Lean out, and smile, and pluck thy heart's desire.
“Seems strange,” said Harry, “that a man can buy a good meal with a
thing like that!”
“What is a petrarch, anyway?” said Jack. “Gee, you'll have to brush your
hair to keep it out of your eyebrows,” said Harry. “Herod was petrarch
of Galilee, don't you remember? It's a kind of comptroller or efficiency
expert.”
“Nonsense,” said Harry. “Herod was patriarch of Galilee, not petrarch.”
At this moment Lester was busy multiplying twenty by fifty-two, and
adding sixty, and he did not attempt to put Laura's friend right in the
eyes of his companions.
*****
The next morning, at the office, Lester took occasion to stroll over to
the corner where Miss Denver was tickling the keys. Her delicious, able
fingers flashed like the boreal aurora; the incomparable smoothness of
her neck and throat fascinated him; her clear, blue-washed gray eyes
startled him with their merry archness. Wambling inwardly, he met her
gaze as coolly as he might.
“Come to Moretti's to-night?” he asked.
“I'm sorry; I've got a date to-night.”
He ached in spirit. “To-morrow night?”
She hesitated a moment, tapping the desk with a rosy finger nail. Then
her face brightened. “I'd love to.”
As he returned to his desk and the dull routine of writing press notes
for Petunia Veal's latest novel, he uttered a phrase that he had caught
from Harry Hanover. It was the first sign of his emancipation from
Mallarmé and the Oxford Movement, for certainly that phrase had never
been heard on the quilted lawns of Balliol: “She's a prize package, all
right, all right!”
Ten days elapsed. All six sonnets had been delivered and paid for, and
Mr. Arundel had bargained for a few extra rondeaux, at five dollars
each.
Antipasto, minestrone, breadsticks, force-meat balls, and here we are
again at the spaghetti and Hackensack Chianti. Lester had mailed his
MS. on “Clara Tice and the Pleinaerists of Greenwich Village” to the
_Oblique Review_ that afternoon, and had calculated that the editors
could not in any decency offer him less than fifty--or perhaps
forty--dollars for it. This, added to 20 by 52 plus 60 plus the rondeaux
and other probable increments, would certainly support two in a garret
for some time. He also had hopes of selling some obscenarios for the
movies. Pearl would probably want to go on with her work, for a while at
any rate. She was so independent! But those clear eyes of hers, like
a March sky with teasings of April in it, how tender and laughing they
were! A few nights ago they had taken a long bus ride together, and she
had forgotten her muff. She let him warm her hands instead. He went
home that night feeling strong enough to bite lamp-posts in two, and had
waked up Jack and Harry to put them right about Petrarch.
Pearl was teaching Lester to twirl up his spaghetti with fork and spoon,
instead of draping it out of his mouth like Spanish moss. Suddenly she
laughed.
“What did I tell you!” she said. “The dear old _Oblique_ has gone
blooie! Mr. Arundel called up the editor to-day and told him the
Barmecide Company won't supply him with any more paper until he pays his
bills. Of course that means he'll have to quit.”
Lester was touched in two vital spots: his own private hopes, and his
zeal for fly-specked literature. “Shades of Frank Harris!” he cried.
“If that isn't just like Arundel! Why, that man is pure and simple
_bourgeois!_ I never heard of such a thing. Has he no feeling at all for
art?” Pearl laughed--the pure, musical laugh of careless girlishness,
but the recording angel caught in the nimble chords a faint overtone of
something else--like the tinkle of ice in a misty tumbler. “Oh, he
has his own ideas about art,” she said. “He's taken to writing poetry
himself. You never heard such stuff--I've been meaning to tell you. What
does 'pullulate' mean?”
Lester's valiant heart, Lester's manly hands that had acted as a muff
on a Riverside Drive bus, trembled and stiffened. “_It 'pullulates and
blooms in sultry rhyme_,” she quoted gayly. “Now what do you make
of that, as referring to Mr. Arundel's heart? Sultry is right, too!”
Lion-hearted Harvard, oak-bosomed Balliol, and all the mature essences
of manhood were needed to keep Lester calm. How had she seen these
secret strains? She must have been peeping into the chief's private
correspondence. He hesitated during six inches of spaghetti. “Search
me!” he said. “Is it in Walter Mason?”
“No, it's his own stuff, I tell you. _O beauteous rose! O shrub without
a thorn!_” she chanted, and her laughter popped like a champagne cork.
The horrid truth burst upon him. The boss was courting the angel of the
office with the very ammunition that Lester himself had furnished, and
his vow of secrecy forbade him to disclose the truth. Oh, the paltry
meanness of fate, the villainy of circumstance! It is impossible to
describe the pangs it cost him to dissemble, cloak, disguise, and
conceal the anguish he felt. But dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal
he did, and though his heart glowed like an angry cigar stub, he reached
home at last.
There he sat down at his table, and amid the healthy snores of his
roommates he concocted a fine piece of literary ordnance. Late and
grimly he toiled and contrived. At length he had fashioned a sonnet
which would be the golden sum and substance of the previous sequence;
a cry of the heart so splendidly forensic that Mr. Arundel would pounce
upon it, yielding his crisp steel engraving in return. But see, the
asp concealed in the basket of fruit, the adder in the woodpile! Read
Lester's sonnet as an acrostic: