Part 1

TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK

By Christopher Morley

Illustrated By Walter Jack Duncan

Garden City, N. Y., And Toronto

Doubleday, Page & Company

1921

A LETTER OF DEDICATION

TO

FRANK NELSON DOUBLEDAY

Dear Effendi:

I take the liberty of dedicating these little stories to you, with affection and respect. They have all grown, in one mood or another, out of the various life of Grub Street, suggested by adventures with publishers, booksellers, magazine editors, newspaper men, theatrical producers, commuters, and poets major and minor. If they have any appeal at all, it must be as an honest (though perhaps sometimes too jocular) picture of the excitements that gratify the career of young men who embark upon the ocean of ink, and (let us not forget) those much-enduring Titanias who consent to share their vicissitudes. You have been the best of friends and counsellors to many such young men, and I assure you that they look back upon the time spent under your shrewd and humorous magistracy with special loyalty and regard. You will understand that in these irresponsible stories no personal identifications are to be presumed.

I think you remember--I know you do, because you have often charitably chuckled over the incident--that rather too eager young man who came to call on you one day in September, 1913, saying that he simply must have a job. And how you, in your inimitable way, said “Well, what kind of a job would you like best to have around this place?” And he cried “Yours!” And you justly punctured the creature by saying “All right, go to work and get it.” (There was more youthful palpitation than intended impertinence in the young man's outcry, so he has assured me.) And then, still tremulous with ambition, this misguided freshman pulled out of his pocket a bulky memorandum on which he had inscribed his pet scheme for the regeneration and stimulus of the publishing business, and laid it before you. How hospitably you considered his programme, and how tenderly you must have smiled, inwardly, at his odd mixture of earnestness and excitement! At any rate, you set him to work that afternoon, with the assurance that he might have your job as soon as he could qualify.

Well, he did not get it; nor will he ever, for he knows (by this time) what a rare complex of instincts and sagacities is needed in the head of a great publishing house; and his own ambition has proved to be a little different. But he can never be enough grateful for the patience and humorous tolerance with which you brooded upon his various antics, condoned his many absurdities, welcomed and encouraged his enthusiasms. In nearly four years in your “shop” he learned (so he insists) more than any college could ever teach: and how much he had to unlearn, too! And the surprising part of it was, it was all such extraordinarily good fun. The greatest moments of all, I suppose, were when this young man was invited by one of your partners (on occasions that seemed so interminably far apart!) to “walk in the garden,” that being the cheerful tradition of the Country Life Press. There, after some embarrassing chat about the peonies and the sun dial, the victim meanwhile groaning to know whether it was, this time, hail or farewell, there would come tidings of one of those five-dollar raises that were so hotly desiderated. That paternal function (so this young man and his fellow small fry observed) was rightly a little beneath the dignity of the Effendi: you, they noted, only walked in the garden with paper merchants and people like Booth Tarkington and Ellen Glasgow and good Mr. Grosset of Grosset and Dunlap!

Many young men (O Effendi), from Frank Norris down, have found your house a wonderful training-school for writers and publishers and booksellers. There are great names, of permanent honour in literature, that owe much to your wisdom and patience. But among all those who know you in your trebled capacity as employer, publisher, and friend, there is none who has more reason to be grateful, or who has done less to deserve it, than the young man I have described. And so you will forgive him if he thus publicly and selfishly pleases himself by trying to express his sense of gratitude, and signs himself

Faithfully yours

Christopher Morley.

Roslyn, Long Island January, 1921.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The original responsibility for some of these stories--or at any rate the original copyright--was allotted as follows: “The Prize Package,” Collier's Weekly (1918); “Urn Burial,” Every Week (1918); “The Climacteric,” The Smart Set (1918); “The Pert Little Hat,” The Metropolitan (1919); “The Battle of Manila Envelopes,” The Bookman (1920); “The Commutation Chop-house,” The New York Evening Post (1920); “The Curious Case of Kenelm Digby,” The Bookman (1921); “Gloria and the Garden of Sweden,” Munsey's (1921); “Punch and Judy,” The Outlook (1921).

