Duke of ——, well of, well—I can’t remember his name. I don’t know what he looks like. He probably can’t talk English. Oh, curses on the nobility.”
He strode aimlessly, hot and muddled. He wished he had asked Mirabel the Duke’s name and personal appearance, but it was now too late. He would not convict himself of such a blunder. Reaching Broadway he suddenly bethought himself of a plan of action.
“I’ll try the restaurants.” He started down toward Sherry’s and had gone but half a block when he had an inspiration. The Duke’s picture was in some evening paper, and his name, too.
He bought a paper and sought for the picture with no result. He tried again and again. On his seventh paper he found it: “The Duke of Matterlane Visits American Millionaire.”
The Duke, a man with side whiskers and eye-glasses, stared menacingly at him from the paper. Garland heaved a sigh of relief, took a long look at the likeness and stuck the paper into his pocket.
“Now to business,” he muttered, wiping his drenched brow. “Duke or die.”
Five minutes later he entered Sherry’s, where he sat down and ordered ginger ale. There was the usual summer night crowd, listless, flushed, and sunburned. There was the usual champagne and ice that seemed hotter than the room; but there was no Duke. He sighed, rose, and visited Delmonico’s, Martin’s, at each place consuming a glass of ginger ale.
“I’ll have to cut out the drinking,” he thought, “or I’ll be inebriated by the time I find his royal nuisance.”
On his weary trail, he visited more restaurants and more hotels, ever searching, sometimes thinking he saw an oasis and finding it only a mirage. He had consumed so much ginger ale that he felt a swaying sea-sickness as he walked; yet he plodded on, hotter and hotter, uncomfortable, and, as Alice in Wonderland would have said, uncomfortabler. His mind was grimly and tenaciously set on the Duke’s face. As he walked along, from hotel to café, from café to restaurant, the Duke’s whiskers remained glued firmly to the insides of his brains. It was half past eight by the City Hall clock when he started on his quest. It was now quarter past ten, hotter, sultrier and stuffier than ever. He had visited every important place of refreshment. He tried the drug stores. He went to four theatres and had the Duke paged, at a large bribe. His money was getting low, his spirits were lower still, but his temperature soared majestically and triumphantly aloft.
Finally, passing through an alley which had been recommended to him as a short cut, he saw before him a man lighting a cigarette. By the flickering match he noticed the whiskers. He stopped dead in his tracks, afraid that it might not be the Duke. The man lit another cigarette. Sure enough, the sideburns, eyeglasses and the whole face proved the question without a doubt.
Garland walked toward the man. The man looked back at him and started to walk in the opposite direction. Garland started to run; the man looked over his shoulder and started to run also. Garland slowed down. The man slowed down. They emerged upon Broadway in the same relative position, and the man started north. Forty feet behind, in stolid determination, walked Garland without his hat. He had left it in the alley.
For eight blocks they continued, the man behind being the pacemaker. Then the Duke spoke quietly to a policeman and when Garland, lost in an obsession of pursuit, was grabbed by the arm by a blue-coated Gorgas, he saw ahead of him the Duke start to run. In a frenzy he struck at the policeman and stunned him. He ran on and in three blocks he had made up what he had lost. For five more blocks the Duke continued, glancing now and then over his shoulder. On the sixth block he stopped. Garland approached him with steady step. He of the side whiskers was standing under a lamp post. Garland came up and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Your Grace.”
“What’s dat?” said the Duke, with an unmistakable East-Side accent. Garland was staggered.
“I’ll grace you,” continued the sideburns aggressively. “I saw you was a swell and I’d a dropped you bad only I’m just out of jail myself. Now listen here. I’ll give you two seconds to get scarce. Go on, beat it.”
Garland beat it. Crestfallen and broken-hearted he walked away and set off for Mirabel’s. He would at least make a decent ending to a miserable quest. A half an hour later he rang the bell, his clothes hanging on him like a wet bathing suit.
Mirabel came to the door, cool and fascinating.
“Oh Doddy!” she exclaimed. “Thank you so much. Dukey,” and she held up a small white poodle which she had in her arms, “came back ten minutes after you left. He had just followed the mailman.”
Garland sat down on the step.
“But the Duke of Matterlane?”
“Oh,” said Mirabel, “he comes tomorrow. You must come right over and meet him.”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” said Garland, rising feebly. “Previous engagement.” He paused, smiled faintly and set off across the sultry moonlit pavement.
— ◆ —
“Shadow Laurels.”
Nassau Literary Magazine (April 1915)
(The scene is the interior of a wine shop in Paris. The walls are lined on all sides by kegs, piled like logs. The ceiling is low and covered with cobwebs. The mid-afternoon sun filters dejectedly through the one-barred window at the back. Doors are on both sides; one, heavy and powerful, opens outside; the other, on the left, leads to some inner chamber. A large table stands in the middle of the room backed by smaller ones set around the walls. A ship’s lamp hangs above the main table. As the curtain rises there is knocking at the outside door—rather impatient knocking—and almost immediately Pitou, the wine dealer, enters from the other room and shuffles toward the door. He is an old man with unkempt beard and dirty corduroys.)
Pitou—Coming, coming—Hold tight! (The knocking stops. Pitou unlatches the door and it swings open. A man in a top hat and opera cloak enters. Jacques Chandelle is perhaps thirty-seven, tall and well groomed. His eyes are clear and penetrating; his chin, clean-shaven, is sharp and decisive. His manner is that of a man accustomed only to success but ready and willing to work hard in any emergency. He speaks French with an odd accent as of one who knew the language well in early years but whose accent had grown toneless through long years away from France.)
Pitou—Good afternoon, Monsieur.
Chandelle—(looking about him curiously) Are you perhaps Monsieur Pitou?
Pitou—Yes, Monsieur.
Chandelle—Ah! I was told that one would always find you in at this hour. (He takes off his overcoat and lays it carefully on a chair.) I was told also that you could help me.
Pitou—(puzzled) I could help you?
Chandelle—(sitting down wearily on a wooden chair near the table) Yes, I’m a—a stranger in the city—now. I’m trying to trace someone—someone who has been dead many years. I’ve been informed that you’re the oldest inhabitant (he smiles faintly).
Pitou—(rather pleased) Perhaps—and yet there are older than I, ah yes, older than I. (He sits down across the table from Chandelle.)
Chandelle—And so I came for you. (He bends earnestly over the table toward Pitou.) Monsieur Pitou, I am trying to trace my father.
Pitou—Yes.
Chandelle—He died in this district about twenty years ago.
Pitou—Monsieur’s father was murdered?
Chandelle—Good God, no! What makes you think that?
Pitou—I thought perhaps in this district twenty years ago, an aristocrat—
Chandelle—My father was no aristocrat. As I remember, his last position was that of waiter in some forgotten