New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
Harry’s prospects have improved wonderfully of late. You know his heart
was never in professional wrestling. He deliberately gave up a promising
career _on the mat_, as they call it, where he acquired that odious
nickname of the "Harlem Gorilla." Poor Hercules is about as much like a
gorilla as I am like an elephant. Refusing engagements to appear in
public contests brought him down on his luck for a time. That’s how he
happened to land in the model tenements. He never was even the least
bit of a radical. Among the Outlaws, our gorilla is quite a lamb.
Well, this repulsive part of his career is over for good. He is now the
physical director of the Bankers’ Club. (What think you of my prophetic
nickname for Hercules? The bankers have their monster clubhouse on Fifth
Avenue, almost next door to the Pillars of Hercules, as the Gotham and
St. Regis hotels are called.) It’s a good position. And an even better
one is in sight. The Life Prolongation Institute (I say, Araminta, what
a name!) has lately approached him in regard to a post at one of its
European branches.
Wouldn’t it be odd, if we all met some fine morning in Trafalgar Square
or the Champs Elysees?
As for Robert, he has become as mad as a March hare. His Guild League
seems to have dropped through a hole in the ground. (I predicted that,
too!) He says the Guildsman propaganda was too radical for the
old-style Laborites and too conservative for the Bolsheviks. But I
can’t pretend to follow these distinctions.
At all events, he was very much at loose ends for a while. One or two
excellent openings in the newspaper line he calmly turned down with the
remark that a successful journalist would have to be as corrupt as
Falstaff and Hutchins Burley rolled into one. He is really quite
incorrigible. He never seems to be content until he has got himself
thoroughly on the wrong side of everybody who might be of service to
him.
There are any number of instances of this trait. His personal quarrel
with Hutchins Burley was quite unnecessarily lengthened into a business
feud. He never made the most of his friendship with Claude (think what
a chance it was for a man in his circumstances to be intimate with a man
in Claude’s!). He got himself in the black books of the whole newspaper
world because of his agitation for the Guildsmen. And he is always
flinging off violently from his friends. To this day, he rebuffs
Hercules and me whenever we try to help him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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