The Smart Set/Volume 42/Issue 1/The Merchant of Venus

by Albert Payson Terhune

 

THE MERCHANT OF VENUS

 

By Albert Payson Terhune

 

RAEGAN had been absent from his home haunts for thirty days. Not for a month. For thirty days. In Raegan's world there is a vast difference of meaning in the two terms.

I was far too tactful to ask where he had been. Intuition—or observation—had told me he would be back in town on the thirtieth day. If not, on the sixtieth or at worst the ninetieth. Magistrates have a fondness for the number thirty and its exact multiples.

Raegan on his return was quite free from reserve or false shame as to his abiding place during the thirty-day hiatus in our acquaintance.

“Been to sea,” he volunteered cheerily. “Surrounded by water, anyhow. And in as comf'table quarters as shipboard; without the risk of being drowned. Stopping a spell at the little riverside ranch claimed by old man Blackwell's heirs. There's worse places—if one doesn't have to be at any of 'em.”

I still felt a certain awkwardness in pursuing the theme. But Raegan had none. He modestly but frankly went on to explain.

“The bulls,” he observed, “have had it in for me for quite a spell. I see that, now it's too late to do me any good. They framed me. Elsewise, why did that mission-upholstered peg poster at Eighth and Fiftieth give me backtalk when I reparteed to his 'move-on' yawp? And then why did he try to shove me when he saw I wasn't feeling as peaceful as I generally do? He must have known I wasn't sober enough to be the reg'lar 'dumb, driven' New Yorker. I handed him one. And in the mix-up I tore both the skirts of his coat. (Always do that, son, when you scrap with a cop. They have to pay, out of their own pockets, for repairs to their harnesses. So a torn coat pains 'em a whole lot worse'n a fractured heart.) I had pull enough to get the coop edict pared down to thirty days; and I squared myself with the sore bull. There's no harm done. But,” he added in soft regret, “if I'd been a militette I'd 'a' got my picture on the front page for messing up a cop—instead of two measly agate lines in the 'Police Court News.'”

I tried to cheer him with the unique reflection that Law, if not Life, deals more gently with women offenders than with men. But Raegan had no wish to be cheered. My well meant words tapped one of the theory veins that lie so close to his mental surface.

And from that punctured vein gushed forth a flood of contradictory argument. To whose depths, like sediment—mud or gold as you may prefer—silted at last the ensuing Raeganesque yarn; told, as usual, by way of illustration.

At least, Raegan seemed to think it illustrated one or more of his argument's various points. Whether or not it did I cannot say. For the points had come too fast and too turbulently for me to tabulate them. But it illustrated something. Of that I can have no doubt at all. Perhaps that honesty is the best policy. Perhaps that birds of a feather should not throw stones.

 

The good old Law (scoffed Raegan) gives women the best of it, hey? Maybe so, in such silly trifles as property rights and breach of promise and arson and mayhem and murder. But not in the really big things of life. Not once. Sometimes it even drives 'em to matrimony. Or worse. Like Mattie Mercer.

It didn't drive Mattie Mercer to matrimony. For she'd driven there of her own accord. But it drove her out of it and then to worse. And, after that, to still worse. And, at last, to very worst.

Mattie was a friend of mine. At just one spot on the route. Not before or since. She's been miles above me, those earlier and later times. She was a fine woman. I'll hand her that, if it will help her carry her district. I've heard folks hint that her morals were bad. They weren't. Any more than a bald-headed man's hair is bad. She hadn't any. Morals. Not hair. She had a double portion of that. Red. And her eyes were red-brown and her skin was a winter sunset. And her stuck-out jaw was the only thing that saved her from being wrecked by that color combination. As it was, she just couldn't make her temperament behave.

I've read somewhere that a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband. Well, if that's so, Mattie's husband hadn't the ghost of a show of butting into the king row. He got wise, by and by, and he Renoed both Mattie and her temperament.

But she didn't have that south elevation jaw for nothing. She sat on the hilltop and made war medicine, till hubby emeritus loafed across with a big lump sum. He wanted her to drop the use of his last name, too—he having quite a fancy to the name and not relishing the decorations she was likely to plaster on it. Mattie agreed to mislay the name for another spot cash consideration. She grabbed the cash—and hung onto the name. She sure was a business man.