All but one of these publications are still in existence. To their editors and owners the author expresses his indebtedness and his congratulation.

TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK

THE PRIZE PACKAGE

LESTER VALIANT came back from Oxford with the degree of B. Litt., some unpaid tailors' bills, and the conviction that the world owed him a living because he had been suffered within the sacred precincts of Balliol College for three years. A Rhodes scholarship is one of the most bounteous gifts the world holds for a young man; but in Lester's case Oxford piled upon Harvard left him with a perilous lot to unlearn. You can tell a lot about a man when you know what he is proud of; and Lester was really proud of having worn a wrist watch and a dinner jacket with blue silk lapels three or four years before they became habitual in the region of Herald Square. But let us be just: he was also proud of his first editions of Conrad and George Moore; for he was much afflicted with literature.

Lester originated in the yonder part of Indiana, but when he returned from Oxford he made up his mind to live in New York. He felt it appropriate that he should be connected in some way with the production of literature, and after hiring a bedroom on the fourth floor of an old house on Madison Avenue, where two friends of his were living, he set out to visit the publishers.

There is a third-rate club in London called the Litterateurs' Club. A few years ago it was in urgent need of funds, and a brilliant idea struck the managing committee. Every writer listed in the American “Who's Who” was circularized and received a very flattering letter saying that, owing to the distinction of his contributions to contemporary letters, the Litterateurs' Club of London would be very much pleased to welcome him as a member, upon a nominal payment of five guineas. About seven hundred guileless persons complied, and transatlantic travel became appreciably denser on account of these men of letters crossing to England to revel in their importance as members of a club of which no one in London has ever heard. And by some fluke the managing committee had got hold of the name of Lester Valiant, then at Oxford--perhaps because he had once published a story in the _Cantharides Magazine_. Probably they bought a mailing list from some firm in Tottenham Court Road.

Cecil Rhodes's executors paid his five guineas, and he had his cards engraved:

LESTER G. P. VALIANT

The Litterateurs' Club, London

The use of these pasteboards brought him ready entrée in the offices of New York publishers. If he had not been so eager to impress the gentlemen he interviewed with his literary connoisseurship, undoubtedly he would have landed a job much sooner. But publishers are justly suspicious of anything that savours of literature, and Lester's innocent allusions to George Moore and Chelsea did much to alarm them. At length, however, Mr. Arundel, the president of the Arundel Company, took pity on the young man and gave him a desk in his editorial department and fifteen dollars a week. Mr. Arundel had once walked through the quadrangle of Balliol, and he was not disposed to be too severe toward Lester's naïve mannerisms.

To his amazement and dismay, Lester found his occupation not even faintly flavoured with literature. He was set to work writing press notes about authors of whom he had never heard at Oxford and whose books he soon discovered to be amateurish or worse. He had been nourishing himself upon the English conception of a publisher's office: a quaint, dingy rookery somewhere in Clifford's Inn, where gentlemen in spats and monocles discuss, over cups of tea and platters of anchovy toast, realism and the latest freak of the Spasmodists.

The Arundel office was a wilderness of light walnut desks and filing cases, throbbing with typewriters, adding machines, and hoarse cries from the shipping room at the rear. Here sat Lester, gloomily writing blurbs for literary editors, and wondering how long it would be before he would earn forty dollars a week. He reckoned that was what one ought to get before incurring matrimony.

*****

Like all young men of twenty-three, Lester thought a good deal about marriage, although he had not yet chosen his quarry. The feeling that he could marry almost anybody was delicious to him. But this heavenly eclecticism endures such a short time! For youth abhors generalities and seeks the concrete instance. Also, much reading of George Moore sets the mind brooding on these things. Lester used to stroll in Madison Square at dusk before going back to his room, and his visions were often of a dark-panelled apartment in the Gramercy Park neighbourhood where an open fire would be burning and someone sitting in silk stockings to endear him as he returned from the office.

