Pictorial Review, July 1915
 

IF A FELLOW has lots of money and lots of time and lots of curiosity about other fellows’ business, it is astonishing, don’t you know, what a lot of strange affairs he can get mixed up in. Now, I have money and curiosity and all the time there is. My name’s Pepper—Reggie Pepper. My uncle was the safety-razor chappie, and he left me all kinds of dough. And ever since the lawyer slipped Uncle’s roll into my hand and closed my fingers over it, whispering, “It’s yours!” life seems to have been just one thing after another.

For instance, the dashed rummy case of dear old Archie.

I first ran into old Archie when he was studying in Paris, and when he came back to New York he looked me up and we made an “Old Home Week” celebration of it. He always liked me because I didn’t mind listening to his theories of Art. For Archie, you must know, was an artist. Not an ordinary artist, either, but one of those fellows you read about who are several years ahead of the game and paint the sort of thing that people will be educated up to by about 1999 or thereabouts. What’s the word? Futurists—that’s it! Dear old Archie was a Futurist and his trouble was that most of the fellows down Washington Square way, not being onto his curves, used to fling books and mahlsticks and things at him when he uncorked his artistic theories, and this rather jarred on the poor old boy, so, whenever he wanted sympathy, he would beat it up-town and talk to me, and I would sit and say “Perfectly corking, old lad!” at intervals, and he would go back to his studio, feeling fit for work again. The consequence was that he got very much attached to me, and came to think a frightful lot of my good sense and judgment: which was how I got dragged into the thing I’m going to tell you about.

Mind you, I don’t want to give you a wrong idea of old Archie. On every other subject except Art he was as sensible as you could wish. I have sat beside him at the Polo Grounds, and absolutely marveled at the breadth and vigor of the way he talked to the umpire when he called Snodgrass out at the plate. And he could imitate a Swedish cook talking to a colored janitor better than any one I have ever heard. It was only when he got onto the subject of his pictures that you felt like sending out a hurry-call to Bloomingdale.

Well, one day as I was sitting in the club watching the traffic coming up one way and going down the other and thinking of nothing in particular, in blew the old boy. He was looking rather worried.

“Reggie, old man, I want your advice.”

“You shall have it. State your point, old sporting life.”

“It’s like this. I’m engaged to be married.”

“My dear old scout, a million con——”

“Yes, I know. Thanks very much and all that, but listen.”

“What’s the trouble? Don’t you like her?”

A kind of rapt expression came over his face.

“Like her! Why, she’s the only——”

He gibbered for a spell. When he had calmed down, I said: “Well, then, what’s your kick if she’s all that?”

“Reggie,” he said, “do you think a man is bound to tell his wife all about his past life?”

“Oh, well,” I said, “of course I suppose she’s prepared to find that a man has—er—sowed his wild oats, don’t you know, and all that sort of thing and——”

He seemed quite irritated.

“Don’t be a chump. It’s nothing like that. Listen. When I came back to New York and started in to try and make a living by painting, I found that people simply wouldn’t buy the sort of work I did at any price. Do you know, Reggie, I’ve been at it three years now, and I haven’t sold a single picture!”

I whooped in a sort of amazed way, but I should have been far more startled if he’d told me he had sold a picture. I’ve seen his pictures, and they are like nothing on earth. As far as I can make out what he says, they aren’t supposed to be. There’s one in particular, called ‘The Coming of Summer,’ which I sometimes dream about when I’ve been hitting it up a shade too vigorously. It’s all dots and splashes, with a great eye staring out of the middle of the mess. It looks as if Summer, just as it was on the way, had stubbed its toe on a bomb. He tells me it’s his masterpiece and that he will never do anything like it again. I should like to have that in writing.

“Well, artists eat, just the same as other people,” he went on, “and personally I like mine often and well-cooked. Besides which, my sojourn in that dear Paris gave me a rather nice taste in light wines. The consequence was that I came to the conclusion, after I had been in New York a few months, that something had to be done. Reggie, tell me honestly, old boy, do you read the New York Gazette?”

