Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: The so-called delicious, intangible joke]
Molly
Make-Believe
By
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
With Illustrations by
Walter Tittle
New York
The Century Co.
1911
Copyright, 1910, by
THE CENTURY CO.
* * * * *
TO
MY SILENT PARTNER
* * * * *
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The so-called delicious, intangible joke _Frontispiece_
"Good enough!" he chuckled
Every girl like Cornelia had to go South sometime between November and
March
An elderly dame
A much-freckled messenger-boy appeared dragging an exceedingly
obstreperous fox-terrier
"Well I'll be hanged," growled Stanton, "if I'm going to be strung by
any boy!"
Some poor old worn-out story-writer
"Maybe she is--'colored,'" he volunteered at last
"Oh! Don't I look--gorgeous!" she stammered
"What?" cried Stanton, plunging forward in his chair
Cornelia's mother answered this time
He unbuckled the straps of his suitcase and turned the cover backward on
the floor
"Are you a good boy?" she asked
"It's only Carl," he said
* * * * *
MOLLY MAKE-BELIEVE
I
The morning was as dark and cold as city snow could make it--a dingy
whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fireplace; a shadow
black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous
room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water,
and a vapid, half-eaten grape-fruit.
Packed into his pudgy pillows like a fragile piece of china instead of
a human being Carl Stanton lay and cursed the brutal Northern winter.
Between his sturdy, restive shoulders the rheumatism snarled and
clawed like some utterly frenzied animal trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its
way out. Along the tortured hollow of his back a red-hot plaster fumed
and mulled and sucked at the pain like a hideously poisoned fang
trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way in. Worse than this; every four or
five minutes an agony as miserably comic as a crashing blow on one's
crazy bone went jarring and shuddering through his whole abnormally
vibrant system.
In Stanton's swollen fingers Cornelia's large, crisp letter rustled
not softly like a lady's skirts but bleakly as an ice-storm in
December woods.
Cornelia's whole angular handwriting, in fact, was not at all unlike a
thicket of twigs stripped from root to branch of every possible
softening leaf.
"DEAR CARL" crackled the letter, "In spite of your
unpleasant tantrum yesterday, because I would not kiss you
good-by in the presence of my mother, I am good-natured
enough you see to write you a good-by letter after all. But
I certainly will not promise to write you daily, so kindly
do not tease me any more about it. In the first place, you
understand that I greatly dislike letter-writing. In the
second place you know Jacksonville quite as well as I do, so
there is no use whatsoever in wasting either my time or
yours in purely geographical descriptions. And in the third
place, you ought to be bright enough to comprehend by this
time just what I think about 'love-letters' anyway. I have
told you once that I love you, and that ought to be enough.
People like myself do not change. I may not talk quite as
much as other people, but when I once say a thing I mean it!
You will never have cause, I assure you, to worry about my
fidelity.
"I will honestly try to write you every Sunday these next
six weeks, but I am not willing to literally promise even
that. Mother indeed thinks that we ought not to write very
much at all until our engagement is formally announced.
"Trusting that your rheumatism is very much better this
morning, I am
"Hastily yours,
"CORNELIA.
"P. S. Apropos of your sentimental passion for letters, I
enclose a ridiculous circular which was handed to me
yesterday at the Woman's Exchange. You had better
investigate it. It seems to be rather your kind."
As the letter fluttered out of his hand Stanton closed his eyes with a
twitch of physical suffering. Then he picked up the letter again and
scrutinized it very carefully from the severe silver monogram to the
huge gothic signature, but he could not find one single thing that he
was looking for;--not a nourishing paragraph; not a stimulating
sentence; not even so much as one small sweet-flavored word that was
worth filching out of the prosy text to tuck away in the pockets of
his mind for his memory to munch on in its hungry hours. Now everybody
who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business
letter does not deserve the paper which it is written on unless it
contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in
the night to remember and think about. And as to the Lover who does
not write significant phrases--Heaven help the young mate who finds
himself thus mismated to so spiritually commonplace a nature! Baffled,
perplexed, strangely uneasy, Stanton lay and studied the barren page
before him. Then suddenly his poor heart puckered up like a persimmon
with the ghastly, grim shock which a man experiences when he realizes
for the first time that the woman whom he loves is not shy,
but--_stingy_.
With snow and gloom and pain and loneliness the rest of the day
dragged by. Hour after hour, helpless, hopeless, utterly impotent as
though Time itself were bleeding to death, the minutes bubbled and
dripped from the old wooden clock. By noon the room was as murky as
dish-water, and Stanton lay and fretted in the messy, sudsy
snow-light like a forgotten knife or spoon until the janitor wandered
casually in about three o'clock and wrung a piercing little wisp of
flame out of the electric-light bulb over the sick man's head, and
raised him clumsily out of his soggy pillows and fed him indolently
with a sad, thin soup. Worst of all, four times in the dreadful
interim between breakfast and supper the postman's thrilly footsteps
soared up the long metallic stairway like an ecstatically towering
high-note, only to flat off discordantly at Stanton's door without
even so much as a one-cent advertisement issuing from the
letter-slide.--And there would be thirty or forty more days just like
this the doctor had assured him; and Cornelia had said that--perhaps,
if she felt like it--she would write--six--times.
Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and
smutted first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the
window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside
world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except
that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to
rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose
all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty
blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high
night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst
like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of
raw fish. Then, just as the mawkish cold, gray dawn came nosing over
the house-tops, and the poor fellow's mind had reached the point where
the slam of a window or the ripping creak of a floorboard would have
shattered his brittle nerves into a thousand cursing tortures--then
that teasing, tantalizing little friend of all rheumatic invalids--the
Morning Nap--came swooping down upon him like a sponge and wiped out
of his face every single bit of the sharp, precious evidence of pain
which he had been accumulating so laboriously all night long to
present to the Doctor as an incontestable argument in favor of an
opiate.
Whiter than his rumpled bed, but freshened and brightened and
deceptively free from pain, he woke at last to find the pleasant
yellow sunshine mottling his dingy carpet like a tortoise-shell cat.
Instinctively with his first yawny return to consciousness he reached
back under his pillow for Cornelia's letter.
Out of the stiff envelope fluttered instead the tiny circular to which
Cornelia had referred so scathingly.
It was a dainty bit of gray Japanese tissue with the crimson-inked
text glowing gaily across it. Something in the whole color scheme and
the riotously quirky typography suggested at once the audaciously
original work of some young art student who was fairly splashing her
way along the road to financial independence, if not to fame. And this
is what the little circular said, flushing redder and redder and
redder with each ingenuous statement:
THE SERIAL-LETTER COMPANY.
Comfort and entertainment Furnished for Invalids, Travelers,
and all Lonely People.
Real Letters
from
Imaginary Persons.
Reliable as your Daily Paper. Fanciful as your Favorite
Story Magazine. Personal as a Message from your Best Friend.
Offering all the Satisfaction of _receiving_ Letters with no
Possible Obligation or even Opportunity of Answering Them.
SAMPLE LIST.
Letters from a Japanese Fairy. (Especially acceptable
Bi-weekly. to a Sick Child. Fragrant
with Incense and
Sandal Wood. Vivid
with purple and orange
and scarlet. Lavishly
interspersed with the
most adorable Japanese
toys that you ever saw
in your life.)
Letters from a little Son. (Very sturdy. Very
Weekly. spunky. Slightly profane.)
Letters from a Little Daughter. (Quaint. Old-Fashioned.
Weekly. Daintily Dreamy.
Mostly about Dolls.)
Letters from a Banda-Sea Pirate. (Luxuriantly tropical.
Monthly. Salter than the Sea.
Sharper than Coral.
Unmitigatedly murderous.
Altogether blood-curdling.)
Letters from a Gray-Plush Squirrel. (Sure to please Nature
Irregular. Lovers of Either
Sex. Pungent with
wood-lore. Prowly.
Scampery. Deliciously
wild. Apt to be just a
little bit messy perhaps
with roots and leaves
and nuts.)
Letters from Your Favorite (Biographically consistent.
Historical Character. Historically reasonable.
Fortnightly. Most vivaciously
human. Really unique.)
Love Letters. (Three grades: Shy.
Daily. Medium. Very Intense.)
In ordering letters kindly state approximate age, prevalent
tastes,--and in case of invalidism, the presumable severity
of illness. For price list, etc., refer to opposite page.
Address all communications to Serial Letter Co. Box, etc.,
etc.
As Stanton finished reading the last solemn business detail he
crumpled up the circular into a little gray wad, and pressed his blond
head back into the pillows and grinned and grinned.
"Good enough!" he chuckled. "If Cornelia won't write to me there seem
to be lots of other congenial souls who will--cannibals and rodents
and kiddies. All the same--" he ruminated suddenly: "All the same I'll
wager that there's an awfully decent little brain working away behind
all that red ink and nonsense."
Still grinning he conjured up the vision of some grim-faced
spinster-subscriber in a desolate country town starting out at last
for the first time in her life, with real, cheery self-importance,
rain or shine, to join the laughing, jostling, deliriously human
Saturday night crowd at the village post-office--herself the only
person whose expected letter never failed to come! From Squirrel or
Pirate or Hopping Hottentot--what did it matter to her? Just the
envelope alone was worth the price of the subscription. How the
pink-cheeked high school girls elbowed each other to get a peep at the
post-mark! How the--. Better still, perhaps some hopelessly unpopular
man in a dingy city office would go running up the last steps just a
little, wee bit faster--say the second and fourth Mondays in the
month--because of even a bought, made-up letter from Mary Queen of
Scots that he knew absolutely without slip or blunder would be
waiting there for him on his dusty, ink-stained desk among all the
litter of bills and invoices concerning--shoe leather. Whether 'Mary
Queen of Scots' prattled pertly of ancient English politics, or
whimpered piteously about dull-colored modern fashions--what did it
matter so long as the letter came, and smelled of faded
fleur-de-lis--or of Darnley's tobacco smoke? Altogether pleased by the
vividness of both these pictures Stanton turned quite amiably to his
breakfast and gulped down a lukewarm bowl of milk without half his
usual complaint.
[Illustration: "Good enough!" he chuckled]
It was almost noon before his troubles commenced again. Then like a
raging hot tide, the pain began in the soft, fleshy soles of his feet
and mounted up inch by inch through the calves of his legs, through
his aching thighs, through his tortured back, through his cringing
neck, till the whole reeking misery seemed to foam and froth in his
brain in an utter frenzy of furious resentment. Again the day dragged
by with maddening monotony and loneliness. Again the clock mocked him,
and the postman shirked him, and the janitor forgot him. Again the
big, black night came crowding down and stung him and smothered him
into a countless number of new torments.
