is nothing but nonsense!" he acknowledged conscientiously; "nothing in
the world except a boxful of make-believe thoughts from a make-believe
girl. And here," he finished resolutely, "are my own fiancée's
thoughts--concerning me."
Out of his blanket-wrapper pocket he produced and spread out before
the Doctor's eyes five thin letters and a postal-card.
"Not exactly thoughts concerning _you_, even so, are they?" quizzed
the Doctor.
Stanton began to grin again. "Well, thoughts concerning the weather,
then--if that suits you any better."
Twice the Doctor swallowed audibly. Then, "But it's hardly fair--is
it--to weigh a boxful of even the prettiest lies against five of even
the slimmest real, true letters?" he asked drily.
"But they're not lies!" snapped Stanton. "Surely you don't call
anything a lie unless not only the fact is false, but the fancy, also,
is maliciously distorted! Now take this case right before us. Suppose
there isn't any 'little brother' at all; suppose there isn't any
'Painted Desert', suppose there isn't any 'black sheep up on a
grandfather's farm', suppose there isn't _anything_; suppose, I say,
that every single, individual fact stated is _false_--what earthly
difference does it make so long as the _fancy_ still remains the
truest, realest, dearest, funniest thing that ever happened to a
fellow in his life?"
"Oh, ho!" said the Doctor. "So that's the trouble is it! It isn't just
rheumatism that's keeping you thin and worried looking, eh? It's only
that you find yourself suddenly in the embarrassing predicament of
being engaged to one girl and--in love with another?"
"N--o!" cried Stanton frantically. "N--O! That's the mischief of
it--the very mischief! I don't even know that the Serial-Letter Co.
_is_ a girl. Why it might be an old lady, rather whimsically inclined.
Even the oldest lady, I presume, might very reasonably perfume her
note-paper with cinnamon roses. It might even be a boy. One letter
indeed smelt very strongly of being a boy--and mighty good tobacco,
too! And great heavens! what have I got to prove that it isn't even an
old man--some poor old worn out story-writer trying to ease out the
ragged end of his years?"
[Illustration: Some poor old worn-out story-writer]
"Have you told your fiancée about it?" asked the Doctor.
Stanton's jaw dropped. "Have I told my fiancée about it?" he mocked.
"Why it was she who sent me the circular in the first place! But,
'tell her about it'? Why, man, in ten thousand years, and then some,
how could I make any sane person understand?"
"You're beginning to make me understand," confessed the Doctor.
"Then you're no longer sane," scoffed Stanton. "The crazy magic of it
has surely then taken possession of you too. Why how could I go to any
sane person like Cornelia--and Cornelia is the most absolutely,
hopelessly sane person you ever saw in your life--how could I go to
anyone like that, and announce: 'Cornelia, if you find any perplexing
change in me during your absence--and your unconscious neglect--it is
only that I have fallen quite madly in love with a person'--would you
call it a person?--who doesn't even exist. Therefore for the sake of
this 'person who doesn't exist', I ask to be released."
"Oh! So you do ask to be released?" interrupted the Doctor.
"Why, no! Certainly not!" insisted Stanton. "Suppose the girl you love
does hurt your feelings a little bit now and then, would any man go
ahead and give up a real flesh-and-blood sweetheart for the sake of
even the most wonderful paper-and-ink girl whom he was reading about
in an unfinished serial story? Would he, I say--would he?"
"Y-e-s," said the Doctor soberly. "Y-e-s, I think he would, if what
you call the 'paper-and-ink girl' suggested suddenly an entirely new,
undreamed-of vista of emotional and spiritual satisfaction."
"But I tell you 'she's' probably a BOY!" persisted Stanton doggedly.
"Well, why don't you go ahead and find out?" quizzed the Doctor.
"Find out?" cried Stanton hotly. "Find out? I'd like to know how
anybody is going to find out, when the only given address is a private
post-office box, and as far as I know there's no sex to a post-office
box. Find out? Why, man, that basket over there is full of my letters
returned to me because I tried to 'find out'. The first time I asked,
they answered me with just a teasing, snubbing telegram, but ever
since then they've simply sent back my questions with a stern printed
slip announcing, "Your letter of ---- is hereby returned to you.
Kindly allow us to call your attention to the fact that we are not
running a correspondence bureau. Our circular distinctly states,
etc."
