Part 2

“I want to ask you a rather delicate question,” pursued the president, who seemed as much embarrassed as his visitor. “Do you ever write poetry?”

Lester's voice was amazingly hoarse and choky, but in a spasm of puzzlement and gratification he ejaculated: “Sometimes!”

“What I really mean,” said Mr. Arundel, “is this: do you ever write verses of a sentimental nature--hum--what might be called endearments?”

The young man sat speechless in surprise and embarrassment. As a matter of fact, he had been trolling some amatory staves in secret, in honour of Miss Denver; and he imagined they had come in some way under his employer's eye.

“Please do not be alarmed,” said Mr. Arundel, seeing his discomfiture. “This is purely a matter of business. As it happens, I have a need for some poems of an intimately sentimental character, and, being totally unfitted to produce them myself, I wondered if you would sell me some? I would be glad to pay market rates for them.”

Still Lester could do no more than bow.

“I shall have to be frank,” said Mr. Arundel, “and I must beg you to keep this matter absolutely confidential. I have your word of honour in that regard?”

“Absolutely,” said Lester, quite vanquished by amazement.

The president's sense of humour seemed to have mastered his diffidence. A quaint smile lurked behind the furrows that years of royalties had carved on his face.

“I want to do some wooing in rhyme; and I want you to turn out some verses for me of a superlatively lyric sort, it being understood that I purchase all rights in these poems, including that of authorship. Would you be willing to do me half a dozen, at say ten dollars each?”

Lester, although staggered by the proposal, was still able to multiply six by ten, and his answer was affirmative and speedy.

“I do not wish to give you any specifications as to the object of your vicarious amour,” said the president. “It is a lady, of course; young and fair. How soon can you despoil the English language of half a dozen songs of passion worthy of the best Oxford traditions?”

Jack and Harry found Lester good company that evening. When they got back to the sitting room on Madison Avenue he was lying on a couch, nursing a large calabash and contemplating the ceiling with dreamy brow. As they entered, stripping off their overcoats and chucking the night extras across the room at him, he smiled the rich, tolerant smile of Alexander at the Macedon polo grounds.

“Well, Lester,” said Jack, “why the Cheshire-cat grin?”

“I've sold sixty dollars' worth of verse,” said Lester, benignly; “also I've had a raise.”

“My God!” said Harry. “Think how many starving cubists you could endow on that! There'll be a riot in Greenwich Village.”

“Pity the poor bartenders on a night like this!” cried Jack. Then they went to Browne's chop-house for dinner. After a three-finger steak and several beakers of dog's nose, Lester was readily persuaded to enounce the first number of his sonnet sequence, which had accreted or (as its author expressed it) nucleolated, while he was walking home from the office.

“Sonnet, in the Petrarchan mode, item No. 1,” he proclaimed:

Upon a trellis, bending toward the south,

I set my heart, a yearning rose, to climb;

It pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme,

It spires and speeds aloft, in spite of drouth.

And seeking for that sweeter rose, your mouth,

That beckons from some balcony sublime,

It heeds no whit the tick-tack-tock of Time

And with its sweetness all the night endow'th.

O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!

O velvet petals unsmutched of the mire!

For this my life was manifestly born,

To climb toward thy lips, and never tire!

Now ope thy shutter in the flood of mom--

Lean out, and smile, and pluck thy heart's desire.

“Seems strange,” said Harry, “that a man can buy a good meal with a thing like that!”

“What is a petrarch, anyway?” said Jack. “Gee, you'll have to brush your hair to keep it out of your eyebrows,” said Harry. “Herod was petrarch of Galilee, don't you remember? It's a kind of comptroller or efficiency expert.”

“Nonsense,” said Harry. “Herod was patriarch of Galilee, not petrarch.”

At this moment Lester was busy multiplying twenty by fifty-two, and adding sixty, and he did not attempt to put Laura's friend right in the eyes of his companions.

*****

The next morning, at the office, Lester took occasion to stroll over to the corner where Miss Denver was tickling the keys. Her delicious, able fingers flashed like the boreal aurora; the incomparable smoothness of her neck and throat fascinated him; her clear, blue-washed gray eyes startled him with their merry archness. Wambling inwardly, he met her gaze as coolly as he might.

“Come to Moretti's to-night?” he asked.

“I'm sorry; I've got a date to-night.”

He ached in spirit. “To-morrow night?”

She hesitated a moment, tapping the desk with a rosy finger nail. Then her face brightened. “I'd love to.”

As he returned to his desk and the dull routine of writing press notes for Petunia Veal's latest novel, he uttered a phrase that he had caught from Harry Hanover. It was the first sign of his emancipation from Mallarmé and the Oxford Movement, for certainly that phrase had never been heard on the quilted lawns of Balliol: “She's a prize package, all right, all right!”

Ten days elapsed. All six sonnets had been delivered and paid for, and Mr. Arundel had bargained for a few extra rondeaux, at five dollars each.