His arrival caused something of an upheaval in the placid breasts of the two old college friends whose sitting room he shared on Madison Avenue. They were sturdy and steady creatures, more familiar with Edward Earle Purinton and Orison Swett Marden than with Swinburne and Crackanthorpe and Mallarmé. To his secret annoyance, Lester learned that both Jack Hulbert and Harry Hanover were earning more than thirty dollars a week, and he even had an uneasy suspicion that they were saving some of it. When he spoke about Beardsley or Will Rothenstein or the Grafton Galleries they were apt to turn the talk upon Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. When he showed them his greatest treasure, a plaster life mask of himself that a sculpturing friend in Chelsea had made, they were frankly ribald. Jack was in the circulation department of a popular magazine, and Harry performed some unexplained tasks in the office of a tea importer. Lester was fond of them both, but it seemed to him a bitter travesty that these simple-minded Philistines should possess so much higher earning power than he. So he thought of taking a garret in Greenwich Village, but in the Madison Avenue house he was sharing a big sitting room at little expense. So he spread his books about, hung up his framed letter from Przybyszewski, put his hammered brass tea caddy on the reading table, and made the best of the situation.

Even on fifteen dollars a week a young man may have a very amusing time in New York. For his room and breakfast Lester paid six dollars a week; for his other meals he used to hunt out the little table-d'hôte restaurants of which there are so many in the crosstown streets between the Avenue and Broadway. To come in from the snowy street on a winter evening, sit down to a tureen of Moretti's hot minestrone, open a new packet of ten-cent cigarettes, and prop up a copy of the _Oblique Review_ against the cruet stand, seemed to Lester the prismatic fringe of all that was _je ne sais quoi_ and _ne plus ultra_. The dandruffians in the little orchestra under the stairs would hammer out some braying operatic strains, and Lester would lean back in a swirl of acrid tobacco smoke and survey his surroundings with great content.

It was while he was conjugating the verb _to live_ in this manner, and sowing (as someone has said) a notable crop of wild table d'hôtes, that he first realized the importance of Pearl Denver. Miss Pearl was Mr. Arundel's personal stenographer, a young woman remarkable in her profession by the fact that she never exposed the details of her camisole to the public gaze; also when the boss dictated she was able to rescue his subordinate clauses from the airy vacancy in which they hung suspended, and hook them up into new sentences capable of grammatical analysis. As a stenog she was distinctly above par, but not above parsing.

Lester, of course, had a speaking acquaintance with Miss Denver, but her existence had never really penetrated the warm aura of egocentric thoughts that enhaloed him. He knew her simply as one of the contingents of the office; and the office had proved a great disappointment to him. Not one of the “firm” (he called them “directors”) wore spats; not one of them had shown the faintest interest in his suggestion that they publish a volume of Clara Tice's drawings. Lester must be pardoned for having dismissed Miss Denver, if he had thought of her at all, as not _generis._

*****

We now proceed more rapidly. Entering the hallway of Moretti's on Thirty-fifth Street, about half past one cocktail of a winter evening, he found the cramped vestibule crowded by several persons taking off their wraps. A copy of the _Oblique Review_, unmistakable in its garlic-green cover, fell at his feet. Thinking it his own, he picked it up and was about to pocket it when a red tarn o'shan-ter in front of him turned round. He saw the bobbed brown hair and gray eyes of Miss Denver. “Well, Mr. Valiant, what are you doing with my magazine?”

“Oh--why--I beg your pardon! I thought it was mine! I'm awfully sorry!” He was keenly embarrassed, and pulled his own copy out of his overcoat pocket as an evidence of good faith.

She laughed. “I don't wonder you made the mistake,” she said. “Probably you thought you were the only person in New York reading the Oblique!”

He felt the alarm that every shy or cautious youth experiences in the presence of beauty, and, with a mumbled apology, fled hastily to a little table in a corner. There, pretending to read some preposterous farrago of free verse, he watched Miss Denver meet another girl who was evidently waiting for her. The two chattered with such abandon, smoked so many cigarettes, and seemed so thoroughly at home that Lester envied them their savoir. Manoeuvring his spaghetti and parmesan, his gaze passed as direct as the cartoonist's dotted line to the charming contour of the stenographer's cheek and neck. His equanimity was quite overset. Never before had he gazed with seeing eye upon the demure creature sorting out Mr. Arundel's mind into paragraphs. Human nature is what it is; let Lester's first thought be confessed: “I wonder if she knows what my salary is?”