"Sent you a printed slip?" cried the Doctor scoffingly. "The
love-letter business must be thriving. Very evidently you are by no
means the only importunate subscriber."
"Oh, Thunder!" growled Stanton. The idea seemed to be new to him and
not altogether to his taste. Then suddenly his face began to brighten.
"No, I'm lying," he said. "No, they haven't always sent me a printed
slip. It was only yesterday that they sent me a rather real sort of
letter. You see," he explained, "I got pretty mad at last and I wrote
them frankly and told them that I didn't give a darn who 'Molly' was,
but simply wanted to know _what_ she was. I told them that it was just
gratitude on my part, the most formal, impersonal sort of gratitude--a
perfectly plausible desire to say 'thank you' to some one who had
been awfully decent to me these past few weeks. I said right out that
if 'she' was a boy, why we'd surely have to go fishing together in the
spring, and if 'she' was an old man, the very least I could do would
be to endow her with tobacco, and if 'she' was an old lady, why I'd
simply be obliged to drop in now and then of a rainy evening and hold
her knitting for her."
"And if 'she' were a girl?" probed the Doctor.
Stanton's mouth began to twitch. "Then Heaven help me!" he laughed.
"Well, what answer did you get?" persisted the Doctor. "What do you
call a realish sort of letter?"
With palpable reluctance Stanton drew a gray envelope out of the cuff
of his wrapper.
"I suppose you might as well see the whole business," he admitted
consciously.
There was no special diffidence in the Doctor's manner this time. His
clutch on the letter was distinctly inquisitive, and he read out the
opening sentences with almost rhetorical effect.
"Oh, Carl dear, you silly boy, WHY do you persist in
hectoring me so? Don't you understand that I've got only a
certain amount of ingenuity anyway, and if you force me to
use it all in trying to conceal my identity from you, how
much shall I possibly have left to devise schemes for your
amusement? Why do you persist, for instance, in wanting to
see my face? Maybe I haven't got any face! Maybe I lost my
face in a railroad accident. How do you suppose it would
make me feel, then, to have you keep teasing and
teasing.--Oh, Carl!
"Isn't it enough for me just to tell you once for all that
there is an insuperable obstacle in the way of our ever
meeting. Maybe I've got a husband who is cruel to me. Maybe,
biggest obstacle of all, I've got a husband whom I am
utterly devoted to. Maybe, instead of any of these things,
I'm a poor, old wizened-up, Shut-In, tossing day and night
on a very small bed of very big pain. Maybe worse than being
sick I'm starving poor, and maybe, worse than being sick or
poor, I am most horribly tired of myself. Of course if you
are very young and very prancy and reasonably good-looking,
and still are tired of yourself, you can almost always rest
yourself by going on the stage where--with a little rouge
and a different colored wig, and a new nose, and skirts
instead of trousers, or trousers instead of skirts, and age
instead of youth, and badness instead of goodness--you can
give your ego a perfectly limitless number of happy
holidays. But if you were oldish, I say, and pitifully 'shut
in', just how would you go to work, I wonder, to rest your
personality? How for instance could you take your biggest,
grayest, oldest worry about your doctor's bill, and rouge it
up into a radiant, young joke? And how, for instance, out of
your lonely, dreary, middle-aged orphanhood are you going to
find a way to short-skirt your rheumatic pains, and braid
into two perfectly huge pink-bowed pigtails the hair that
you _haven't got_, and caper round so ecstatically before
the foot-lights that the old gentleman and lady in the front
seat absolutely swear you to be the living image of their
'long lost Amy'? And how, if the farthest journey you ever
will take again is the monotonous hand-journey from your
pillow to your medicine bottle, then how, for instance, with
map or tinsel or attar of roses, can you go to work to solve
even just for your own satisfaction the romantic, shimmering
secrets of--Morocco?
"Ah! You've got me now, you think? All decided in your mind
that I am an aged invalid? I didn't say so. I just said
'maybe'. Likelier than not I've saved my climax for its
proper place. How do you know,--for instance, that I'm not
a--'Cullud Pusson'?--So many people are."
Without signature of any sort, the letter ended abruptly then and
there, and as though to satisfy his sense of something left
unfinished, the Doctor began at the beginning and read it all over
again in a mumbling, husky whisper.
"Maybe she is--'colored'," he volunteered at last.
