Tales of the Jazz Age

dressed in the attenuation of fashion and carrying a wisp of a cane. He entered the shop, walked past Merlin, and proceeded to take out a cigarette and light it. Merlin approached him.

'Anything I can do for you, sir?'

'Old boy,' said the youth coolly, 'there are seveereal things; You can first let me smoke my ciggy in here out of sight of that old lady in the limousine, who happens to be my grandmother. Her knowledge as to whether I smoke it or not before my majority happens to be a matter of five thousand dollars to me. The second thing is that you should look up your first edition of the 'Crime of Sylvester Bonnard' that you advertised in last Sunday's Times. My grandmother there happens to want to take it off your hands.'

Detecatif story! Crime of somebody! Silver Bones! All was explained. With a faint deprecatory chuckle, as if to say that he would have enjoyed this had life put him in the habit of enjoying anything, Merlin doddered away to the back of his shop where his treasures were kept, to get this latest investment which he had picked up rather cheaply at the sale of a big collection.

When he returned with it the young man was drawing on his cigarette and blowing out quantities of smoke with immense satisfaction.

'My God!' he said, 'She keeps me so close to her the entire day running idiotic errands that this happens to be my first puff in six hours. What's the world coming to, I ask you, when a feeble old lady in the milk-toast era can dictate to a man as to his personal vices. I happen to be unwilling to be so dictated to. Let's see the book.'

Merlin passed it to him tenderly and the young man, after opening it with a carelessness that gave a momentary jump to the book-dealer's heart, ran through the pages with his thumb.

'No illustrations, eh?' he commented. 'Well, old boy, what's it worth? Speak up! We're willing to give you a fair price, though why I don't know.'

'One hundred dollars,' said Merlin with a frown.

The young man gave a startled whistle.

'Whew! Come on. You're not dealing with somebody from the cornbelt. I happen to be a city-bred man and my grandmother happens to be a city-bred woman, though I'll admit it'd take a special tax appropriation to keep her in repair. We'll give you twenty-five dollars, and let me tell you that's liberal. We've got books in our attic, up in our attic with my old play-things, that were written before the old boy that wrote this was born.'

Merlin stiffened, expressing a rigid and meticulous horror.

'Did your grandmother give you twenty-five dollars to buy this with?'

'She did not. She gave me fifty, but she expects change. I know that old lady.'

'You tell her,' said Merlin with dignity, 'that she has missed a very great bargain.'

'Give you forty,' urged the young man. 'Come on now--be reasonable and don't try to hold us up----'

Merlin had wheeled around with the precious volume under his arm and was about to return it to its special drawer in his office when there was a sudden interruption. With unheard-of magnificence the front door burst rather than swung open, and admitted in the dark interior a regal apparition in black silk and fur which bore rapidly down upon him. The cigarette leaped from the fingers of the urban young man and he gave breath to an inadvertent 'Damn!'--but it was upon Merlin that the entrance seemed to have the most remarkable and incongruous effect--so strong an effect that the greatest treasure of his shop slipped from his hand and joined the cigarette on the floor. Before him stood Caroline.

She was an old woman, an old woman remarkably preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but still an old woman. Her hair was a soft, beautiful white, elaborately dressed and jewelled; her face, faintly rouged a la grande dame, showed webs of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes and two deeper lines in the form of stanchions connected her nose with the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dim, ill natured, and querulous.

But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline's features though in decay; Caroline's figure, if brittle and stiff in movement; Caroline's manner, unmistakably compounded of a delightful insolence and an enviable self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline's voice, broken and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.

She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette upon the floor.

'What's that?' she cried. The words were not a question--they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation, confirmation, and decision. She tarried over them scarcely an instant. 'Stand up!' she said to her grandson, 'stand up and blow that nicotine out of your lungs!'

The young man looked at her in trepidation.

'Blow!' she commanded.

He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.

'Blow!' she repeated, more peremptorily than before.

He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.

'Do you realize,' she went on briskly, 'that you've forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?'

Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall pleading upon his knees, but such is the nobility of human nature that he remained standing--even blew again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.

'Young ass!' cried Caroline. 'Once more, just once more and you leave college and go to work.'

This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.

'Do you think I don't know what you and your brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me? Well, I do. You think I'm senile. You think I'm soft. I'm not!' She struck herself with her-fist as though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. 'And I'll have more brains left when you've got me laid out in the drawing- room some sunny day than you and the rest of them were born with.'

'But Grandmother----'

'Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it weren't for my money might have risen to be a journeyman barber out in the Bronx--Let me see your hands. Ugh! The hands of a barber-- you presume to be smart with me, who once had three counts and a bona-fide duke, not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from the city of Rome to the city of New York.' She paused, took breath. 'Stand up! Blow'!'

The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed, moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up to Caroline.

'Found you at last,' he cried. 'Been looking for you all over town. Tried your house on the 'phone and your secretary told me he thought you'd gone to a bookshop called the Moonlight--'

Caroline turned to him irritably.

'Do I employ you for your reminiscences?' she snapped. 'Are you my tutor or my broker?'

'Your broker,' confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. 'I beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and five.'

'Then do it.'

'Very well. I thought I'd better--'

'Go sell it. I'm talking to my grandson.'

'Very well. I--'

'Good-by.'

'Good-by, Madame.' The fur-trimmed man made a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the shop.

'As for you,' said Caroline, turning to her grandson, 'you stay just where you are and be quiet.'

She turned to Merlin and included his entire length in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.

'It's the only way,' she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity. 'The only thing that keeps old folks like