Delphi complete works of.., p.71
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 71
De Vere assented readily, telephoned to the Belmont not to keep lunch waiting for him, and in a moment was speeding up the magnificent Riverside Drive towards Mr. Overgold’s home. On the way Mr. Overgold pointed out various objects of interest, — Grant’s tomb, Lincoln’s tomb, Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, the ticket office of the New York Subway, and various other points of historic importance.
On arriving at the house, de Vere was ushered up a flight of broad marble steps to a hall fitted on every side with almost priceless objets d’art and others, ushered to the cloak-room and out of it, butlered into the lunch-room and footmanned to a chair.
As they entered, a lady already seated at the table turned to meet them.
One glance was enough — plenty.
It was she — the object of de Vere’s impassioned quest. A rich lunch-gown was girdled about her with a twelve-o’clock band of pearls.
She reached out her hand, smiling.
“Dorothea,” said the multimillionaire, “this is Mr. de Vere. Mr. de Vere — my wife.”
CHAPTER III
Of this next chapter we need only say that the Blue Review (Adults Only) declares it to be the most daring and yet conscientious handling of the sex-problem ever attempted and done. The fact that the Congregational Times declares that this chapter will undermine the whole foundations of English Society and let it fall, we pass over: we hold certificates in writing from a great number of the Anglican clergy, to the effect that they have carefully read the entire novel and see nothing in it.
. . . . . . .
They stood looking at one another.
“So you didn’t know,” she murmured.
In a flash de Vere realised that she hadn’t known that he didn’t know and knew now that he knew.
He found no words.
The situation was a tense one. Nothing but the woman’s innate tact could save it. Dorothea Overgold rose to it with the dignity of a queen.
She turned to her husband.
“Take your soup over to the window,” she said, “and eat it there.”
The millionaire took his soup to the window and sat beneath a little palm tree, eating it.
“You didn’t know,” she repeated.
“No,” said de Vere; “how could I?”
“And yet,” she went on, “you loved me, although you didn’t know that I was married?”
“Yes,” answered de Vere simply. “I loved you, in spite of it.”
“How splendid!” she said.
There was a moment’s silence. Mr. Overgold had returned to the table, the empty plate in his hand. His wife turned to him again with the same unfailing tact.
“Take your asparagus to the billiard-room,” she said, “and eat it there.”
“Does he know, too?” asked de Vere.
“Mr. Overgold?” she said carelessly. “I suppose he does. Eh apres, mon ami?”
French? Another mystery! Where and how had she learned it? de Vere asked himself. Not in France, certainly.
“I fear that you are very young, amico mio,” Dorothea went on carelessly. “After all, what is there wrong in it, piccolo pochito? To a man’s mind perhaps — but to a woman, love is love.”
She beckoned to the butler.
“Take Mr. Overgold a cutlet to the music-room,” she said, “and give him his gorgonzola on the inkstand in the library.”
“And now,” she went on, in that caressing way which seemed so natural to her, “don’t let us think about it any more! After all, what is is, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is,” said de Vere, half convinced in spite of himself.
“Or at any rate,” said Dorothea, “nothing can at the same time both be and not be. But come,” she broke off, gaily dipping a macaroon in a glass of creme de menthe and offering it to him with a pretty gesture of camaraderie, “don’t let’s be gloomy any more. I want to take you with me to the matinee.”
“Is he coming?” asked de Vere, pointing at Mr. Overgold’s empty chair.
“Silly boy,” laughed Dorothea. “Of course John is coming. You surely don’t want to buy the tickets yourself.”
. . . . . . .
The days that followed brought a strange new life to de Vere.
Dorothea was ever at his side. At the theatre, at the polo ground, in the park, everywhere they were together. And with them was Mr. Overgold.