Again the treacherous Morning Nap wiped out all traces of the pain and
left the doctor still mercilessly obdurate on the subject of an
opiate.
And Cornelia did not write.
Not till the fifth day did a brief little Southern note arrive
informing him of the ordinary vital truths concerning a comfortable
journey, and expressing a chaste hope that he would not forget her.
Not even surprise, not even curiosity, tempted Stanton to wade twice
through the fashionable, angular handwriting. Dully impersonal, bleak
as the shadow of a brown leaf across a block of gray granite,
plainly--unforgivably--written with ink and ink only, the stupid,
loveless page slipped through his fingers to the floor.
After the long waiting and the fretful impatience of the past few days
there were only two plausible ways in which to treat such a letter.
One way was with anger. One way was with amusement. With conscientious
effort Stanton finally summoned a real smile to his lips.
Stretching out perilously from his snug bed he gathered the
waste-basket into his arms and commenced to dig in it like a sportive
terrier. After a messy minute or two he successfully excavated the
crumpled little gray tissue circular and smoothed it out carefully on
his humped-up knees. The expression in his eyes all the time was
quite a curious mixture of mischief and malice and rheumatism.
"After all" he reasoned, out of one corner of his mouth, "After all,
perhaps I have misjudged Cornelia. Maybe it's only that she really
doesn't know just what a love-letter OUGHT to be like."
Then with a slobbering fountain-pen and a few exclamations he
proceeded to write out a rather large check and a very small note.
"TO THE SERIAL-LETTER CO." he addressed himself brazenly.
"For the enclosed check--which you will notice doubles the
amount of your advertised price--kindly enter my name for a
six weeks' special 'edition de luxe' subscription to one of
your love-letter serials. (Any old ardor that comes most
convenient) Approximate age of victim: 32. Business status:
rubber broker. Prevalent tastes: To be able to sit up and
eat and drink and smoke and go to the office the way other
fellows do. Nature of illness: The meanest kind of
rheumatism. Kindly deliver said letters as early and often
as possible!
"Very truly yours, etc."
Sorrowfully then for a moment he studied the depleted balance in his
check-book. "Of course" he argued, not unguiltily, "Of course that
check was just the amount that I was planning to spend on a
turquoise-studded belt for Cornelia's birthday; but if Cornelia's
brains really need more adorning than does her body--if this special
investment, in fact, will mean more to both of us in the long run than
a dozen turquoise belts--."
Big and bland and blond and beautiful, Cornelia's physical personality
loomed up suddenly in his memory--so big, in fact, so bland, so blond,
so splendidly beautiful, that he realized abruptly with a strange
little tucked feeling in his heart that the question of Cornelia's
"brains" had never yet occurred to him. Pushing the thought
impatiently aside he sank back luxuriantly again into his pillows, and
grinned without any perceptible effort at all as he planned adroitly
how he would paste the Serial Love Letters one by one into the
gaudiest looking scrap-book that he could find and present it to
Cornelia on her birthday as a text-book for the "newly engaged" girl.
And he hoped and prayed with all his heart that every individual
letter would be printed with crimson ink on a violet-scented page and
would fairly reek from date to signature with all the joyous, ecstatic
silliness that graces either an old-fashioned novel or a modern
breach-of-promise suit.
So, quite worn out at last with all this unwonted excitement, he
drowsed off to sleep for as long as ten minutes and dreamed that he
was a--bigamist.
The next day and the next night were stale and mean and musty with a
drizzling winter rain. But the following morning crashed
inconsiderately into the world's limp face like a snowball spiked with
icicles. Gasping for breath and crunching for foothold the sidewalk
people breasted the gritty cold. Puckered with chills and goose-flesh,
the fireside people huddled and sneezed around their respective
hearths. Shivering like the ague between his cotton-flannel blankets,
Stanton's courage fairly raced the mercury in its downward course. By
noon his teeth were chattering like a mouthful of cracked ice. By
night the sob in his thirsty throat was like a lump of salt and snow.
But nothing outdoors or in, from morning till night, was half as
wretchedly cold and clammy as the rapidly congealing hot-water bottle
that slopped and gurgled between his aching shoulders.
It was just after supper when a messenger boy blurted in from the
frigid hall with a great gust of cold and a long pasteboard box and a
letter.
Frowning with perplexity Stanton's clumsy fingers finally dislodged
from the box a big, soft blanket-wrapper with an astonishingly
strange, blurry pattern of green and red against a somber background
of rusty black. With increasing amazement he picked up the
accompanying letter and scanned it hastily.
"Dear Lad," the letter began quite intimately. But it was not signed
"Cornelia". It was signed "Molly"!
II
Turning nervously back to the box's wrapping-paper Stanton read once
more the perfectly plain, perfectly unmistakable name and
address,--his own, repeated in absolute duplicate on the envelope.
Quicker than his mental comprehension mere physical embarrassment
began to flush across his cheek-bones. Then suddenly the whole truth
dawned on him: The first installment of his Serial-Love-Letter had
arrived.