“Every day.”

“And Sundays?”

“Sundays especially.”

“I suppose you throw away the colored comic supplement without looking at it?”

“On the contrary, old scout, I look at it before anything else.”

He gazed at me with a kind of wistful admiration.

“I envy you, Reggie. Fancy being able to make a statement like that openly and without fear. Then I take it you know the Doughnut Family?”

“I should say I did.”

His voice sank almost to a whisper and he looked over his shoulder nervously.

“Reggie, I do them!”

“You what?”

“I do them. Draw them. Paint them. I am the creator of the Doughnut Family.”

I stared at him, absolutely astounded. I was simply dumb. It was the biggest surprise I had ever had in my life. Why, dash it, the Doughnut Family is the best thing in its line in America. You know them, of course? There is Pa Doughnut, Ma Doughnut, Aunt Verbena, Cousin Twombley and Mamie, the daughter, and they have all sorts of slap-stick adventures. Pa, Ma and Aunt Verbena are pure gargoyles, Cousin Twombley is a little more nearly semihuman, and Mamie is a perfect darling. I had often wondered who did them, for they were unsigned; and I had often thought what a deuced brainy fellow the chap must be. And all the time it was dear old Archie! I stammered as I tried to congratulate him.

He winced.

“Don’t gargle, Reggie, there’s a good fellow,” he said. “My nerves are all on edge. Well, as I say, I do the Doughnuts. It was that or starvation. I got the idea one night when I had toothache, and next day I took some specimens round to an editor. He rolled in his chair and told me to start in and go on till further notice. Since then I have done them without a break. Papers fought over me like a lot of hens over a scrap of food. The News got me away from the Chronicle, the Gazette stole me from the News. How much do you think I get a week now? Just five hundred dollars!”

“It’s not half enough.”

“Well, there’s the position. I must go on drawing these infernal things, or I shall be penniless. The question is, am I to tell, her?”

“Tell her? Of course you must tell her.”

“Ah, but you don’t know her, Reggie. Have you ever heard of Eunice Nugent?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“As she doesn’t sprint up and down the Great White Way in spangles and tinsel, I didn’t suppose you would.”

I thought this rather uncalled-for seeing that, as a matter of fact, I scarcely know a dozen of these chorus girls, but I made allowances for his state of mind.

“She’s a poetess,” he went on, “and her work has appeared in lots of good magazines. My idea is that she would be utterly horrified if she knew, and could never be quite the same to me again. But I want you to meet her and judge for yourself. It’s just possible that I am taking too morbid a view of the matter, and I want an unprejudiced outside opinion. Come and lunch with us at the Knickerbocker to-morrow, will you?”

 

HE WAS absolutely right. One glance at Miss Nugent told me that the poor old boy had got the correct dope. I hardly know how to describe the impression she made on me. On the way to the “Knick,” Archie had told me that what first attracted him to her was the fact that she was so utterly unlike Mamie Doughnut; but that had not prepared me for what she really was. She was kind of intense, if you know what I mean, kind of spirituelle. She was perfectly pleasant, and drew me out about golf and all that sort of thing, but all the time I felt that she considered me an earthy worm whose loftier soul essence had been carelessly left out of his composition at birth. She made me wish that I had never seen a musical comedy or danced on a supper table on New Year’s eve. And, if that was the impression she made on me, you can understand why poor old Archie gibed at the idea of bringing her the colored supplement of the Gazette and pointing at the Doughnuts and saying “Me! I did it!” The notion was absolutely out of the question. The shot wasn’t on the board. I told Archie so directly we were alone.

“Old sox,” I said, “you must keep it dark.”

“I’m afraid so. But I hate the thought of deceiving her.”

“You must get used to that, now you’re going to be a married man,” I said.