"Very likely," said Stanton perfectly cheerfully. "It's just those
occasional humorous suggestions that keep me keyed so heroically up to
the point where I'm actually infuriated if you even suggest that I
might be getting really interested in this mysterious Miss Molly! You
haven't said a single sentimental thing about her that I haven't
scoffed at--now have you?"
"N--o," acknowledged the Doctor. "I can see that you've covered your
retreat all right. Even if the author of these letters should turn out
to be a one-legged veteran of the War of 1812, you still could say, 'I
told you so'. But all the same, I'll wager that you'd gladly give a
hundred dollars, cash down, if you could only go ahead and prove the
little girl's actual existence."
Stanton's shoulders squared suddenly but his mouth retained at least a
faint vestige of its original smile.
"You mistake the situation entirely," he said. "It's the little girl's
non-existence that I am most anxious to prove."
Then utterly without reproach or interference, he reached over and
grabbed a forbidden cigar from the Doctor's cigar case, and lighted
it, and retreated as far as possible into the gray film of smoke.
It was minutes and minutes before either man spoke again. Then at last
after much crossing and re-crossing of his knees the Doctor asked
drawlingly, "And when is it that you and Cornelia are planning to be
married?"
"Next April," said Stanton briefly.
"U--m--m," said the Doctor. After a few more minutes he said,
"U--m--m," again.
[Illustration: "Maybe she is--'colored,'" he volunteered at last]
The second "U--m--m" seemed to irritate Stanton unduly. "Is it your
head that's spinning round?" he asked tersely. "You sound like a Dutch
top!"
The Doctor raised his hands cautiously to his forehead. "Your story
does make me feel a little bit giddy," he acknowledged. Then with
sudden intensity, "Stanton, you're playing a dangerous game for an
engaged man. Cut it out, I say!"
"Cut what out?" said Stanton stubbornly.
The Doctor pointed exasperatedly towards the big box of letters. "Cut
those out," he said. "A sentimental correspondence with a girl
who's--more interesting than your fiancée!"
"W-h-e-w!" growled Stanton, "I'll hardly stand for that statement."
"Well, then lie down for it," taunted the Doctor. "Keep right on being
sick and worried and--." Peremptorily he reached out both hands
towards the box. "Here!" he insisted. "Let's dump the whole
mischievous nonsense into the fire and burn it up!"
With an "Ouch," of pain Stanton knocked the Doctor's hands away. "Burn
up my letters?" he laughed. "Well, I guess not! I wouldn't even burn
up the wall papers. I've had altogether too much fun out of them. And
as for the books, the Browning, etc.--why hang it all, I've gotten
awfully fond of those books!" Idly he picked up the South American
volume and opened the fly-leaf for the Doctor to see. "Carl from his
Molly," it said quite distinctly.
"Oh, yes," mumbled the Doctor. "It looks very pleasant. There's absolutely
no denying that it looks very pleasant. And some day--out of an old trunk,
or tucked down behind your library encyclopedias--your wife will discover
the book and ask blandly, 'Who was Molly? I don't remember your ever saying
anything about a "Molly".--Just someone you used to know?' And your answer
will be innocent enough: 'No, dear, _someone whom I never knew_!' But how
about the pucker along your spine, and the awfully foolish, grinny feeling
around your cheek-bones? And on the street and in the cars and at the
theaters you'll always and forever be looking and searching, and asking
yourself, 'Is it by any chance possible that this girl sitting next to me
now--?' And your wife will keep saying, with just a barely perceptible edge
in her voice, 'Carl, do you know that red-haired girl whom we just passed?
You stared at her so!' And you'll say, 'Oh, no! I was merely wondering
if--' Oh yes, you'll always and forever be 'wondering if'. And mark my
words, Stanton, people who go about the world with even the most innocent
chronic question in their eyes, are pretty apt to run up against an
unfortunately large number of wrong answers."
"But you take it all so horribly seriously," protested Stanton. "Why
you rave and rant about it as though it was actually my affections
that were involved!"
"Your affections?" cried the Doctor in great exasperation. "Your
affections? Why, man, if it was only your affections, do you suppose I'd
be wasting even so much as half a minute's worry on you? But it's your
_imagination_ that's involved. That's where the blooming mischief lies.
Affection is all right. Affection is nothing but a nice, safe flame that
feeds only on one special kind of fuel,--its own particular object.