"But I thought--thought it would be type-written," he stammered
miserably to himself. "I thought it would be a--be a--hectographed
kind of a thing. Why, hang it all, it's a real letter! And when I
doubled my check and called for a special edition de luxe--I wasn't
sitting up on my hind legs begging for real presents!"
But "Dear Lad" persisted the pleasant, round, almost childish
handwriting:
"DEAR LAD,
"I could have _cried_ yesterday when I got your letter
telling me how sick you were. Yes!--But crying wouldn't
'comfy' you any, would it? So just to send you
right-off-quick something to prove that I'm thinking of you,
here's a great, rollicking woolly wrapper to keep you snug
and warm this very night. I wonder if it would interest you
any at all to know that it is made out of a most larksome
Outlaw up on my grandfather's sweet-meadowed farm,--a
really, truly Black Sheep that I've raised all my own
sweaters and mittens on for the past five years. Only it
takes two whole seasons to raise a blanket-wrapper, so
please be awfully much delighted with it. And oh, Mr. Sick
Boy, when you look at the funny, blurry colors, couldn't you
just please pretend that the tinge of green is the flavor
of pleasant pastures, and that the streak of red is the
Cardinal Flower that blazed along the edge of the noisy
brook?
"Goodby till to-morrow,
"MOLLY."
With a face so altogether crowded with astonishment that there was no
room left in it for pain, Stanton's lame fingers reached out
inquisitively and patted the warm, woolly fabric.
"Nice old Lamb--y" he acknowledged judicially.
Then suddenly around the corners of his under lip a little balky smile
began to flicker.
"Of course I'll save the letter for Cornelia," he protested, "but no
one could really expect me to paste such a scrumptious blanket-wrapper
into a scrap-book."
Laboriously wriggling his thinness and his coldness into the black
sheep's luxuriant, irresponsible fleece, a bulging side-pocket in the
wrapper bruised his hip. Reaching down very temperishly to the pocket
he drew forth a small lace-trimmed handkerchief knotted pudgily across
a brimming handful of fir-balsam needles. Like a scorching hot August
breeze the magic, woodsy fragrance crinkled through his nostrils.
"These people certainly know how to play the game all right," he
reasoned whimsically, noting even the consistent little letter "M"
embroidered in one corner of the handkerchief.
Then, because he was really very sick and really very tired, he
snuggled down into the new blessed warmth and turned his gaunt cheek
to the pillow and cupped his hand for sleep like a drowsy child with
its nose and mouth burrowed eagerly down into the expectant draught.
But the cup did not fill.--Yet scented deep in his curved, empty,
balsam-scented fingers lurked--somehow--somewhere--the dregs of a
wonderful dream: Boyhood, with the hot, sweet flutter of summer woods,
and the pillowing warmth of the soft, sunbaked earth, and the crackle
of a twig, and the call of a bird, and the drone of a bee, and the
great blue, blue mystery of the sky glinting down through a
green-latticed canopy overhead.
For the first time in a whole, cruel tortuous week he actually smiled
his way into his morning nap.
When he woke again both the sun and the Doctor were staring pleasantly
into his face.
"You look better!" said the Doctor. "And more than that you don't look
half so 'cussed cross'."
"Sure," grinned Stanton, with all the deceptive, undauntable optimism
of the Just-Awakened.
"Nevertheless," continued the Doctor more soberly, "there ought to be
somebody a trifle more interested in you than the janitor to look
after your food and your medicine and all that. I'm going to send you
a nurse."
"Oh, no!" gasped Stanton. "I don't need one! And frankly--I can't
afford one." Shy as a girl, his eyes eluded the doctor's frank stare.
"You see," he explained diffidently; "you see, I'm just engaged to be
married--and though business is fairly good and all that--my being
away from the office six or eight weeks is going to cut like the deuce
into my commissions--and roses cost such a horrid price last Fall--and
there seems to be a game law on diamonds this year; they practically
fine you for buying them, and--"
The Doctor's face brightened irrelevantly. "Is she a Boston young
lady?" he queried.
"Oh, yes," beamed Stanton.
"Good!" said the Doctor. "Then of course she can keep some sort of an
eye on you. I'd like to see her. I'd like to talk with her--give her
just a few general directions as it were."
A flush deeper than any mere love-embarrassment spread suddenly over
Stanton's face.
"She isn't here," he acknowledged with barely analyzable
mortification. "She's just gone south."
"_Just_ gone south?" repeated the Doctor. "You don't mean--since
you've been sick?"
Stanton nodded with a rather wobbly grin, and the Doctor changed the
subject abruptly, and busied himself quickly with the least
bad-tasting medicine that he could concoct.
Then left alone once more with a short breakfast and a long morning,
Stanton sank back gradually into a depression infinitely deeper than
his pillows, in which he seemed to realize with bitter contrition that
in some strange, unintentional manner his purely innocent,
matter-of-fact statement that Cornelia "had just gone south" had
assumed the gigantic disloyalty of a public proclamation that the lady
of his choice was not quite up to the accepted standard of feminine
intelligence or affections, though to save his life he could not
recall any single glum word or gloomy gesture that could possibly have
conveyed any such erroneous impression to the Doctor.