“The trouble is, how am I going to account for the fact that I can afford an apartment on the Drive, an automobile and, in fact, everything the same as Mother used to make it?”

“Why, tell her you have private means, of course. What’s your money invested in?”

“Practically all of it in B. and O. P. Rails. It’s a devilish good thing. A pal of mine put me onto it.”

“Tell her that you have a wad of money in B. and O. P., then. She’ll take it for granted it’s a legacy. A spirituelle girl like Miss Nugent isn’t likely to inquire further.”

“Reggie, I believe you’re right. It cuts both ways, that spirituelle thing. I’ll do it.”

They were married quietly at the Little Church around the Corner. I held the towel for Archie, and a spectacled wren with a mouth like a rat-trap saw fair play for Eunice. And then they went off to Bermuda for their honeymoon. I wondered how the Doughnuts were going to get on in old Archie’s absence, but it seemed that he had buckled down to it and turned out three months’ supply in advance. He told me that long practise had enabled him to “Doughnut” almost without conscious effort. When he came back to New York, he would give an hour a week to them and do them on his head. Pretty soft! It seemed to me that the marriage was going to be a success.

You get out of touch with people when they marry. I am not much on the social-call game, and for nearly six months I don’t suppose I saw Archie more than two or three times. When I did, he appeared sound in wind and limb, and reported that married life was all to the velvet and that he regarded bachelors like myself as so many excrescences on the social system. He compared me, if I remember rightly, to a wart and advocated drastic treatment.

It was perhaps seven or eight months after Archie had told Eunice that he endowed her with all his worldly goods—she not suspecting what the parcel contained—that he came to me unexpectedly one afternoon with a face so long and sick-looking that my finger was on the button and I was ordering a drink before he had time to speak.

“Reggie,” he said, “an awful thing has happened. Have you seen the paper to-day?”

“Yes. Why?”

 

“DID YOU read the Wall Street news? Did you see that some lunatic has been jumping around with a club and hammering the stuffing out of B. and O. P.? This afternoon they are worth practically nothing.”

“By Jove! And all your money was in B. and O. P.! What rotten luck!” Then I spotted the silver lining. “But, after all, it doesn’t matter so very much. What I mean is, bang go your little savings and all that sort of thing, but, after all, you’re making five hundred a week steady, so you should worry.”

He gave me the sort of look a batter gives the “ump,” when he throws back his head and yells “Strike tuh!”

“I might have known you would miss the point,” he said. “Can’t you understand the situation? This morning at breakfast, Eunice got hold of the paper first. ‘Archie,’ she said, ‘didn’t you tell me all your money was in B. and O.P?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’ ‘Then we’re ruined.’ Now do you see? If I had had time to think, I could have said that I had another wad in something else, but I had committed myself. I have either got to tell her about those infernal Doughnuts, or else conceal the five hundred a week.”

“Great Scott! What on earth are you going to do?”

“I can’t think. We can struggle along in a sort of way, for it appears that she has small private means of her own—about fifteen hundred a year. The idea at present is that we shall live on that. We’re selling the automobile and trying to get out of the rest of our lease up at the apartment, and then we’re going to look about for a cheap flat probably down Washington Square way, so as to be near my studio. What was that stuff I’ve been drinking? Ring for another of the same, there’s a good fellow. In fact, I think you had better keep your finger permanently on the bell; I shall want all they’ve got.”

The spectacle of a fellow human being up to his neck in the consommé is painful, of course, but there’s certainly what the little bits at the top of magazine stories call a “tense, human interest” about it, and I’m bound to say that I saw as much as possible of poor old Archie from then on. His sad case fascinated me. It was rather thrilling to see him wrestling with lamb stew and five-cent beer down at his Waverly Street flat with all the suppressed anguish of a man who has let himself get accustomed to delicate food and vintage wines, and think that a word from him could send him whizzing back to the old life again whenever he wished. But, at what a cost, as they say in the novels! That was the catch. He might hate this new order of things, but his lips were sealed.

