Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

Kale-2

“I used to go often, with a lady's maid that had the same access to clothing as I did. She was part of a caretaking staff also. Being a writing person, you have, of course, only viewed New York's society and near-society from the outside, and no doubt you have been intimidated by the haughty manners of the servants. Well, when you get close to swells and really know them personally, you will find they are human, too.

“A butler on duty is a swelled-up proposition, because he has to be that way. But take him as you find him among his peers, and he quits acting like the Duke of Westminster Abbey, and is real sociable. This Larry person, for instance, could distend himself like a poisoned pup and make a timid millionaire feel like the sleeves of his undershirt must be showing below his cuffs; but in our little select circle Larry was the life of the party.

“Being, as I said before, an outsider, you likely don't realize how many of those big swell millionaires' cribs uptown are in the hands of caretakers like Larry and his mother and me the best part of the year. Well, they are; and there's a social life goes on in them that don't ever get into the papers. The parties we had that year in Jake's house would have done Jake himself good, if Jake could have got an invitation to them. But Jake was absent, though his cellar and his grocers were at our service; and he never questioned a bill, Larry said. There were twelve or fifteen hand-picked servants in our little social circle that year, and before I left there I could begin to understand how these débutantes feel at the end of the season—sort of tired and bored and willing to relax and go in for work and rest and athletics for a change.

“I had only been butler's companion for a few weeks when Old Man Singleton dropped in one evening—yes, sir, Old Lemuel Singleton himself. He came to see the butler's mother, Mrs. Hodgkins. He had known her a good many years before, when he was wearing those red mittens and sawing wood up in that New England town and she was somebody's Irish cook. And he had run across her again, after he became a millionaire, down here in New York City. He was tickled to see her, and he didn't care a darn if she was Jake Hergsheimer's housekeeper. She could cook cabbage and kale better than any one else in the world, and he used to come and sit with her, and talk about that little old town up there, and indulge in his favorite dissipation.

“Old Man Singleton has had what you call the social entrée in New York for a good many years; for so long that some of his children, and all his grandchildren, were born with it. But he never took it very seriously himself. He has been an in-and-outer, you might say. If he saw Mrs. Hodgkins around Jake's house, he would call her Mary and ask her how folks were up home in front of Jake and his wife and a whole bunch of guests, just as soon as not.

“And his sons and his daughters and his grandchildren never could get him out of those ways; he always was bull-headed about doing what he pleased, so Mrs. Hodgkins told me, and he always will be. And the old lady liked to see him and chin with him and cook for him; and believe me, she was some cook when she set herself to it. Not merely kale, but everything. She didn't cook for the Hergsheimers—they had a chef for that—but they missed it by not having her. Victuals was old Mary's middle name, and she could rustle up some of the best grub you ever threw your lip over.

“At first, Old Man Singleton and Mrs. Hodgkins didn't mix much with us younger folks when we pulled a party. It wasn't that we were too aristocratic for them, for off duty, as I said before, butlers and other swells can be as easy and jolly as common people. But they seemed too antiquated, if you get me; they were living too much in the past.

“And then, one night, I discovered what Old Man Singleton's fad was—kale. Money. Big money. Big money on his person. It was this way: Larry and I wanted to go downtown and have a little fun, but neither of us had any cash in hand. Larry had a check for one hundred and fifty dollars which Jake Hergsheimer had sent him, but all the tradesmen we knew were closed at that hour, and there wasn't any way to cash it, unless Old Man Singleton could.

“'Mr. Singleton,' says Larry to the old man, who was sitting down to a mess of pork and kale with Mrs. Hodgkins, 'maybe you can cash this for me.' And he handed him the check.

“The old man stopped eating and put his glasses on and pulled a billfolder out of his pocket, with a kind of pleased smile on his face.

“'Let me see,' he says, taking out the bills, and running them over with his fingers; 'let me see.'

“I nearly dropped dead. There wasn't a bill in there of lower denomination than one thousand dollars; and most of them were ten-thousand-dol-lar bills.

“'No, Larry,' says the old man, 'I'm afraid I can't, afraid I can't—haven't got the change.'

“And while we stood there and looked, he smoothed and patted those bills, and folded and refolded them, and then put them back into his pocket, and patted the pocket.

“'Mary,' he says to the old woman with a grin, 'that's quite a lot of money for little Lem Singleton to be carrying around in his pocket, isn't it?' “'It is that, Lemuel,' said the old lady, 'and I should think you'd be afraid of leaving it out of the bank.'