[Illustration: Every girl like Cornelia had to go South sometime
between November and March]
"Why Cornelia _had_ to go South," he reasoned conscientiously. "Every
girl like Cornelia _had_ to go South sometime between November and
March. How could any mere man even hope to keep rare, choice,
exquisite creatures like that cooped up in a slushy, snowy New
England city--when all the bright, gorgeous, rose-blooming South
was waiting for them with open arms? 'Open arms'! Apparently it was
only 'climates' that were allowed any such privileges with girls like
Cornelia. Yet, after all, wasn't it just exactly that very quality of
serene, dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia
among the score of freer-mannered girls of his acquaintance?"
Glumly reverting to his morning paper, he began to read and reread
with dogged persistence each item of politics and foreign news--each
gibbering advertisement.
At noon the postman dropped some kind of a message through the slit in
the door, but the plainly discernible green one-cent stamp forbade any
possible hope that it was a letter from the South. At four o'clock
again someone thrust an offensive pink gas bill through the
letter-slide. At six o'clock Stanton stubbornly shut his eyes up
perfectly tight and muffled his ears in the pillow so that he would
not even know whether the postman came or not. The only thing that
finally roused him to plain, grown-up sense again was the joggle of
the janitor's foot kicking mercilessly against the bed.
"Here's your supper," growled the janitor.
On the bare tin tray, tucked in between the cup of gruel and the slice
of toast loomed an envelope--a real, rather fat-looking envelope.
Instantly from Stanton's mind vanished every conceivable sad thought
concerning Cornelia. With his heart thumping like the heart of any
love-sick school girl, he reached out and grabbed what he supposed was
Cornelia's letter.
But it was post-marked, "Boston"; and the handwriting was quite
plainly the handwriting of The Serial-Letter Co.
Muttering an exclamation that was not altogether pretty he threw the
letter as far as he could throw it out into the middle of the floor,
and turning back to his supper began to crunch his toast furiously
like a dragon crunching bones.
At nine o'clock he was still awake. At ten o'clock he was still awake.
At eleven o'clock he was still awake. At twelve o'clock he was still
awake.... At one o'clock he was almost crazy. By quarter past one, as
though fairly hypnotized, his eyes began to rivet themselves on the
little bright spot in the rug where the "serial-letter" lay gleaming
whitely in a beam of electric light from the street. Finally, in one
supreme, childish impulse of petulant curiosity, he scrambled
shiveringly out of his blankets with many "O--h's" and "O-u-c-h-'s,"
recaptured the letter, and took it growlingly back to his warm bed.
Worn out quite as much with the grinding monotony of his rheumatic
pains as with their actual acuteness, the new discomfort of straining
his eyes under the feeble rays of his night-light seemed almost a
pleasant diversion.
The envelope was certainly fat. As he ripped it open, three or four
folded papers like sleeping-powders, all duly numbered, "1 A. M.," "2
A. M.," "3 A. M.," "4 A. M." fell out of it. With increasing
inquisitiveness he drew forth the letter itself.
"Dear Honey," said the letter quite boldly. Absurd as it was, the
phrase crinkled Stanton's heart just the merest trifle.
"DEAR HONEY:
"There are so many things about your sickness that worry me.
Yes there are! I worry about your pain. I worry about the
horrid food that you're probably getting. I worry about the
coldness of your room. But most of anything in the world I
worry about your _sleeplessness_. Of course you _don't_
sleep! That's the trouble with rheumatism. It's such an old
Night-Nagger. Now do you know what I'm going to do to you?
I'm going to evolve myself into a sort of a Rheumatic Nights
Entertainment--for the sole and explicit purpose of trying
to while away some of your long, dark hours. Because if
you've simply _got_ to stay awake all night long and
think--you might just as well be thinking about ME, Carl
Stanton. What? Do you dare smile and suggest for a moment
that just because of the Absence between us I cannot make
myself vivid to you? Ho! Silly boy! Don't you know that the
plainest sort of black ink throbs more than some blood--and
the touch of the softest hand is a harsh caress compared to
the touch of a reasonably shrewd pen? Here--now, I say--this
very moment: Lift this letter of mine to your face, and
swear--if you're honestly able to--that you can't smell the
rose in my hair! A cinnamon rose, would you say--a yellow,
flat-faced cinnamon rose? Not quite so lusciously fragrant
as those in your grandmother's July garden? A trifle paler?
Perceptibly cooler? Something forced into blossom, perhaps,
behind brittle glass, under barren winter moonshine? And
yet--A-h-h! Hear me laugh! You didn't really mean to let
yourself lift the page and smell it, did you? But what did I
tell you?
"I mustn't waste too much time, though, on this nonsense.
What I really wanted to say to you was: Here are four--not
'sleeping potions', but waking potions--just four silly
little bits of news for you to think about at one o'clock,
and two, and three--and four, if you happen to be so
miserable to-night as to be awake even then.
"With my love,
"MOLLY."
Whimsically, Stanton rummaged around in the creases of the bed-spread
and extricated the little folded paper marked, "No. 1 o'clock." The
news in it was utterly brief.
"My hair is red," was all that it announced.
With a sniff of amusement Stanton collapsed again into his pillows.
For almost an hour then he lay considering solemnly whether a
red-headed girl could possibly be pretty. By two o'clock he had
finally visualized quite a striking, Juno-esque type of beauty with a
figure about the regal height of Cornelia's, and blue eyes perhaps
just a trifle hazier and more mischievous.
