal an hour later in the rococo rouge et noise room. I
telegraphed that night to Miss Artemisia in Salina. She took a couple
of photographs and an autograph letter to an elder in the Fourth
Presbyterian Church in the morning, and got some transportation and
$80. She stopped in Topeka long enough to trade a flashlight interior
and a valentine to the vice-president of a trust company for a mileage
book and a package of five-dollar notes with $250 scrawled on the band.

“The fifth evening after she got my wire she was waiting, all
décolletée and dressed up, for me and Vaucross to take her to dinner in
one of these New York feminine apartment houses where a man can’t get
in unless he plays bezique and smokes depilatory powder cigarettes.

“‘She’s a stunner,’ says Vaucross when he saw her. ‘They’ll give her a
two-column cut sure.’

“This was the scheme the three of us concocted. It was business
straight through. Vaucross was to rush Miss Blye with all the style and
display and emotion he could for a month. Of course, that amounted to
nothing as far as his ambitions were concerned. The sight of a man in a
white tie and patent leather pumps pouring greenbacks through the large
end of a cornucopia to purchase nutriment and heartsease for tall,
willowy blondes in New York is as common a sight as blue turtles in
delirium tremens. But he was to write her love letters—the worst kind
of love letters, such as your wife publishes after you are dead—every
day. At the end of the month he was to drop her, and she would bring
suit for $100,000 for breach of promise.

“Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she won the suit that was all;
and if she lost she was to get it anyhow. There was a signed contract
to that effect.

“Sometimes they had me out with ’em, but not often. I couldn’t keep up
to their style. She used to pull out his notes and criticize them like
bills of lading.

“‘Say, you!’ she’d say. ‘What do you call this—letter to a Hardware
Merchant from His Nephew on Learning that His Aunt Has Nettlerash? You
Eastern duffers know as much about writing love letters as a Kansas
grasshopper does about tugboats. “My dear Miss Blye!”—wouldn’t that put
pink icing and a little red sugar bird on your bridal cake? How long do
you expect to hold an audience in a court-room with that kind of stuff?
You want to get down to business, and call me “Tweedlums Babe” and
“Honeysuckle,” and sign yourself “Mama’s Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy Boy”
if you want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs.
Get sappy.’

“After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible tabasco. His notes
read like something or other in the original. I could see a jury
sitting up, and women tearing one another’s hats to hear ’em read. And
I could see piling up for Mr. Vaucross as much notoriousness as
Archbishop Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese-on-salad ever
enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at the prospects.

“They agreed on a night; and I stood on Fifth Avenue outside a solemn
restaurant and watched ’em. A process-server walked in and handed
Vaucross the papers at his table. Everybody looked at ’em; and he
looked as proud as Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five-cent
cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good as ours.

“About two hours later somebody knocked at my door. There stood
Vaucross and Miss Artemisia, and she was clinging—yes, sir, clinging—to
his arm. And they tells me they’d been out and got married. And they
articulated some trivial cadences about love and such. And they laid
down a bundle on the table and said ‘Good night’ and left.

“And that’s why I say,” concluded Ferguson Pogue, “that a woman is too
busy occupied with her natural vocation and instinct of graft such as
is given her for self-preservation and amusement to make any great
success in special lines.”

“What was in the bundle that they left?” I asked, with my usual
curiosity.

“Why,” said Ferguson, “there was a scalper’s railroad ticket as far as
Kansas City and two pairs of Mr. Vaucross’s old pants.”


IX