Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 May 1901 — THE GENTLEMAN [ARTICLE]

THE GENTLEMAN

By Edwin L. Sabin.

“ didn’t know enough to take off his hat!” As the elevator sedately moved upward, bearing Miss Hallowell to the eighth floor, these words were spilled from it directly into the sun-burned ears of John Peck, of the sixth floor. He realized that it was his hat which bad not been “taken off,” and that through the medium of this hat he had Incurred the displeasure and scorn of Miss Hallowell. He inserted a key In the keyhole of 'Apartment 603, entered, and strode noisily through the inner hall until he reached his room. He was angry and hurt Nothing so cruel as a woman’s tongue, and nothing that leaves a man so defenceless. John removed the offending hat and examined it critically even approvingly. It was a sombrero. The chances were that no hat in that whole great city could equal it in fineness of texture and in genuine worth. “Out West” from where John Peck recently had come {and where at this moment he heartily wished he were), the quality of a hat is of supreme importance. A hat is actually an integral part, not merely an adjunct, of a wardrobe. It is carefully selected, jealously cherished and proudly worn as a thing of art. The cowboy is more tender of his boots and of his hat than he is of his pony. However, despite the evident fact that this was a hat to be esteemed among all rival hats, John admitted to himself that he ought not to have kept it on his head while he was in the elevator with a woman. It dawned upon him that there is a distinction between private and public elevators. He had committed an error against society. Take a man who has been on the range for seven or eight years, and In that period scarcely has seen a woman, and transplant him to a city, and although at heart he is a gentleman he is likely at first to scratch the polish of metropolitan civilization. Thus to oblige a woman, whether pretty or ugly, John Peck might brave a norther, but he might meet her the next day in an elevator and forget to doff his hat. Miss Hallowell had learned only the latter portion of this hypothesis, and now up on the eighth floor she was graphically recounting to her friends her truly harrowing experience. Miss Hallowell, maiden lady, was large and angular and severe, but she had a little mind, easily disturbed. “I just glared at him all the way,” Bhe incited, with proper emphasis, “yet I don’t believe he even thought of his hat! I never heard of such a performance! He looked like a cowboy, and the little fellow in the elevator says that he rooms on the sixth, in the Morris apartments. I shouldn’t think the Morrises would take a lodger like that!”

“He’s a relative of Mr. Morris,” explained one friend, “and I understand he’s from Arizona. Anyway, he’s come to the city to stay awhile, and of course Mr. Morris felt obliged to give him a room until he found permanent quarters.” “Well, he isn’t a gentleman!” asserted Miss Hallowell, conclusively. For Miss Hallowell was quite sure that she knew a gentleman when she saw him. ******* While on the top floor of the building Miss Hallowell had been vigorously narrating and condemning; while two floors below John Peck had been sitting on his bed wrathfully brooding over criticism by effete society; while, later, Miss Hallowell had descended to her own apartments at 617, on the same floor with those of the misbehaving Morris family, far down in the basement a Are had been bom, and from moment to moment it had been growing. Brought forth in stealth. In stealth It sought to live until its stature was assured. At 8 o’clock that night it had been only a tiny flicker of flame which the breath of a babe might have overcome. At 8 o’dock two buckets of water could have prevailed against it. At 10 o’clock a single extinguisher, wisely wielded, could have subdued it. At 11 o’clock it still was afraid to be seen. So slowly and so craftily was it eating Into the cranny leading between the walls. But at 12 o’clock it had arrived to Its manhood, it had established its stronghold, and it was ready to flaunt the red banner of defiance in the face of a thousand people. Therefore it recked not that during the midnight hour the engineer, tardily traversing tiu' corridor, smelt

smoke, and peering in saw fire, and, awakening the elevator boys as he ran,, rushed to the alarm box and pulled the lever. Fast as sped the elevator boys from story to story, summoning the tenants, faster sped the flames. The fine aparthouse, with its convenient hallways, its unique furnishings of maple, its varnished floors, its tastefully tinted ceilings, was after all a very flimsy structure. The contractors deemed that they were the only ones to know this —but fire long had been in possession of the secret John Peck, sleeping the sound slum* ber of a perfectly healthy man, at the end of an inside hall, with the Mosrises absent for the night, and no one near to arouse him, and Miss Hallowell, slightly deaf, also asleep at the end of an inside hall opposite him, did not comprehend the situation until their rooms were thick with smoke and the blaze was seeking for them. When they leaped from their beds they found the floor hot to their feet. The man and the woman emerged from their apartments simultaneously, and met face to face on the landing. No thought now of outward semblance of lady and gentleman. The elevator shaft was a flue up which whirled gusts of resinous smoke, glowing cinders and bursts of torrid air, while from stairs beneath little flames spouted eagerly. The draft caused the doors to slam behind the two. The elevator cage was somewhere below and descending. “Quick—try the back way!” cried John. “Through our apartmenthurry!” “Oh, I can’t, I can’t!” wailed Miss Hallowell, frantically. “I can’t move. My knees are so weak!”

“But you must!” appealed John. “Give me your hand—give it to me, I say!” Her collapse irritated him. “Get up! I’ll carry you, but you must try to walk.”. “No, no, I can’t,” she answered, with a sob. “Go on. Don’t you dare to touch me! I’d rather die here than get caught in that long corridor.” “Then the fire-escape in front,” he urged. “I’ll help you.” “No, no!” she protested hysterically, raising her hands to keep him at a distance. “Don’t touch me! don’t touch me! I’l stay here. You go!” “O thunder!” ejaculated John, with a sudden lapse into his forceful Western speech. “I’m shore not goin’ to leave you here all alone.” “You jest get under this, and I’ll make a try for that blamed elevator,” he said, as lightly as he could, and he clapped on her head his sombrero, which through habit he had snatched as he was bolting through his room. For a second time while in her company he was wearing it. He pressed the electric button, but already the elevator was crawling upward, after its last load—clutched at by the hungry flames as it brushed them in passing. From landing to landing it came, taking on in ones and twos persons who, like Miss Hallowell, had been unable to help themselves, or who, like John, had remained to help others. None would wait for the downward trip, for who could tell what might happen between minutes? The heat now was intense, and the cage was in the midst of a greedy, roaring furnace. Fire from the stairs curled into the sides of the elevator, and when it had swept painfully by licked its retreating floor. Its load was in torture. Men and women alike fought the operator as he bravely persisted in ascending. As he wrenched it back the door of the shaft blistered John’s hands. “Can’t go no higher!” gasped the elevator boy, as the cage hesitated opposite. “Get in, quick!” “Quick! Quick!” echoed the people, writhing as they were jostled against the hot iron-work of their prison. “For God’s sake, don’t stop! There’s no room!” shouted the voice of a man maddened by torture. “Down! down!” “You bet there’s room, pardner,” replied John, recklessly. “Lots of it! Ladies first—-” and with a swift motion he dragged Miss Hallowell from her knees and fairly rammed her in between the squirming bodies. Then then —in an Instant some frenzied hand jerked the lever and the cage shot down. Flames from the fourth floor closed over It like a barrier, and sprang vengefully up the stairway. Thus abandoned, John Peck turned to the door of the Morris apartment But the night-latch had fallen into place—and his keys were in his room. Desperately he tried Miss Hallowell’s

door. That, too, was locsea. ue dashed at the stairs. A volcano of fire met him, smote him in the face and hurled him backward.—The Criterion.