Then she figured how she could best lay out her capital and her name so as to support herself and to peeve Mercer and his scand'lized, high-idealed family that had lost its taste for her.

She'd read “Mrs. Warren's Profession” and it gave her the double idea she wanted. I never read the poem or tract or treatise or whatever it is, myself. But when Mattie told me about her start and mentioned the Warren person, I asked her who Mrs. Warren was. And she answered, kind of disgusted:

“A Merchant of Venus.”

“By Shakespeare?” I asked her, to show I was hep to just a few of the major leaguers.

“No,” comes back Mattie; “by Necessity.”

Mattie started business. She had the cash. And her earlier flights had given her the nucleus of a good clientèle. She kept the name “Mercer,” too. And it began to take on quite a new local reputation all of its own.

Friend Husband must have been pleased. But it served him nice and right. Men are too careless about who they lend the use of their names to. Any man of sense, looking at Mattie, from the time she was expelled from grammar school, would have hung out the “No Matrimony” sign in a hurry. And scuttled up a tree till she had moved past.

It didn't take Mattie long to make a fairly good beginning, and to stop being “Mattie” and become “Mrs. Mercer.” Maybe you think there was a fortune in it. Most people do. They think the middlewoman's profits are enormous, and that the Mrs. Mercers usually stack up the coin in millions.

And the Mrs. Mercers ought to. They ought to have every pleasure and luxury that this life can give them. Because, if there's a good old John Calvin hell anywhere in the next world, the Mrs. Mercers are sure due to occupy its classiest grills. To my way of thinking, theirs comes pretty near to being the only unpardonable sin on the whole slate.

And when I say “unpardonable,” I mean “inexcusable,” too. There's nothing to make the Merchant of Venus profession forgivable. Not even the money that's in it. For there's more profit in a toy shop or a steam laundry.

It's just rotten. And fringed with trouble, at that. Like I'm going to prove to you, if you'll quit yawning and listen.

Still, as I pointed out, Mrs. Mercer hadn't a moral to her back. And she had a spite to work off on her ex-family-in-law. And she grew to love the life. And there was a tolerable living in it for her. And it kept her from being lonesome. And it was nice to have folks to order around. So Mrs. Mercer was pretty happy. She had craved to lap up excitement. And she got it (like the house's liquor) by the wholesale. It was the life she was suited to. The longer it lasted the surer she was of that.

She came of a million times better class than most Rahabettes. And that helped. For she catered only to the “Double A” trade. She was clever, too; and always hitting on cute ways to advertise, among the clubmen who had known Hubby. As, for instance, when she hung her saintly, stiff-necked mother-in-law's Sargent portrait in the front reception room. Hubby heard about that. She saw to it that he should. He paid a private detective five hundred dollars to go and steal or destroy it. Mrs. Mercer tipped the sleuth an extra ten to sling acid on the picture when there was a club crowd in the house and a correspondent of Social Blitherings; and to talk about it afterward.

Yes, Mrs. Mercer got along fine—for such a job. And she was happier'n ever before in her life. But maybe too much happiness ain't good for any woman. Perhaps that's why so few of 'em die of it. And perhaps that's why old man Trouble by and by frescoed the Indian sign on Mrs. Mercer's career of simple bliss. Here's how it happened:

Mrs. Mercer had a younger brother and sister. And they were the only folks in the world she cared anything about. But she sure worshiped those two. They had all three been orphans ever since the little sister had been born; and an undesired maiden aunt had brought them up. Mrs. Mercer had been years the oldest and she had married young.

After her smash-up with her husband and her experiment in Mercerizing vice, she had been canned good and plenty by Auntie. But she had managed to keep in touch with Brother and Little Sister, on the sly. She was generous with them and was always slipping them cash or pretty presents. In view of which, they consented to take her at her own face value instead of at Auntie's.

Brother was getting ready for college. And Little Sister had been bedridden from the day she was born. Bad teamwork in the legs and spine, or something expensive like that.