The three were always together. At times at the theatre Dorothea and de Vere would sit downstairs and Mr. Overgold in the gallery; at other times, de Vere and Mr. Overgold would sit in the gallery and Dorothea downstairs; at times one of them would sit in Row A, another in Row B, and a third in Row C; at other times two would sit in Row B and one in Row C; at the opera, at times, one of the three would sit listening, the others talking, at other times two listening and one talking, and at other times three talking and none listening.
Thus the three formed together one of the most perplexing, maddening triangles that ever disturbed the society of the metropolis.
. . . . . . .
The denouement was bound to come.
It came.
It was late at night.
De Vere was standing beside Dorothea in the brilliantly lighted hall of the Grand Palaver Hotel, where they had had supper. Mr. Overgold was busy for a moment at the cashier’s desk.
“Dorothea,” de Vere whispered passionately, “I want to take you away, away from all this. I want you.”
She turned and looked him full in the face. Then she put her hand in his, smiling bravely.
“I will come,” she said.
“Listen,” he went on, “the Gloritania sails for England to-morrow at midnight. I have everything ready. Will you come?”
“Yes,” she answered, “I will”; and then passionately, “Dearest, I will follow you to England, to Liverpool, to the end of the earth.”
She paused in thought a moment and then added.
“Come to the house just before midnight. William, the second chauffeur (he is devoted to me), shall be at the door with the third car. The fourth footman will bring my things — I can rely on him; the fifth housemaid can have them all ready — she would never betray me. I will have the undergardener — the sixth — waiting at the iron gate to let you in; he would die rather than fail me.”
She paused again — then she went on.
“There is only one thing, dearest, that I want to ask. It is not much. I hardly think you would refuse it at such an hour. May I bring my husband with me?”
De Vere’s face blanched.
“Must you?” he said.
“I think I must,” said Dorothea. “You don’t know how I’ve grown to value, to lean upon, him. At times I have felt as if I always wanted him to be near me; I like to feel wherever I am — at the play, at a restaurant, anywhere — that I can reach out and touch him. I know,” she continued, “that it’s only a wild fancy and that others would laugh at it, but you can understand, can you not — carino caruso mio? And think, darling, in our new life, how busy he, too, will be — making money for all of us — in a new money market. It’s just wonderful how he does it.”
A great light of renunciation lit up de Vere’s face.
“Bring him,” he said.
“I knew that you would say that,” she murmured, “and listen, pochito pocket-edition, may I ask one thing more, one weeny thing? William, the second chauffeur — I think he would fade away if I were gone — may I bring him, too? Yes! O my darling, how can I repay you? And the second footman, and the third housemaid — if I were gone I fear that none of—”
“Bring them all,” said de Vere half bitterly; “we will all elope together.”
And as he spoke Mr. Overgold sauntered over from the cashier’s desk, his open purse still in his hand, and joined them. There was a dreamy look upon his face.
“I wonder,” he murmured, “whether personality survives or whether it, too, when up against the irresistible, dissolves and resolves itself into a series of negative reactions?”
De Vere’s empty heart echoed the words.
Then they passed out and the night swallowed them up.
CHAPTER IV
At a little before midnight on the next night, two motors filled with muffled human beings might have been perceived, or seen, moving noiselessly from Riverside Drive to the steamer wharf where lay the Gloritania.
A night of intense darkness enveloped the Hudson. Outside the inside of the dockside a dense fog wrapped the Statue of Liberty. Beside the steamer customs officers and deportation officials moved silently to and fro in long black cloaks, carrying little deportation lanterns in their hands.
To these Mr. Overgold presented in silence his deportation certificates, granting his party permission to leave the United States under the imbecility clause of the Interstate Commerce Act.
No objection was raised.
A few moments later the huge steamer was slipping away in the darkness.
On its deck a little group of people, standing beside a pile of first-class cabin luggage, directed a last sad look through their heavy black disguise at the rapidly vanishing shore which they could not see.
De Vere, who stood in the midst of them, clasping their hands, thus stood and gazed his last at America.
“Spoof!” he said.