“'Well, Mary,' says the old man, 'I kind o' like to have it around me all the time—uh—huh! a little bit where I can put my hands on it, all the time. I used to carry gold; but I gave that up; it's too heavy, for what it's worth. But I like it, Mary; I used to look at that gold and say to myself, “Well, there's one thing you got, Lem Singleton, they never thought you'd get when you left home! And they aren't going to take it away from you, either!” It was a long time before I could make paper seem as real to me as gold. But it does now.'

“And what does the old bird do but take it out of his pocket again and crinkle it through his fingers and smooth it out again and pet it and do everything but kiss it. Larry and I stood looking at him with our eyes sticking out, and he looked at us and laughed. It came to me all of a sudden that he liked to come where we servants were because he could pull that kind of thing in front of us, but that he was sort of lost among the swell-society bunch because he didn't dare pull it there and didn't feel so rich among them.

“'My God, Larry,' I said, when we were outside the house, 'did you notice how much kale the old man had there?'

“'Uh-huh,' said Larry. 'Mother always cooks a lot for him.'

“'Wake up, Stupid,' I said. 'I don't mean cabbage. I mean money. There must have been nearly two hundred thousand dollars in that roll!'

“'He always has around one hundred thousand dollars on him, at least,' says Larry. 'And I've seen him flash as high as a quarter of a million.'

“'Well,' I says, 'something ought to be done about it.'

“'What do you mean, Ed?' says he.

“'Oh, nothing,' I said.

“We walked over to get the L train downtown, saying nothing, and then finally Larry remarked: “'Electricity is a great thing, Ed.'

“'I never said it wasn't,' says I.

“'It's a great thing,' says Larry, 'but when you sit on it, sit on it right. For instance, I'd a darned sight rather sit in one of these electric trains than in that electric chair up at Sing Sing.'

“'Who said anything about an electric chair?' I asked him.

“'Nobody said anything,' says Larry, 'but you're thinking so darned loud I can get you.'

“'Piffle, peanuts and petrification,' I said. 'Take care of your own thoughts, and I'll skim the fat off of mine myself.'

“Well, as I said, after that we got better acquainted, the old man and I. I paid more attention to him. He interested me more. I've always been interested in science of all kinds, and the year I spent in Jake Hergsheimer's house I cut the leaves of a lot of books in his library and gave them the once over. I was always interested in psychology, even before the word got to be a headliner in the Sunday supplements, and I took a good deal of pleasure that winter trying to get inside of Old Man Singleton's mind. I must say, I never got very far in, at that. My general conclusion at the end is what it was at the beginning—his fad is kale.

“And he loved to show it, you could see that. Not that he pulled it every time he happened to be at one of our parties. Often he would drop in that winter from some swell social event at one of the big houses uptown, where he had been a guest, and eat some of old Mary's chow, and never intimate by word or look that he had all that kale on him. And then again he'd come among us, diked out in the soup and fish, and flash the roll, for no other reason that I know except he enjoyed seeing us get the blind staggers, which we always did. And then he'd fuss with it and pet it and go into a dream over it, and wake up again and grin and talk about life with old Mary. And they agreed about life; you never heard two more moral persons exchange views. It was sometimes as good as a Sunday-school to listen to them for half an hour.

“One night, when they had been gassing for a while, they sort of got my goat, and I said to him:

“'Mr. Singleton, does it ever strike you as a little peculiar that you should have so much money and so many other people, such as myself, none at all?'

“'No, Ed,' he says. 'No, it doesn't. That's the Lord's way, Ed! Money is given as a sacred trust by the Lord to them that are best fitted to have and to hold.'

“'Meaning,' I asked him, 'that if you were ever to let loose of any of it, it might work harm in the world?'

“He chewed over that for quite a while, as if he saw something personal in it, and he gave me a ten-dollar bill for a Christmas present. He isn't as stingy as some people say he is; he just looks so stingy that if he was the most liberal man on earth he would get the reputation of being stingy.

“The lady's maid that I used to go to the opera with quit me a little while after Christmas. She and I were walking around the promenade between the acts one night at the Metropolitan and Larry was with us, when a fellow stopped Larry and spoke to him. I could see the guy looking at the girl and me as he and Larry talked. Later, Larry told me that it was one of Jake Hergsheimer's friends, and he had been a little bit surprised to see Larry at the opera all diked out, and he had wanted to know who the girl was.

“Well, anyhow, she never went to the opera with me after that; but a few weeks later I saw her at a cabaret with Jake's friend. It was a grief to me; but I got into some real trouble, or let it get into me, about the same time, and that helped take the sting off. I had once been married—but there's no use going into all that. Anyhow, when the marriage kind o' wore off, my own folks took my wife's side of the case and she went to live with them. My old dad was sick, and they needed money, and my wife wrote to me that she was willing to let bygones be bygones and accept some money from me, and that my parents felt the same way, and there was a kid, too, that my folks were bringing up.