He hated it, poor old gazook. He was an independent sort of a chap, and the thought that he was living on his wife’s money hit him pretty hard. And the food problem was almost as bad. I had him to lunch as often as he could come, and let him do the ordering; and afterward, as we smoked and drank our coffee, he would tell me all the things that their cook could do—and did—with a leg of lamb. The way he described how she piloted it through to the fourth day in the shape of hash was one of the most moving things I have ever heard, by Jove it was!

I personally came in for a good deal of quiet esteem for the way in which I stuck to him in his adversity. I don’t think Eunice had thought much of me before, but now she seemed to feel that I had formed a corner in golden hearts.

I took advantage of this to try and pave the way for a confession on poor old Archie’s part.

“I wonder, Archie old top,” I said one evening after we had dined on lamb stew and were sitting around trying to forget it, “I wonder you don’t try another line in painting. I’ve heard that some of these fellows who draw for the comic supplements——”

Mrs. Archie nipped me in the bud.

“How can you suggest such a thing, Mr. Pepper! A man with Archie’s genius! I know the public is not educated up to his work, but it is only a question of time. Archie suffers, like all pioneers, from being ahead of his generation. But, thank Heaven, he need not sully his genius by stooping——”

“No, no,” I said. “Sorry! I only suggested it.”

After that I gave more time than ever to trying to think of a solution. Sometimes I would lie awake at night, and my manner toward Wilberforce, my man, became so distrait that it almost caused a rift. He asked me one morning which suit I would wear that day and, by Jove, I said “Oh, any of them, I don’t mind.” There was a most frightful silence and I woke up to find him looking at me with such a dashed wounded expression in his eyes that I had to tip him a much-needed ten-spot to bring him round again.

Well, you can’t go on straining your brain like that forever without something breaking loose and one night, just after I had gone to bed, I got it. Yes, by gad, absolutely got it. And I was so excited that I hopped out from under the blankets there and then, and called up old Archie on the telephone.

“Archie, old scout,” I said. “Can the missus hear what I’m saying? Well, then, don’t say anything to give the show away. Keep on saying ‘Yes? Hullo?’ so that you can tell her it was some one on the wrong wire. I’ve got it, my boy. All you’ve got to do to solve the whole problem is to tell her you’ve sold one of your pictures. Make the price as big as you like. Come and lunch with me to-morrow at the club, and we’ll settle the details.”

There was a pause, and then Archie’s voice said “Hello? Hello?” It might have been a bit disappointing, only there was a tremble in it which made me understand how happy I had made the old boy. I went back to bed and slept like a king.

Next day we lunched together and fixed the thing up. I have never seen any one so supremely braced. We examined the scheme from every angle, and there wasn’t a flaw in it. The only difficulty was to hit on a plausible purchaser. Archie suggested me, but I couldn’t see it. I said it would sound fishy.

Eventually I had a brain wave, and suggested J. Bellingwood Brackett, the Pittsburg millionaire. You see his name in the papers every day as having bought some painting or statue or something, so why shouldn’t he buy Archie’s “Coming of Summer?” And Archie said, “Exactly. Why shouldn’t he? And if he had had any sense in his darned ivory head, he would have done it long ago, darn him.” Which shows you that dear old Archie was bracing up, for I’ve heard him use much the same language in happier days about Bill Klem, when Bill had called one of Matty’s a ball when any one but an astigmatic brigand could see that it was really a strike.

 

HE WENT off, crammed to the eyebrows with good food and happiness, to tell Mrs. Archie that all was well, and that the old home was saved, and that lamb stew might now be definitely considered as off the bill of fare.

He told me on the telephone that night that he had made the price ten thousand dollars, because he needed the money, and what was ten thousand to a man who had been soaking it to the widow and the orphan for forty-odd years without a break? I thought the price was a bit high, but I agreed that J. Bellingwood could afford it. And happiness, as you might say, reigned supreme.