Just as Mrs. Mercer is beginning to hit out a fair living and to realize she's struck her gait at last, good old Auntie forgets to wake up one morning. Auntie's eight-thousand-dollar annuity stops with Auntie's life. Nothing had been laid by. Brother and Little Sister were tossed into the snow-eating class.

It was up to Mrs. Mercer. And she never batted a lash, but took on the extra weight as cheerful as could be. She loved those two kids. As I was telling you.

Of course, she couldn't very well keep them at the house. So she hired a little apartment for them and furnished it. And she hired a trained nurse at a flat rate of $1,560 a year to tend to Little Sister and run the flat for her and Brother. And Mrs. Mercer paid all expenses—doctors, tradesfolks and Brother's tuition at Columbia. The whole thing tore a mighty ragged and unsightly hole in a five-thousand-dollar bill, every year. But Mrs. Mercer was game. She never once screeched.

Just the same, peace and comfort flew out of the window pretty near as spry as Mrs. Mercer's guests would at sound of a patrol wagon bell. Five thousand dollars extra is a handicap that even a galloping Pittsburgher don't care to carry unless he has to. And it brought Mrs. Mercer into a half-Nelson with Worry. She could have cleared expenses nicely and maybe could have put something by; if she'd been let alone. But that additional five thousand dollars debit was too much.

Here's where nine people out of eight would begin to talk to you about the enormous profits of Mrs. Mercer's rotten trade and to wonder how a measly five thousand could keep her awake nights. And here's where that same fool idea is due to be exploded with a reverberating pop. By one Raegan. Let me tell you, in a mouthful or so of words, some of the things that swallowed Mrs. Mercer's profits; same as they gobble the excess cash of every Merchant of Venus.

You're likely doping up in your mind what the rent of the average city house would be, and the cost of food and servants; and trying to subtract that petty sum from the profits. Likewise you're figuring what those profits must have been when Mrs. Mercer sold California champagne at seven dollars a quart and flat bottled domestic beer at seventy-five cents a pint and bum cigarettes at half a dollar the box of ten. And you're thinking her bank balance at the end of the month must have looked like John D. Carnebilt's, seen through a high power magnifier. So don't let me waste any of my loose time in getting your mind cleared up.

I don't know from experience the exact gross profits of such places, my own worst pursuits having been poorbox robbing and burning foundling asylums. But I do know, from all sorts of hearsay, what some of its disbursements are. Here's just a few of 'em:

Every tradesman soaked extra charges on the goods sent to Mrs. Mercer's, as soon as they found out what kind of house it was. Which was as soon as the first delivery was made. Guests weren't exactly on their least boisterous behavior, either; especially when they came there in a crowd from stag banquets. And that meant more breakage and general wear and tear and damage than the average restaurant would get in a year.

But those were minor expenses. The first big regular outlay, of course, was the monthly wad to the precinct captain's collector. And the captain himself had a sociable little way of dropping around in plain clothes and first sopping up, free, a couple of bottles of Mrs. Mercer's seven-dollar wine, and then breaking the news to her that there was a new and awful greedy inspector in the district who had ordered him to raise the monthly ante by twenty-five per cent.

Mrs. Mercer would pay the added bit. It was cheaper than to refuse. Then, like as not, she'd find that the captain had been transferred the next day and had just been making a chunk of good-bye clean-up. A new captain would get on the job. And that meant a new contribution, right off, for Mrs. Mercer and her fellow landladies in the precinct. More holes in the gross receipts.

Another little bar to plutocracy was the credit system she must stand for. She had to let some of her richer patrons run up dizzy accounts. Most of these credit customers were Wall Streeters. And Wall Streeters of that class are apt to go broke pretty sudden and unexpected. And when they did, they'd get a fit of absence of memory about Mrs. Mercer's bill, and they'd transfer their trade to some house where their credit was still strong. A cute trick.

Say, did you ever stop to think what a cinch all men have in passing off counterfeit money on the Mrs. Mercers of this world? And how much of it is done? It's so easy that it's plain unsportsmanlike. Almost dishonest. A man with a bundle of phoney bills can always get rid of it at such places. If the bills are fairly well got up.