(We admit that this final panorama, weird in its midnight mystery, and filling the mind of the reader with a sense of something like awe, is only appended to Spoof in order to coax him to read our forthcoming sequel, Spiff!)
THE READING PUBLIC. A BOOK STORE STUDY
“WISH TO LOOK about the store? Oh, oh, by all means, sir,” he said. Then as he rubbed his hands together in an urbane fashion he directed a piercing glance at me through his spectacles.
“You’ll find some things that might interest you,” he said, “in the back of the store on the left. We have there a series of reprints — Universal Knowledge from Aristotle to Arthur Balfour — at seventeen cents. Or perhaps you might like to look over the Pantheon of Dead Authors at ten cents. Mr. Sparrow,” he called, “just show this gentleman our classical reprints — the ten-cent series.”
With that he waved his hand to an assistant and dismissed me from his thought.
In other words, he had divined me in a moment. There was no use in my having bought a sage-green fedora in Broadway, and a sporting tie done up crosswise with spots as big as nickels. These little adornments can never hide the soul within. I was a professor, and he knew it, or at least, as part of his business, he could divine it on the instant.
The sales manager of the biggest book store for ten blocks cannot be deceived in a customer. And he knew, of course, that, as a professor, I was no good. I had come to the store, as all professors go to book stores, just as a wasp comes to an open jar of marmalade. He knew that I would hang around for two hours, get in everybody’s way, and finally buy a cheap reprint of the Dialogues of Plato, or the Prose Works of John Milton, or Locke on the Human Understanding, or some trash of that sort.
As for real taste in literature — the ability to appreciate at its worth a dollar-fifty novel of last month, in a spring jacket with a tango frontispiece — I hadn’t got it and he knew it.
He despised me, of course. But it is a maxim of the book business that a professor standing up in a corner buried in a book looks well in a store. The real customers like it.
So it was that even so up-to-date a manager as Mr. Sellyer tolerated my presence in a back corner of his store: and so it was that I had an opportunity of noting something of his methods with his real customers — methods so successful, I may say, that he is rightly looked upon by all the publishing business as one of the mainstays of literature in America.
I had no intention of standing in the place and listening as a spy. In fact, to tell the truth, I had become immediately interested in a new translation of the Moral Discourses of Epictetus. The book was very neatly printed, quite well bound and was offered at eighteen cents; so that for the moment I was strongly tempted to buy it, though it seemed best to take a dip into it first.
I had hardly read more than the first three chapters when my attention was diverted by a conversation going on in the front of the store.
“You’re quite sure it’s his LATEST?” a fashionably dressed lady was saying to Mr. Sellyer.
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Rasselyer,” answered the manager. “I assure you this is his very latest. In fact, they only came in yesterday.”
As he spoke, he indicated with his hand a huge pile of books, gayly jacketed in white and blue. I could make out the title in big gilt lettering — GOLDEN DREAMS.
“Oh, yes,” repeated Mr. Sellyer. “This is Mr. Slush’s latest book. It’s having a wonderful sale.”
“That’s all right, then,” said the lady. “You see, one sometimes gets taken in so: I came in here last week and took two that seemed very nice, and I never noticed till I got home that they were both old books, published, I think, six months ago.”
“Oh, dear me, Mrs. Rasselyer,” said the manager in an apologetic tone, “I’m extremely sorry. Pray let us send for them and exchange them for you.”
“Oh, it does not matter,” said the lady; “of course I didn’t read them. I gave them to my maid. She probably wouldn’t know the difference, anyway.”
“I suppose not,” said Mr. Sellyer, with a condescending smile. “But of course, madam,” he went on, falling into the easy chat of the fashionable bookman, “such mistakes are bound to happen sometimes. We had a very painful case only yesterday. One of our oldest customers came in in a great hurry to buy books to take on the steamer, and before we realised what he had done — selecting the books I suppose merely by the titles, as some gentlemen are apt to do — he had taken two of last year’s books. We wired at once to the steamer, but I’m afraid it’s too late.”