At last, after smoking many cigarettes and skimming over the _Oblique Review_, Lester felt it was his move. He walked down the room, looking at his wrist watch with a slight frown as he passed her table. At the door he saw by the reflection in a mirror that she had not even looked up. He hurried back to Madison Avenue, pausing to sniff the crystal frosty air. At the corner of Fifth he stood for a moment, inhaling the miraculous clearness of the night and pondering on the relative values of free verse and ordered rhythms as modes of self-expression.

In spite of a certain bumptiousness among males, Lester was painfully shy with nubile women, and it was several days before he had opportunity for further speech with Miss Denver. Moretti's is a fifty-cent table d'hôte, and his regimen was calculated on a forty-cent limit for dinner; but after this meeting with the _Oblique Review's_ fairest _abonnée_ he haunted the place for some evenings. Then one day, taking in some copy for a book jacket to be approved by the sales manager, he encountered Miss Denver in the sample room. During working hours she was “strictly business,” and he admired the trim white blouse, the satin-smooth neck, and the small, capable hands jotting pothooks in her notebook as she took a long telephone call. She put down the receiver, and smiled pleasantly at him.

“Don't you go to Moretti's any more?” he asked, and then regretted the brusqueness of the question.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Usually when I buy the _Oblique_ I go to a Hartford Lunch. I can sit there as long as I want and read, with doughnuts and coffee.”

Lester had a curious feeling of oscillation somewhere to the left of his middle waistcoat button. As the little girl said on the Coney Island switchback, he felt as though he had freckles on his stomach.

“Will you come to Moretti's with me some night?” he asked.

“I'd love to,” she said. “I must hurry now. Mr. Arundel's waiting for this phone call.”

A little later in the day, after a good deal of heartburning, Lester called her up from his desk. “How about to-morrow night?” he said, and she accepted.

*****

Coursing back to his chamber the next evening, Lester was a little worried about the ceremonial demanded by the occasion. Should he put on white linen and a dinner jacket, becoming the conquering male of the upper classes? But the recollection of the _Oblique Review_ suggested that a touch of négligée would be more appropriate. A clean, soft collar and a bow tie of lavender silk were his concessions to unconvention. He was about to scrub out a minute soup stain on the breast of his coat, but concluded that as a badge of graceful carelessness this might remain. At a tobacconist's he bought a package of cheap Russian cigarettes, such as he imagined a Bolshevik might smoke.

There she came, tripping along the street, with something of the quick, alcaic motion of an Undersmith on high. He waved gayly. She depressed her shift key and reversed the ribbon. He double-spaced, and they entered the restaurant together.

Lester felt an intellectual tremor as they sat down at a corner table. Never had his mind seemed so relentlessly clear, so keen to leap upon the problems of life and tessellate them. It was as though all his past experience had cumulated and led up to this peak of existence. “Now for a close analysis of Female Mind,” was his secret thought as he settled in his chair. He felt almost sorry for this gay, defenceless little shred of humanity who had cast herself under his domineering gaze. A masculine awareness of size and power filled him. And yet--she seemed quite unterrified.

As they began on the antipasto he thought to himself: “I must start very gently. Women like men to veil their power.” So he said:

“That was funny, my picking up your magazine the other night, wasn't it? You know I thought it was my copy.”

“Oh, the dear old _Oblique!_ Isn't it a scream? I read myself to sleep with it every night. We'll have to make the most of it while we can, because Mr. Arundel says it can't pay its paper bill much longer.”