Why is it that there is always a catch in these good things? Fellows who know—detectives and people like that, will tell you that nine times out of ten a murderer will go and make some boneheaded break which leads to his being caught on the hop. He either does something or forgets to take something into his calculations, with the result that, bing! he’s copped. Putting up a game on any one, even from the best motives, is rather like that. You think the whole thing over, and fancy that you’ve allowed for everything, and all the time you’ve forgotten to spot something that ought to have been absolutely obvious.

What Archie and I forgot to allow for was the fact that this thing might get into the papers.

But, mind you, even if we had remembered about the papers, I doubt if we should have revised the scheme much. We should have taken it for granted that, if they mentioned it at all, they would just have given it five lines somewhere at the bottom of a page between the report of an Italian peanut vender’s arrest for being without a license and the advertisement of Old Doctor Spivins’s Lung Tonic.

Did they? They did not! They ran it on the first page with illustrations and headlines.

I don’t know when I’ve had such a nasty jar as I got when Wilberforce brought me the paper in bed, and I languidly opened it, and this jumped out and bit at me:

 

connoisseur brackett discovers young american
genius
pays stupendous price
for
new york artist’s
picture
hitherto unknown futurist receives
$10,000

 

UNDERNEATH, there was a column, some of it about Archie, the rest about the picture, winding up with a twelve-line scream of triumph about how the native son had at last slipped one over on European competition and why didn’t other millionaire connoisseurs imitate patriotic Brackett and support home industries.

Scattered over the page were two photographs of old Archie, looking more like Pa Doughnut than anything human, and a smudged reproduction of “The Coming of Summer.” And, believe me, frightful as the original of that weird exhibit looked, the reproduction had it licked to a whisper. It was one of the ghastliest things I’ve ever seen.

Well, after the first shock, I recovered a bit. After all, it was fame for dear old Archie; and it wasn’t likely that J. Bellingwood Brackett would make any fuss, for the thing was almost as much a boost for him as for Archie. As soon as I had had lunch, I went down to the flat to congratulate him.

He was sitting there with Mrs. Archie. He was looking a bit dazed, but she was simmering with joy. She welcomed me as the faithful friend.

“Isn’t it perfectly splendid, Mr. Pepper, to think that dear Archie’s genius has at last been recognized! How quiet he kept it. I had no idea that Mr. Brackett was even interested in his work. I wonder how he heard of it.”

“Oh, these things get about,” I said. “You can’t keep a good man down.”

“Think of ten thousand dollars for one picture—and the first he has ever sold!”

“What beats me,” said Archie, “is how the papers got hold of it.”

“Oh, I sent it to the papers,” said Mrs. Archie in an offhand way.

“I wonder who did the writing-up.”

“They would do that in the office, wouldn’t they?” said Mrs. Archie.

“I guess they would,” I said. “They are wonders at that sort of thing. I remember a pal of mine telling me that a girl came from a paper to interview him and he was in his bath and sent out word that he couldn’t see her and, when he looked at the paper next morning, he found that he had got off about half a column of corking good stuff full of epigrams.”

I couldn’t help wishing that dear old Archie would enter into the spirit of the thing a little more and perk up, instead of sitting there looking like a codfish. The thing seemed to have stunned the poor chappie. He told me afterward that even then he had a sense of impending doom. He said he had a presentiment that there was more to come, and that Fate was just backing away and measuring the distance, preparatory to pasting him good and hard.

“After this, Archie,” I said, “all you have to do is to sit in your studio, while the police reserves see that the waiting line of millionaires doesn’t straggle over the sidewalk. They’ll fight——”

“What’s that?” said Archie, starting as if some one had dug a red-hot needle into his calf.

It was only a ring at the bell, followed by a voice asking if Mr. Ferguson were at home.