But the little folded paper marked, "No. 2 o'clock," announced
destructively: "My eyes are brown. And I am _very_ little."
With an absurdly resolute intention to "play the game" every bit as
genuinely as Miss Serial-Letter Co. was playing it, Stanton refrained
quite heroically from opening the third dose of news until at least
two big, resonant city clocks had insisted that the hour was ripe. By
that time the grin in his face was almost bright enough of itself to
illuminate any ordinary page.
"I am lame," confided the third message somewhat depressingly. Then
snugglingly in parenthesis like the tickle of lips against his ear
whispered the one phrase: "My picture is in the fourth paper,--if you
should happen still to be awake at four o'clock."
Where now was Stanton's boasted sense of honor concerning the ethics
of playing the game according to directions? "Wait a whole hour to see
what Molly looked like? Well he guessed not!" Fumbling frantically
under his pillow and across the medicine stand he began to search for
the missing "No. 4 o'clock." Quite out of breath, at last he
discovered it lying on the floor a whole arm's length away from the
bed. Only with a really acute stab of pain did he finally succeed in
reaching it. Then with fingers fairly trembling with effort, he
opened forth and disclosed a tiny snap-shot photograph of a
grim-jawed, scrawny-necked, much be-spectacled elderly dame with a
huge gray pompadour.
[Illustration: An elderly dame]
"Stung!" said Stanton.
Rheumatism or anger, or something, buzzed in his heart like a bee the
rest of the night.
Fortunately in the very first mail the next morning a postal-card came
from Cornelia--such a pretty postal-card too, with a bright-colored
picture of an inordinately "riggy" looking ostrich staring over a neat
wire fence at an eager group of unmistakably Northern tourists.
Underneath the picture was written in Cornelia's own precious hand the
heart-thrilling information:
"We went to see the Ostrich Farm yesterday. It was really very
interesting. C."
III
For quite a long time Stanton lay and considered the matter judicially
from every possible point of view. "It would have been rather
pleasant," he mused "to know who 'we' were." Almost childishly his
face cuddled into the pillow. "She might at least have told me the
name of the ostrich!" he smiled grimly.
Thus quite utterly denied any nourishing Cornelia-flavored food for
his thoughts, his hungry mind reverted very naturally to the
tantalizing, evasive, sweetly spicy fragrance of the 'Molly'
episode--before the really dreadful photograph of the unhappy
spinster-lady had burst upon his blinking vision.
Scowlingly he picked up the picture and stared and stared at it.
Certainly it was grim. But even from its grimness emanated the same
faint, mysterious odor of cinnamon roses that lurked in the
accompanying letter. "There's some dreadful mistake somewhere," he
insisted. Then suddenly he began to laugh, and reaching out once more
for pen and paper, inscribed his second letter and his first complaint
to the Serial-Letter Co.
"To the Serial-Letter Co.," he wrote sternly, with many ferocious
tremors of dignity and rheumatism.
"Kindly allow me to call attention to the fact that in my
recent order of the 18th inst., the specifications
distinctly stated 'love-letters', and _not_ any
correspondence whatsoever,--no matter how exhilarating from
either a 'Gray-Plush Squirrel' or a 'Banda Sea Pirate' as
evidenced by enclosed photograph which I am hereby
returning. Please refund money at once or forward me
without delay a consistent photograph of a 'special edition
de luxe' girl.
"Very truly yours."
The letter was mailed by the janitor long before noon. Even as late as
eleven o'clock that night Stanton was still hopefully expecting an
answer. Nor was he altogether disappointed. Just before midnight a
messenger boy appeared with a fair-sized manilla envelope, quite stiff
and important looking.
"Oh, please, Sir," said the enclosed letter, "Oh, please,
Sir, we cannot refund your subscription money because--we
have spent it. But if you will only be patient, we feel
quite certain that you will be altogether satisfied in the
long run with the material offered you. As for the
photograph recently forwarded to you, kindly accept our
apologies for a very clumsy mistake made here in the office.
Do any of these other types suit you better? Kindly mark
selection and return all pictures at your earliest
convenience."
Before the messenger boy's astonished interest Stanton spread out on
the bed all around him a dozen soft sepia-colored photographs of a
dozen different girls. Stately in satin, or simple in gingham, or
deliciously hoydenish in fishing-clothes, they challenged his
surprised attention. Blonde, brunette, tall, short, posing with
wistful tenderness in the flickering glow of an open fire, or smiling
frankly out of a purely conventional vignette--they one and all defied
him to choose between them.
"Oh! Oh!" laughed Stanton to himself. "Am I to try and separate her
picture from eleven pictures of her friends! So that's the game, is
it? Well, I guess not! Does she think I'm going to risk choosing a
tom-boy girl if the gentle little creature with the pansies is really
herself? Or suppose she truly is the enchanting little tom-boy, would
she probably write me any more nice funny letters if I solemnly
selected her sentimental, moony-looking friend at the heavily draped
window?"
Craftily he returned all the pictures unmarked to the envelope, and
changing the address hurried the messenger boy off to remail it. Just
this little note, hastily scribbled in pencil went with the envelope:
"DEAR SERIAL-LETTER CO.:
"The pictures are not altogether satisfactory. It isn't a
'type' that I am looking for, but a definite likeness of
'Molly' herself. Kindly rectify the mistake without further
delay! or REFUND THE MONEY."