“But now, this book,” said the lady, idly turning over the leaves, “is it good? What is it about?”
“It’s an extremely POWERFUL thing,” said Mr. Sellyer, “in fact, MASTERLY. The critics are saying that it’s perhaps THE most powerful book of the season. It has a—” and here Mr. Sellyer paused, and somehow his manner reminded me of my own when I am explaining to a university class something that I don’t know myself— “It has a — a — POWER, so to speak — a very exceptional power; in fact, one may say without exaggeration it is the most POWERFUL book of the month. Indeed,” he added, getting on to easier ground, “it’s having a perfectly wonderful sale.”
“You seem to have a great many of them,” said the lady.
“Oh, we have to,” answered the manager. “There’s a regular rush on the book. Indeed, you know it’s a book that is bound to make a sensation. In fact, in certain quarters, they are saying that it’s a book that ought not to—” And here Mr. Sellyer’s voice became so low and ingratiating that I couldn’t hear the rest of the sentence.
“Oh, really!” said Mrs. Rasselyer. “Well, I think I’ll take it then. One ought to see what these talked-of things are about, anyway.”
She had already begun to button her gloves, and to readjust her feather boa with which she had been knocking the Easter cards off the counter. Then she suddenly remembered something.
“Oh, I was forgetting,” she said. “Will you send something to the house for Mr. Rasselyer at the same time? He’s going down to Virginia for the vacation. You know the kind of thing he likes, do you not?”
“Oh, perfectly, madam,” said the manager. “Mr. Rasselyer generally reads works of — er — I think he buys mostly books on — er—”
“Oh, travel and that sort of thing,” said the lady.
“Precisely. I think we have here,” and he pointed to the counter on the left, “what Mr. Rasselyer wants.”
He indicated a row of handsome books— “Seven Weeks in the Sahara, seven dollars; Six Months in a Waggon, six-fifty net; Afternoons in an Oxcart, two volumes, four-thirty, with twenty off.”
“I think he has read those,” said Mrs. Rasselyer. “At least there are a good many at home that seem like that.”
“Oh, very possibly — but here, now, Among the Cannibals of Corfu — yes, that I think he has had — Among the — that, too, I think — but this I am certain he would like, just in this morning — Among the Monkeys of New Guinea — ten dollars, net.”
And with this Mr. Sellyer laid his hand on a pile of new books, apparently as numerous as the huge pile of Golden Dreams.
“Among the Monkeys,” he repeated, almost caressingly.
“It seems rather expensive,” said the lady.
“Oh, very much so — a most expensive book,” the manager repeated in a tone of enthusiasm. “You see, Mrs. Rasselyer, it’s the illustrations, actual photographs” — he ran the leaves over in his fingers— “of actual monkeys, taken with the camera — and the paper, you notice — in fact, madam, the book costs, the mere manufacture of it, nine dollars and ninety cents — of course we make no profit on it. But it’s a book we like to handle.”
Everybody likes to be taken into the details of technical business; and of course everybody likes to know that a bookseller is losing money. These, I realised, were two axioms in the methods of Mr. Sellyer.
So very naturally Mrs. Rasselyer bought Among the Monkeys, and in another moment Mr. Sellyer was directing a clerk to write down an address on Fifth Avenue, and was bowing deeply as he showed the lady out of the door.
As he turned back to his counter his manner seemed much changed.
“That Monkey book,” I heard him murmur to his assistant, “is going to be a pretty stiff proposition.”
But he had no time for further speculation.
Another lady entered.
This time even to an eye less trained than Mr. Sellyer’s, the deep, expensive mourning and the pensive face proclaimed the sentimental widow.
“Something new in fiction,” repeated the manager, “yes, madam — here’s a charming thing — Golden Dreams” — he hung lovingly on the words— “a very sweet story, singularly sweet; in fact, madam, the critics are saying it is the sweetest thing that Mr. Slush has done.”