Mrs. Mercer couldn't tell a clever counterfeit bill from real currency, any more than you or most other amachoors can. Especially by artificial light. She'd get loads of phoney money each month. What could she do? She couldn't have the men who palmed it on her arrested. Think it over a minute and you'll see she couldn't. It was a safe play on the part of the bad-money shovers. And it cut down Mrs. Mercer's profits, in swads, and left her every month with about half a wastebasket full of fives, tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds, that her bank was too haughty and fastidious to accept as deposits.

And yet you say the law is easier on women than on men? Any man could jug a man who handed him such bills for value received.

Liquors—especially beer—formed another big item. The case goods folks charged her a series of Klondike prices. And if she wouldn't pay, or said she was going to some other dealer, they'd threaten to squeal about the house to the Cruelty to Vice Society and get her closed down and maybe Blackwelled. Don't you remember Mary Goode's testimony along just that same line? The newspapers were full of it a while back. But being in New York, it was all forgot a week later.

Servants, too, helped keep Mrs. Mercer from sleeping too peaceful. Say! Respectable folks think they're pestered by the servant question. They have a cinch. If they want to know what a nightmare the servant question really is—let 'em try running a place like Mrs. Mercer's.

She had to pay extra big wages, of course, to keep any sort of servants at all. Even black ones—the only kind generally that'll work for the Rahabettes. Besides big wages, she had to stand for quick raises, for laziness, for incompetence, for every fault a servant can have. If she tried to fire her servants, or gave them a hot calldown, they'd be back at her in a second with the good old threat to expose her and to give evidence that would put her out of business.

The rent game was played on Mrs. Mercer, too. You know the stunt? It's very simple. A set of real estate agents make a business of renting houses and flats to Mercers. They charge hideous sums; and at that they aren't content. When such agents want a piece of extra coin, they get the cops—for a consideration—to close up a batch of houses. The Mercers have to get new places in a hurry. The agents get them the new homes they want. And charge double for speed—and other things. It's a fine industry.

What's the use of wasting breath on more instances? Mrs. Mercer and her kind are everybody's prey. Honest, I don't know whether it's rottener to be a Merchant of Venus or one of the swarm that bleed her. But I guess I've told you enough to show you what those glittering gross profits of Mrs. Mercer's amounted to by the time the gross was boiled down to net. And what shape she was in to stand that added load of five thousand dollars a year for the upkeep of Brother and Little Sister.

Understand me. She could have kept going, as regiments of others do, even under all the regular drains of her business, but she couldn't carry that yearly five-thousand-dollar outlay besides. Not one Merchant of Venus in a hundred could have done that.

At first Mrs. Mercer fought; and fought hard. She had all the pluck there is. And she was mad, clear through, at the fear of having to lose the beloved career she'd picked out. She squared her front-extension chin and scowled the way she imagined Mme. de Pompadour must have in one of her near-royal rages. (Oh, yes. Every woman thinks she looks like some siren of history. Just as every woman knows, at heart, that she could be a great actress if she had half a quarter of a chance. And just as every tubby, undersized, smooth-shaven, light-eyed man thinks he looks like Napoleon; and loves to pull down his forelock and cross his fat little arms and glower into the shaving glass when he's all alone.)

Next, Mrs. Mercer swallows her rage and gets down to work to cut expenses and boost trade. And fate counters on her by causing a financial panic in the Street and the electing of a reform city Administration at the same time. Poor Mrs. Mercer!

It was a double wave that swamped many a wabbly craft, disreputable and otherwise, that year. It clamped shut the city's lid and its spenders' pockets at one swash. But, at that, it only hurried along for Mrs. Mercer a day that was already overdue and that had to come soon or late; thanks to that same five-thousand-dollar overweight.

She looked out through the shutters at the harness bull stationed by a reform-for-revenue-only police captain outside her door. She looked at the list of bad debts, the piled-up tradesmen duns, and the higher pile of counterfeit yellows. And she wished for once in her life that she was still respectable; so she could cry on some woman friend's divan, tell her pastor her troubles, and then be snappy to her husband and maybe discharge the cook.

But what could she do? She had no woman friend left—of the sort one cries to. Her husband was still farther away. She was too frankly an animal to soil any church with her presence; so she had no pastor. To discharge the cook was a luxury she and her kind are mostly afraid to indulge in.

