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 bookshop 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 your 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 automibiles; 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 perpsin. 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
uneffiminate. 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
d'ecollet'ee 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
sing 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 Crammer 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 this 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 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."
-THE END-
William Sidney Porter]O Henry's short story: The Girl And The Graft
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