“Probably an interviewer,” said Mrs. Archie. “I suppose we shall get no peace for a long time to come.”

The door opened and the cook came in with a card.

“T. Renshaw Liggett,” read Mrs. Archie. “I don’t know him. Do you, Archie? It must be an interviewer. Ask him to come in, Julia.”

And in he came.

My experience of chappies in general, after a fairly wide experience, is that some chappies seem to kind of convey an atmosphere of unpleasantness the moment you come in contact with them. I don’t know what it is about them—maybe it’s something in the way they work their eyebrows—but directly you see them you feel that you want to get down into a bomb-proof cellar and lock the door after you.

T. Renshaw Liggett gave me this feeling directly he came in, and when he fixed me with a sinister glance and said “Mr. Ferguson?” I felt inclined to say “Not Guilty!”  I backed a step or two and jerked my head toward Archie; and T. Renshaw turned the search-light off me and switched it onto him.

T. Renshaw Liggett was one of those sharp-cornered fellows, the sort of fellow you felt would give you a nasty gash if you ran against him on the street. His face worked outward to a point at the end of his nose, like some kind of a bird. He had a sharp chin, and I didn’t like the look of his eyes. Altogether, having given him the swift onceover, I was deuced glad that it was Archie he wanted to chat with and not me.

“You are Mr. Archibald Ferguson, the artist?”

Archie nodded pallidly, and T. Renshaw nodded, as much as to say that you couldn’t deceive him. He produced a sheet of paper. It was the front page of the Clarion.

“You authorized the publication of this?”

Archie nodded again.

“I represent Mr. Brackett. The publication of this most impudent fiction has caused Mr. Brackett extreme annoyance and, as it might also lead to other and more serious consequences, I must insist that a full denial be published without a moment’s delay.”

“What do you mean?” cried Mrs. Archie. “Are you mad?”

She had been standing, listening to the conversation in a sort of trance. Now she jumped into the fight with a vim that turned T. Renshaw’s attention to her in a second.

“No, madam, I am not mad. Nor, despite the interested assertions of certain parties whom I need not specify by name, is Mr. Brackett. It may be news to you, Mrs. Ferguson, that an action is even now pending, whereby certain parties are attempting to show that my client, Mr. Brackett, is non compos and shall be legally restrained from exercising control over his property. Their case, qua case, is extremely weak, for even if we admit their contention that our client did on the eighteenth of June last attempt to walk up Fifth Avenue in his pajamas, we shall be able to show that his action was the result of an election bet.

 

BUT, as the parties to whom I have alluded will undoubtedly snatch at every straw in their efforts to prove that Mr. Brackett is mentally infirm, the prejudicial effect of this publication cannot be overestimated. Unless Mr. Brackett can clear himself of the stigma of having given ten thousand dollars for this extraordinary production of an absolutely unknown artist who, to cap all, is an American, the strength of his case must be seriously shaken. I may add that my client’s lavish patronage of Art is already one of the main planks in the platform of the parties already referred to. They adduce his extremely generous expenditure in this direction as evidence that he is incapable of a proper handling of his moneys. I need scarcely point out with what sinister pleasure, therefore, they must have contemplated—this.”

And he looked at “The Coming of Summer” as if it were a cockroach.

I must say, much as I disliked the blighter, I couldn’t help feeling that he had right on his side. It hadn’t occurred to me in quite that light before, but, considering it calmly now, I could see that a man who would disgorge ten thousand of the best and crispest for Archie’s futurist masterpiece might very well step straight into the nut factory, and no questions asked.

Mrs. Archie came right back at him, as game as you please.

“I am sorry for Mr. Brackett’s domestic troubles, but my husband can prove without difficulty that he did buy the picture. Can’t you, dear?”

Archie, extremely white about the gills, looked at the ceiling and at the floor and at me and T. Renshaw Liggett.

“No,” he said finally, “I can’t. Because he didn’t.”