You've got an 'affection' for Cornelia, and wherever Cornelia fails to
feed that affection it is mercifully ordained that the starved flame
shall go out into cold gray ashes without making any further trouble
whatsoever. But you've got an 'imagination' for this make-believe
girl--heaven help you!--and an 'imagination' is a great, wild, seething,
insatiate tongue of fire that, thwarted once and for all in its original
desire to gorge itself with realities, will turn upon you body and soul,
and lick up your crackling fancy like so much kindling wood--and sear
your common sense, and scorch your young wife's happiness. Nothing but
Cornelia herself will ever make you want--Cornelia. But the other girl,
the unknown girl--why she's the face in the clouds, she's the voice in
the sea; she's the glow of the sunset; she's the hush of the June
twilight! Every summer breeze, every winter gale, will fan the embers!
Every thumping, twittering, twanging pulse of an orchestra, every--. Oh,
Stanton, I say, it isn't the ghost of the things that are dead that will
ever come between you and Cornelia. There never yet was the ghost of any
lost thing that couldn't be tamed into a purring household pet.
But--the--ghost--of--a--thing--that--you've--never--yet--found? _That_,
I tell you, is a very different matter!"
Pounding at his heart, and blazing in his cheeks, the insidious
argument, the subtle justification, that had been teeming in Stanton's
veins all the week, burst suddenly into speech.
"But I gave Cornelia the _chance_ to be 'all the world' to me," he
protested doggedly, "and she didn't seem to care a hang about it!
Great Scott, man! Are you going to call a fellow unfaithful because
he hikes off into a corner now and then and reads a bit of Browning,
for instance, all to himself--or wanders out on the piazza some night
all sole alone to stare at the stars that happen to bore his wife to
extinction?"
"But you'll never be able to read Browning again 'all by yourself',"
taunted the Doctor. "Whether you buy it fresh from the presses or
borrow it stale and old from a public library, you'll never find
another copy as long as you live that doesn't smell of cinnamon roses.
And as to 'star-gazing' or any other weird thing that your wife
doesn't care for--you'll never go out alone any more into dawns or
darknesses without the very tingling conscious presence of a wonder
whether the 'other girl' _would_ have cared for it!"
"Oh, shucks!" said Stanton. Then, suddenly his forehead puckered up.
"Of course I've got a worry," he acknowledged frankly. "Any fellow's
got a worry who finds himself engaged to be married to a girl who
isn't keen enough about it to want to be all the world to him. But I
don't know that even the most worried fellow has any real cause to be
scared, as long as the girl in question still remains the only
flesh-and-blood girl on the face of the earth whom he wishes _did_
like him well enough to want to be 'all the world' to him."
"The only 'flesh-and-blood' girl?" scoffed the Doctor. "Oh, you're all
right, Stanton. I like you and all that. But I'm mighty glad just the
same that it isn't my daughter whom you're going to marry, with all
this 'Molly Make-Believe' nonsense lurking in the background. Cut it
out, Stanton, I say. Cut it out!"
"Cut it out?" mused Stanton somewhat distrait. "Cut it out? What!
Molly Make-Believe?"
Under the quick jerk of his knees the big box of letters and papers
and things brimmed over in rustling froth across the whole surface of
the table. Just for a second the muscles in his throat tightened a
trifle. Then, suddenly he burst out laughing--wildly, uproariously,
like an excited boy.
"Cut it out?" he cried. "But it's such a joke! Can't you see that it's
nothing in the world except a perfectly delicious, perfectly
intangible joke?"
"U--m--m," reiterated the Doctor.
In the very midst of his reiteration, there came a sharp rap at the
door, and in answer to Stanton's cheerful permission to enter, the
so-called "delicious, intangible joke" manifested itself abruptly in
the person of a rather small feminine figure very heavily muffled up
in a great black cloak, and a rose-colored veil that shrouded her nose
and chin bluntly like the nose and chin of a face only half hewed out
as yet from a block of pink granite.
"It's only Molly," explained an undeniably sweet little alto voice.
"Am I interrupting you?"
VII
Jumping to his feet, the Doctor stood staring wildly from Stanton's
amazed face to the perfectly calm, perfectly accustomed air of poise
that characterized every movement of the pink-shrouded visitor. The
amazement in fact never wavered for a second from Stanton's blush-red
visage, nor the supreme serenity from the lady's whole attitude. But
across the Doctor's startled features a fearful, outraged
consciousness of having been deceived, warred mightily with a
consciousness of unutterable mirth.