Almost all the rest of the night he amused himself chuckling to think
how the terrible threat about refunding the money would confuse and
conquer the extravagant little Art Student.
But it was his own hands that did the nervous trembling when he opened
the big express package that arrived the next evening, just as his
tiresome porridge supper was finished.
"Ah, Sweetheart--" said the dainty note tucked inside the
package--"Ah, Sweetheart, the little god of love be praised
for one true lover--Yourself! So it is a picture of _me_
that you want? The _real me_! The _truly me_! No mere pink
and white likeness? No actual proof even of 'seared and
yellow age'? No curly-haired, coquettish attractiveness that
the shampoo-lady and the photograph-man trapped me into for
that one single second? No deceptive profile of the best
side of my face--and I, perhaps, blind in the other eye? Not
even a fair, honest, every-day portrait of my father's and
mother's composite features--but a picture of _myself_!
Hooray for you! A picture, then, not of my physiognomy, but
of my _personality_. Very well, sir. Here is the
portrait--true to the life--in this great, clumsy,
conglomerate package of articles that
represent--perhaps--not even so much the prosy, literal
things that I am, as the much more illuminating and
significant things that _I would like to be_. It's what we
would 'like to be' that really tells most about us, isn't
it, Carl Stanton? The brown that I have to wear talks loudly
enough, for instance, about the color of my complexion, but
the forbidden pink that I most crave whispers infinitely
more intimately concerning the color of my spirit. And as to
my Face--_am I really obliged to have a face_? Oh, no--o!
'Songs without words' are surely the only songs in the world
that are packed to the last lilting note with utterly
limitless meanings. So in these 'letters without faces' I
cast myself quite serenely upon the mercy of your
imagination.
"What's that you say? That I've simply _got_ to have a face?
Oh, darn!--well, do your worst. Conjure up for me then, here
and now, any sort of features whatsoever that please your
fancy. Only, Man of Mine, just remember this in your
imaginings: Gift me with Beauty if you like, or gift me with
Brains, but do not make the crude masculine mistake of
gifting me with both. Thought furrows faces you know, and
after Adolescence only Inanity retains its heavenly
smoothness. Beauty even at its worst is a gorgeously
perfect, flower-sprinkled lawn over which the most ordinary,
every-day errands of life cannot cross without scarring. And
brains at their best are only a ploughed field teeming
always and forever with the worries of incalculable
harvests. Make me a little pretty, if you like, and a little
wise, but not too much of either, if you value the verities
of your Vision. There! I say: do your worst! Make me that
face, and that face only, that you _need the most_ in all
this big, lonesome world: food for your heart, or fragrance
for your nostrils. Only, one face or another--I insist upon
having _red hair_!
"MOLLY."
With his lower lip twisted oddly under the bite of his strong white
teeth, Stanton began to unwrap the various packages that comprised the
large bundle. If it was a "portrait" it certainly represented a
puzzle-picture.
First there was a small, flat-footed scarlet slipper with a fluffy
gold toe to it. Definitely feminine. Definitely small. So much for
that! Then there was a sling-shot, ferociously stubby, and rather
confusingly boyish. After that, round and flat and tantalizing as an
empty plate, the phonograph disc of a totally unfamiliar song--"The
Sea Gull's Cry": a clue surely to neither age nor sex, but indicative
possibly of musical preference or mere individual temperament. After
that, a tiny geographical globe, with Kipling's phrase--
"For to admire an' for to see,
For to be'old this world so wide--
It never done no good to me,
But I can't drop it if I tried!"--
written slantingly in very black ink across both hemispheres. Then an
empty purse--with a hole in it; a silver-embroidered gauntlet such as
horsemen wear on the Mexican frontier; a white table-doily partly
embroidered with silky blue forget-me-nots--the threaded needle still
jabbed in the work--and the small thimble, Stanton could have sworn,
still warm from the snuggle of somebody's finger. Last of all, a fat
and formidable edition of Robert Browning's poems; a tiny black
domino-mask, such as masqueraders wear, and a shimmering gilt picture
frame inclosing a pert yet not irreverent handmade adaptation of a
certain portion of St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians:
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and
have not a Sense of Humor, I am become as sounding brass, or
a tinkling symbol. And though I have the gift of
Prophecy--and all knowledge--so that I could remove
Mountains, and have not a Sense of Humor, I am nothing. And
though I bestow all my Goods to feed the poor, and though I
give my body to be burned, and have not a Sense of Humor it
profiteth me nothing.
"A sense of Humor suffereth long, and is kind. A Sense of
Humor envieth not. A Sense of Humor vaunteth not itself--is
not puffed up. Doth not behave itself Unseemly, seeketh not
its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil--Beareth
all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
endureth all things. A Sense of Humor never faileth. But
whether there be unpleasant prophecies they shall fail,
whether there be scolding tongues they shall cease, whether
there be unfortunate knowledge it shall vanish away. When I
was a fault-finding child I spake as a fault-finding child,
I understood as a fault-finding child,--but when I became a
woman I put away fault-finding things.