This irreverence rather startled Lester, who was writing an article “On the Art of Clara Tice” which he had been hoping the Oblique would buy. In fact, he was startled quite out of the careful conversational paradigm he had planned. He found himself getting a little ahead of his barrage. “Does Mr. Arundel read it?” he asked. “Heavens, no!” cried Miss Denver, and effervesced with laughter. “He would rather face a firing squad than read that kind of stuff. But he has an interest in the concern that supplies their paper.” The matter of paper had never occurred to Lester before. Of course he knew a magazine had to have something to print on, but he had never thought of the editors of a radical review being embarrassed by such a paltry consideration.

“Is Mr. Arundel literary?” he asked.

Miss Denver found this very whimsical. “Say, are you kidding me?” she said, with tilted eyebrows. “The chief says literature is the curse of the publishing business. Every time somebody puts over some highbrow stuff on him we lose money on it. The only kind of literature that gets under his ribs is reports from the sales department.”

“That's very Philistine, isn't it?”

“Sure it is, but it puts the frogs in the pay envelopes, so what of it?”

“Well, I should expect the head of a big publishing house to be at least interested in some form of literary expression.”

“You should worry! That's what we hires for. Besides he _has_ a literary passion, too--Walt Mason. He thinks Walt is the greatest poet in the world.”

“Walter Mason?” murmured Lester. “I don't think I know his work.”

“Hasn't Walt made Oxford yet?” asked Miss Denver. “He writes the prose poems in the evening papers, syndicate stuff, you know. Printed to look like prose, just the opposite of the free-verse gag.” She smiled reminiscently, and quoted:

_When I am as dry as a fish up a tree, then I to the hydrant repair, and fill myself up, without ticket or fee, with the water that's eddying there. I drink all I want--half a gallon or more--and then I lie down on my couch; when I rise in the morning my head isn't sore and I don't wear a dark brindle grouch----“_

“Is there any free-verse stuff that can cover that?” she asked.

Lester was somewhat disconcerted. His assessment of Female Mind did not seem to be proceeding methodically. He played for time.

“I thought you enjoyed the _Oblique_?”

“As a joke, yes: I laugh myself giddy over it. But I know darn well that kind of junk won't last. By and by the ghost'll quit putting up and the editors will get jobs as ticket choppers. I guess I'm a Philistine!”

With this deliciously impudent creature beaming at him, Lester felt himself cursedly at a disadvantage. Neither Harvard nor Balliol had informed him about this Walter Mason, and though he had seven hundred quips and anecdotes indexed in a scrapbook marked _Jocoseria_, none of them seemed to bubble up just now. Darn the girl, her mind wouldn't stand still long enough for him to take its temperature. It was like trying to write captions for the movies while the film was running. He blew a cloud of blue Russian vapour across the board, and smiled at her in a tolerant, _veni-vidi-Bolsheviki_ kind of way. Behind his forehead he was fighting desperately to catch up.

As they wrestled with the spaghetti he remembered that someone had told him that publishers usually depend on the literary judgment of their wives. Perhaps that was the case with Mr. Arundel? But Miss Denver laughed aloud at the suggestion.

“Wrong again!” she said. “He's not married. Petunia Veal, the author of 'Sveltschmerz,' has been angling for him for years, and lots of other lady authors, too. He's so sentimental, he's escaped 'em all so far.”

She bubbled and chuckled and gurgled her way through the rest of Moretti's menu, amazing him more and more by the spontaneity, sophistication, and charm of her wit. He escorted her home, and then stood under a lamp-post for three minutes removing the soup stain with a handkerchief. “She's immense!” he said to himself. “Why she's--she's a poem by William Butler Yeats!” As an afterthought, he made a mental memorandum to visit the library and look up the work of Walter Mason.

A few days later Mr. Arundel sent for Lester, who hurried to the private office with visions of a raise in salary. The president was sitting at his desk turning over some papers; he motioned Lester to a chair and seemed curiously loath to begin conversation. At last he turned, saying:

“Mr. Valiant, your life at Oxford did a great deal to mitigate your literary sensibilities?” Lester hardly knew what to say, and murmured some meaningless syllables.

“I think that your abilities can be of very great service to us,” continued Mr. Arundel, “and as an evidence of that I am asking the cashier to raise your salary five dollars a week.”

Lester bowed gently; he was not capable of articulate speech.