“Exactly,” said T. Renshaw. “And I must ask you to publish that statement in to-morrow’s papers without fail.” He rose, and made for the door. “My client has no objection to young artists advertising themselves, realizing that this is an age of strenuous competition; but he firmly refuses to permit them to do it at his expense. Good afternoon.”

And he legged it, leaving behind him one of the most chunky silences I have ever been mixed up in. For the life of me I couldn’t see who was to make the next remark. I was jolly certain that it wasn’t going to be me.

Eventually Mrs. Archie opened the proceedings.

“What does it mean?”

 

ARCHIE turned to me with a sort of frozen calm.

“Reggie, would you mind stepping into the kitchen and asking Julia for the colored supplement of the Gazette? I know she has it.”

He was right. She unearthed it from a closet. I trotted back with it to the sitting-room. Archie took the paper from me, and held it out to his wife, Doughnuts uppermost.

“Look,” he said.

She looked.

“I do them. I have done them every week for three years. No, don’t speak yet. Listen. This is where all my money came from, all the money I lost when B. and O. P. Rails went smash. And this is where the money came from to buy ‘The Coming of Summer.’ It wasn’t Brackett who bought it; it was myself.”

Mrs. Archie was devouring the Doughnuts with wide-open eyes. I caught a glimpse of them myself, and only just managed not to laugh, for it was the set of pictures where Pa Doughnut tries to fix the electric light—one of the very finest things dear old Archie had ever done.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I draw these things. I have sold my soul for five hundred dollars a week.”

“Archie!”

He winced, but stuck to it bravely.

“Yes. I knew how you would feel about it, and that was why I didn’t dare to tell you, and why we fixed up this story about old Brackett. I couldn’t bear to live on you any longer, and to see you roughing it here when we might be having all the money we wanted.”

Suddenly, like a boiler exploding, she began to laugh.

“They’re the funniest things I ever saw in my life!” she gurgled. “Mr. Pepper, do look! He’s trying to cut the electric wire with the scissors, and everything blazes up. And you’ve been hiding this from me all this time!”

Archie goggled dumbly. She dived at a table and picked up a magazine, pointing to one of the advertisement pages.

“Read!” she cried. “Read it aloud!”

And, in a shaking voice, Archie read:

“ ‘You think you are perfectly well, don’t you? You wake up in the morning and spring out of bed and say to yourself that you have never been better in your life. You’re wrong! Unless you are avoiding coffee as you would avoid the man who always tells you the smart things his little boy said yesterday, and drinking safety first molassine for breakfast, you cannot be perfectly well. It is a physical impossibility. Coffee contains an appreciable quantity of the deadly drug caffeine, and therefore——’ ”

“I wrote that,” she said. “And I wrote the advertisement of the Spiller Baby Food on page ninety-four, and the one about the Preeminent Breakfast Sausage on page eighty-six. Oh, Archie, dear, the torments I have been through, fearing that you would some day find me out and despise me! I couldn’t help it. I had no private means, and I didn’t make enough out of my poetry to keep me in hats. I learned to write advertisements four years ago at a correspondence school, and I’ve been doing them ever since. And now I don’t mind your knowing, now that you have told me this perfectly splendid news. Do you really get five hundred dollars a week for these drawings?”

A kind of holy light came into Archie’s eyes.

“Not now. As soon as I can get to a telephone, I’m going to call up the office and make it five-fifty or jump to the Sunday Universe. They’ll unbelt all right. They know me. I shall consider it as compensation for all I’ve been through.”

“Archie!”

She rushed into his arms the way I’ve seen fellows at college bucking center. And I drifted out. It seemed to me that this was a scene in which I was not on. I sidled to the door, and slid forth. They didn’t notice me. My experience is that nobody ever does—much.

 


 

[Editor’s Note: Thanks to Tony Ring for providing a copy of this item and to Neil Midkiff for cleaning up the images.]