Then she sat up all night going over her books, and in the morning she had 'em balanced. But she'd also proved that the five thousand dollars would overbalance 'em.

In on her blues sneaked the reform-for-revenue-only captain's wardman, with a hint that the policeman could be shoved from the door and business could be discreetly resumed at second speed—if Mrs. Mercer would come across with a sum that staggered belief and would follow it with double her former monthly payments. The new captain, you see, was a human man. And he couldn't bear to see anyone go broke from lack of business. Not even himself.

Mrs. Mercer heard out the message. Then she thought a minute and said to the wardman—or maybe to herself:

“The anchor isn't much use after the ship is wrecked. Is it?”

The wardman, who'd got pretty well acquainted with her, on his official visits—his name just happened to be Raegan, by some queer twist—didn't quite understand what she was getting at. He told her so. She didn't bother to explain, but went on:

“Tell the captain I can't pay it. Tell him I'm never going to pay anything again to anyone of the vulture breed. That means a raid. I know. Now, for old time's sake, slip me a warning when to expect it. I'll try to see it's spectacular enough to put the captain's name in every paper. Tell him so.”

She got word half an hour later that the raid was scheduled for eleven fifteen that evening. And the cop was taken away from in front of the door. That reform captain sure had sense. If only in his wardman's name. He took her tip and played it strong. Sweet are the uses of advertisement.

Mrs. Mercer hadn't much time to squander. So she used every inch of it. First she telephoned to about thirty men—big names, some of them. They all chanced to be delinquent credit customers or chaps who had inadvertently left phoney money with her. She told them all was forgiven, and that tonight was the night she was going to give such a party as time would hereafter date from. Everything was to be free; in honor of a big legacy she'd just fallen into. And there was going to be a big and separate surprise for every guest. Likewise, no one would be admitted later'n eleven ten p.m.

She called up the head of the liquor firm that supplied her, and the real estate partners, and invited them, too. And on the last shred of her credit she bought the eats and the booze for the supper. After which she tipped off a few reporters she knew.

To cap the climax of glorious achievement, she went downstairs and fired her servants; first explaining tenderly just what she thought of them. Especially the cook. She told me afterward that kitchen scene was the first moment of pure and exalted soul joy she had known since before her baby died.

 

At 12.15 a.m. the next day there was a bigger, shame-faceder and better-dressed assortment of John Smiths in the Night Court than had adorned that sunless resort since the biggest Canfield raid. Gee, but the reporters wallowed deep that night; and the papers printed worth-while stuff in the morning! And that week's issue of Social Blitherings sold out an hour after it was published.

Some night! It's talked of yet. The captain was afraid of the reform magistrate. And the magistrate was afraid of the reform captain. So the two of 'em done their dooty as they seen it. And the John Smith clan was forever disgraced. Some members of it in their own name.

So much for trying to get something for nothing. Never do that, son. Offer it, but never take it. Those simps might have known enough to shy clear to the other side of the road when a woman like Mattie Mercer offered a wholesale party—free.

She had played Samson, all right, in her fall.

As soon as she could shake clear of the law, Mrs. Mercer made a round of chatty little office visits to a few kind gentlemen she knew. And while all of them scowled fierce when she came in, yet they all came meekly across with cheques of one size or another by the time she was through talking to them. So, by the time the last call was paid, Mrs. Mercer had a cozy little stake for a new game.

Did she start over again in the only trade where “Mrs.” and “Madam” never can mean the same thing? Not she. She was clever. Even if her life's ambitions was all wrecked about her feet. She used the money in the one way that was left open to her.

Her hopes were smashed. Her career was over. Her apology-for-a-heart was dead. But the world had to roll on just the same. And five thousand dollars per year had to be found to keep Brother and Little Sister going.

The law had driven Mrs. Mercer out of matrimony into something worse. And now, as I hinted to you before, it drove her into the very worst. But that was all it could do to her. It drove her where it could never again have any more hold over her.

Suicide? Son, how many times have I got to ding it into your folding ears that Mattie Mercer was clever.