Advancing toward the fireplace with a rather slow-footed, hesitating
gait, the little visitor's attention focused suddenly on the cluttered
table and she cried out with unmistakable delight. "Why, what are you
people doing with all my letters and things?"
Then climbing up on the sturdy brass fender, she thrust her pink,
impenetrable features right into the scared, pallid face of the shabby
old clock and announced pointedly, "It's almost half-past seven. And I
can stay till just eight o'clock!"
When she turned around again the Doctor was gone.
With a tiny shrug of her shoulders, she settled herself down then in a
big, high-backed chair before the fire and stretched out her overshoed
toes to the shining edge of the fender. As far as any apparent
self-consciousness was concerned, she might just as well have been all
alone in the room.
Convulsed with amusement, yet almost paralyzed by a certain stubborn,
dumb sort of embarrassment, nothing on earth could have forced
Stanton into making even an indefinite speech to the girl until she
had made at least one perfectly definite and reasonably illuminating
sort of speech to him. Biting his grinning lips into as straight a
line as possible, he gathered up the scattered pages of the evening
paper and attacked them furiously with scowling eyes.
After a really dreadful interim of silence, the mysterious little
visitor rose in a gloomy, discouraged kind of way, and climbing up
again on the narrow brass fender, peered once more into the face of
the clock.
"It's twenty minutes of eight, now," she announced. Into her voice
crept for the first time the faintest perceptible suggestion of a
tremor. "It's twenty minutes of eight--now--and I've got to leave here
exactly at eight. Twenty minutes is a rather--a rather stingy little
bit out of a whole--lifetime," she added falteringly.
Then, and then only did Stanton's nervousness break forth suddenly
into one wild, uproarious laugh that seemed to light up the whole
dark, ominous room as though the gray, sulky, smoldering hearth-fire
itself had exploded into iridescent flame. Chasing close behind the
musical contagion of his deep guffaws followed the softer, gentler
giggle of the dainty pink-veiled lady.
By the time they had both finished laughing it was fully quarter of
eight.
"But you see it was just this way," explained the pleasant little
voice--all alto notes again. Cautiously a slim, unringed hand burrowed
out from the somber folds of the big cloak, and raised the pink
mouth-mumbling veil as much as half an inch above the red-lipped speech
line. "You see it was just this way. You paid me a lot of money--all in
advance--for a six weeks' special edition de luxe Love-Letter Serial.
And I spent your money the day I got it; and worse than that I owed
it--long before I even got it! And worst of all, I've got a chance now
to go home to-morrow for all the rest of the winter. No, I don't mean
that exactly. I mean I've found a chance to go up to Vermont and have
all my expenses paid--just for reading aloud every day to a lady who
isn't so awfully deaf. But you see I still owe you a week's
subscription--and I can't refund you the money because I haven't got it.
And it happens that I can't run a fancy love-letter business from the
special house that I'm going to. There aren't enough resources
there--and all that. So I thought that perhaps--perhaps--considering how
much you've been teasing and teasing to know who I was--I thought that
perhaps if I came here this evening and let you really see me--that
maybe, you know--maybe, not positively, but just _maybe_--you'd be
willing to call that equivalent to one week's subscription. _Would
you?_"
In the sharp eagerness of her question she turned her shrouded face
full-view to Stanton's curious gaze, and he saw the little nervous,
mischievous twitch of her lips at the edge of her masking pink veil
resolve itself suddenly into a whimper of real pain. Yet so vivid were
the lips, so blissfully, youthfully, lusciously carmine, that every
single, individual statement she made seemed only like a festive
little announcement printed in red ink.
"I guess I'm not a very--good business manager," faltered the
red-lipped voice with incongruous pathos. "Indeed I know I'm not
because--well because--the Serial-Letter Co. has 'gone broke!
Bankrupt', is it, that you really say?"
With a little mockingly playful imitation of a stride she walked the
first two fingers of her right hand across the surface of the table to
Stanton's discarded supper dishes.
"Oh, please may I have that piece of cold toast?" she asked
plaintively. No professional actress on the stage could have spoken
the words more deliciously. Even to the actual crunching of the toast
in her little shining white teeth, she sought to illustrate as
fantastically as possible the ultimate misery of a bankrupt person
starving for cold toast.
Stanton's spontaneous laughter attested his full appreciation of her
mimicry.