"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three. _But the
greatest of these is a sense of humor!_"
With a little chuckle of amusement not altogether devoid of a very
definite consciousness of being _teased_, Stanton spread all the
articles out on the bed-spread before him and tried to piece them
together like the fragments of any other jig-saw puzzle. Was the young
lady as intellectual as the Robert Browning poems suggested, or did
she mean simply to imply that she _wished_ she were? And did the
tom-boyish sling-shot fit by any possible chance with the dainty,
feminine scrap of domestic embroidery? And was the empty purse
supposed to be especially significant of an inordinate fondness for
phonograph music--or what?
Pondering, puzzling, fretting, fussing, he dozed off to sleep at last
before he even knew that it was almost morning. And when he finally
woke again he found the Doctor laughing at him because he lay holding
a scarlet slipper in his hand.
IV
The next night, very, very late, in a furious riot of wind and snow
and sleet, a clerk from the drug-store just around the corner appeared
with a perfectly huge hot-water bottle fairly sizzling and bubbling
with warmth and relief for aching rheumatic backs.
"Well, where in thunder--?" groaned Stanton out of his cold and pain
and misery.
"Search me!" said the drug clerk. "The order and the money for it came
in the last mail this evening. 'Kindly deliver largest-sized hot-water
bottle, boiling hot, to Mr. Carl Stanton,... 11.30 to-night.'"
"OO-w!" gasped Stanton. "O-u-c-h! G-e-e!" then, "Oh, I wish I could
purr!" as he settled cautiously back at last to toast his pains
against the blessed, scorching heat. "Most girls," he reasoned with
surprising interest, "would have sent ice cold violets shrouded in
tissue paper. Now, how does this special girl know--Oh, Ouch! O-u-c-h!
O-u-c-h--i--t--y!" he crooned himself to sleep.
The next night just at supper-time a much-freckled messenger-boy
appeared dragging an exceedingly obstreperous fox-terrier on the end
of a dangerously frayed leash. Planting himself firmly on the rug in
the middle of the room, with the faintest gleam of saucy pink tongue
showing between his teeth, the little beast sat and defied the entire
situation. Nothing apparently but the correspondence concerning the
situation was actually transferable from the freckled messenger boy to
Stanton himself.
"Oh, dear Lad," said the tiny note, "I forgot to tell you my
real name, didn't I!--Well, my last name and the dog's first
name are just the same. Funny, isn't it? (You'll find it in
the back of almost any dictionary.)
"With love,
"MOLLY.
"P. S. Just turn the puppy out in the morning and he'll go
home all right of his own accord."
With his own pink tongue showing just a trifle between his teeth,
Stanton lay for a moment and watched the dog on the rug. Cocking his
small, keen, white head from one tippy angle to another, the little
terrier returned the stare with an expression that was altogether and
unmistakably mirthful. "Oh, it's a jolly little beggar, isn't it?"
said Stanton. "Come here, sir!" Only a suddenly pointed ear
acknowledged the summons. The dog himself did not budge. "Come here, I
say!" Stanton repeated with harsh peremptoriness. Palpably the
little dog winked at him. Then in succession the little dog dodged
adroitly a knife, a spoon, a copy of Browning's poems, and several
other sizable articles from the table close to Stanton's elbow.
Nothing but the dictionary seemed too big to throw. Finally with a
grin that could not be disguised even from the dog, Stanton began to
rummage with eye and hand through the intricate back pages of the
dictionary.
[Illustration: A much-freckled messenger-boy appeared dragging an
exceedingly obstreperous fox-terrier]
"You silly little fool," he said. "Won't you mind unless you are
spoken to by name?"
"Aaron--Abidel--Abel--Abiathar--" he began to read out with petulant
curiosity, "Baldwin--Barachias--Bruno (Oh, hang!) Cadwallader--Cæsar--Caleb
(What nonsense!) Ephraim--Erasmus (How could a girl be named anything like
that!) Gabriel--Gerard--Gershom (Imagine whistling a dog to the name of
Gershom!) Hannibal--Hezekiah--Hosea (Oh, Hell!)" Stolidly with unheedful,
drooping ears the little fox-terrier resumed his seat on the rug.
"Ichabod--Jabez--Joab," Stanton's voice persisted, experimentally. By nine
o'clock, in all possible variations of accent and intonation, he had quite
completely exhausted the alphabetical list as far as "K." and the little
dog was blinking himself to sleep on the far side of the room. Something
about the dog's nodding contentment started Stanton's mouth to yawning and
for almost an hour he lay in the lovely, restful consciousness of being at
least half asleep. But at ten o'clock he roused up sharply and resumed the
task at hand, which seemed suddenly to have assumed really vital
importance. "Laban--Lorenzo--Marcellus," he began again in a loud, clear,
compelling voice. "Meredith--" (Did the little dog stir? Did he sit up?)
"Meredith? Meredith?" The little dog barked. Something in Stanton's brain
flashed. "It is 'Merry' for the dog?" he quizzed. "Here, MERRY!" In another
instant the little creature had leaped upon the foot of his bed, and was
talking away at a great rate with all sorts of ecstatic grunts and growls.
Stanton's hand went out almost shyly to the dog's head. "So it's 'Molly
Meredith'," he mused. But after all there was no reason to be shy about it.
It was the _dog's_ head he was stroking.
Tied to the little dog's collar when he went home the next morning was
a tiny, inconspicuous tag that said "That was easy! The pup's
name--and yours--is 'Meredith.' Funny name for a dog but nice for a
girl."
The Serial-Letter Co.'s answers were always prompt, even though
perplexing.