No, sir. It turned her respectable. That's what the law's final swat did to her. Through what the Socialists call “Economic pressure,” the poor harassed dame was driven into respectability.

She rented a big, old-fashioned house on the West Side, stocked it with fake old-fashioned furniture that Sheraton and Chippendale and Hepplewhite would have sobbed over; and—she started an ultra-exclusive, super-high-priced boarding house.

Not the funny story boarding house. But the kind that's as hard to get into as the Metropolitan Club or the Newport cottage crowd. The type of boarding house where you must be recommended and vouched for, and then investigated and maybe be turned down after all.

There's no siren or other lure in this sheep-souled old world half so enticing as a 'No Admittance” sign. And when you make any place hard to get into, you put it, right away, on the top line of the Desirable List.

Mrs. Mercer was dead wise to that. So, after the crash that broke her heart, she set the new trap accordingly. Instead of hanging out a come-all-ye invitation in front of her new boarding house, she began by turning people away as ineligible. That started the rush.

She'd cleared the decks in good shape for the move. After the raid she had vanished for a day or two. And during that time she had sent a batch of cute little farewell notes to the cops and the rest of the carrion flock. Notes that bade 'em a sweet good-bye and promised never to bother any of 'em again, and wound up by saying that by the time the postman delivered the notes, she'd be on her way to Europe, where she was going to stay forever amen—being sore on lively New York.

Next she dyes that Titian thatch of hers to a rusty black and puts on a pair of dinky little gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

Those two precautions—the notes and the new headpiece effect—was all she needed, especially in New York. Madam Mercer was dead and gone forever. And to the good old occasionally-sunny, hard-worked South she reaches for a new self.

With the result that she starts her boarding house as Mrs. Jubal Lee Fauquier; the Richmond relict of a silver-lunged Virginia Senator; and the daughter of a professionally gallant Confederate general who had fallen in defense of States' Rights shortly before the first battle of Bull Run.

The South is always a sure card. And the farther north you go, the better it gets.

Mattie ran the boarding house just to keep her from having time to brood over a glories in the dreamy Southland.

The prices she charged helped a lot, too. Folks will break themselves to see a six-dollar show when they'd be dead leary of it if the admission was fifty cents.

And when she turned an orphan girl boarder out of the house for sitting in the parlor till eleven thirty with a fellow the girl was engaged to—why, Mrs. Fauquier's establishment straightway got a name for lofty propriety that made out-of-town mothers fall over their own feet in the rush to pay frontier rates for the privilege of placing their music-study daughters in her pure charge.

Business boomed. Mrs. Fauquier rented three houses in a row, and she cleared all her expenses off her top floors. Why shouldn't she? She was getting any prices she had the blasphemy to ask. The Confederacy's fall was avenged. And as it was such a high privilege to be one of the Fauquier boarders, she could save a lot on food. She had no hush money to pay to cops or liquor men or real estaters or any of the vulture flock. Tradesmen scrapped for her custom, and made special cut rates for her. She was able to live nicely off the class of folks who had once lived off her. Servants loved to work for her. It gave them a standing for future places. She had nobody to be afraid of. She was safe at every square on the board. She had taught the servants and boarders to call her “Madam Fauquier.” They supposed it was a Southern custom.

Was she happy? You'd think so, with a land office income, a good conscience, no worry and the respect of her community.

But—if you lose what you want most, will you be happy with what's wished on you in its place? Not you. Not anyone. Certainly not Mrs. Jubal Lee Fauquier—formerly Mattie Mercer.

Her boarders used to whisper that there was a heartbreaking, far-away look sometimes in Madam Fauquier's big red-brown eyes. There was, too. She was listening for the giggles of girls, the snickers and guffaws of men, the click of booze glasses, the dicker of the wardman and the patrol wagon bell. Once when an ambulance clanged through the street at dinner time, she almost lost everything by coming suddenly out of a trance and yelling:

“There's a getaway route by the basement that they aren't on to!”

Yes, Mattie has everything a woman can want. And she's dead homesick and miserable. It's the cruel law that's made her so.

 

Raegan lighted another putrescent cigar, shook out the match and resumed:

“Yes, son, here in New York the temptation to be respectable is apt to be too strong for a poor weak woman to resist!”