Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy Part 3

"Yes," she answered, "I will"; and then pa.s.sionately, "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 pa.s.sed out and the night swallowed them up.

CHAPTER IV

At a little before midnight on the next night, two motors filled with m.u.f.fled 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-cla.s.s cabin luggage, directed a last sad look through their heavy black disguise at the rapidly vanishing sh.o.r.e 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!)

II.--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 cla.s.sical reprints--the ten-cent series."

With that he waved his hand to an a.s.sistant 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. Ra.s.selyer," answered the manager. "I a.s.sure 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 t.i.tle 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. Ra.s.selyer," 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 t.i.tles, 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 cla.s.s 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."