Antipasto, minestrone, breadsticks, force-meat balls, and here we are again at the spaghetti and Hackensack Chianti. Lester had mailed his MS. on “Clara Tice and the Pleinaerists of Greenwich Village” to the _Oblique Review_ that afternoon, and had calculated that the editors could not in any decency offer him less than fifty--or perhaps forty--dollars for it. This, added to 20 by 52 plus 60 plus the rondeaux and other probable increments, would certainly support two in a garret for some time. He also had hopes of selling some obscenarios for the movies. Pearl would probably want to go on with her work, for a while at any rate. She was so independent! But those clear eyes of hers, like a March sky with teasings of April in it, how tender and laughing they were! A few nights ago they had taken a long bus ride together, and she had forgotten her muff. She let him warm her hands instead. He went home that night feeling strong enough to bite lamp-posts in two, and had waked up Jack and Harry to put them right about Petrarch.

Pearl was teaching Lester to twirl up his spaghetti with fork and spoon, instead of draping it out of his mouth like Spanish moss. Suddenly she laughed.

“What did I tell you!” she said. “The dear old _Oblique_ has gone blooie! Mr. Arundel called up the editor to-day and told him the Barmecide Company won't supply him with any more paper until he pays his bills. Of course that means he'll have to quit.”

Lester was touched in two vital spots: his own private hopes, and his zeal for fly-specked literature. “Shades of Frank Harris!” he cried. “If that isn't just like Arundel! Why, that man is pure and simple _bourgeois!_ I never heard of such a thing. Has he no feeling at all for art?” Pearl laughed--the pure, musical laugh of careless girlishness, but the recording angel caught in the nimble chords a faint overtone of something else--like the tinkle of ice in a misty tumbler. “Oh, he has his own ideas about art,” she said. “He's taken to writing poetry himself. You never heard such stuff--I've been meaning to tell you. What does 'pullulate' mean?”

Lester's valiant heart, Lester's manly hands that had acted as a muff on a Riverside Drive bus, trembled and stiffened. “_It 'pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme_,” she quoted gayly. “Now what do you make of that, as referring to Mr. Arundel's heart? Sultry is right, too!” Lion-hearted Harvard, oak-bosomed Balliol, and all the mature essences of manhood were needed to keep Lester calm. How had she seen these secret strains? She must have been peeping into the chief's private correspondence. He hesitated during six inches of spaghetti. “Search me!” he said. “Is it in Walter Mason?”

“No, it's his own stuff, I tell you. _O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!_” she chanted, and her laughter popped like a champagne cork. The horrid truth burst upon him. The boss was courting the angel of the office with the very ammunition that Lester himself had furnished, and his vow of secrecy forbade him to disclose the truth. Oh, the paltry meanness of fate, the villainy of circumstance! It is impossible to describe the pangs it cost him to dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal the anguish he felt. But dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal he did, and though his heart glowed like an angry cigar stub, he reached home at last.

There he sat down at his table, and amid the healthy snores of his roommates he concocted a fine piece of literary ordnance. Late and grimly he toiled and contrived. At length he had fashioned a sonnet which would be the golden sum and substance of the previous sequence; a cry of the heart so splendidly forensic that Mr. Arundel would pounce upon it, yielding his crisp steel engraving in return. But see, the asp concealed in the basket of fruit, the adder in the woodpile! Read Lester's sonnet as an acrostic:

Over that trellis where the moon distills

My heart is climbing like a rambler rose:

You lean and listen to the whippoorwills,

Heedless of how the fragrant blossom grows!

O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!

When wilt thou realize my love in sooth?

I touch the windowsill with heart forlorn,

Hoping the guerdon of thy bounteous youth.

After the grief and teen of bitter days,

Troubled by woes that cicatrize and burn,

Ever at eventide I seek thy praise,

Yearning thy maiden bliss--I yearn, I yearn!

Over the rotten fruit of buried years

Unbar the bolt--have pity on my tears!

The discerning reader will spot the glittering falchion of malice lurking in the initial letters. Read them downward, they convey: _o my how I hate you!_ Lester had but to convey this poisoned comfit to his chief: then, playing upon the artless Pearl, persuade her to show it to him--point out the murderous duplicity of the love token; and she would recoil into his arms. Greenwich Village would sound the timbrel of joy, and even the _Oblique_ might find a softer-hearted papyrus vendor. _Vos plaudite!_ With such thoughts, amid the wailing matin song of boarding-house steam pipes, our hero fell into a brief slumber.

That morning Lester hastened to the office. He waited feverishly until the hour when the chief usually arrived, then visited the private office. There he found the vice-president going over the morning mail. “Is--is Mr. Arundel in?” he stammered.

“Mr. Arundel isn't here to-day,” said the vicepresident. “He will be away two weeks.”

Lester retired queasily, and hurried to the corner sacred to Miss Denver. Here he found one of the other stenographers using Pearl's machine.

“Where's Miss Denver?” he asked.

The young lady, of humorous turn, looked at her wrist watch. “Getting ready to go over the top,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Haven't you heard? She marries the boss this morning.”

ADVICE TO TO LOVELORN

I

MISS ANN AUSTIN came briskly into her little cupboard of a room at the back of the _Evening Planet_ office. She hung up her hat and coat, opened her rolltop desk, put her small handbag carefully in a drawer, and looked at herself in a greenish mirror that hung secretly on a hook in the recess under the pigeonholes. She took the rubber hood off her typewriter, poured three paper cupfuls of drinking water on the potted geranium on the windowledge, wound up the cheap clock on top of the desk, and moved it forward ten minutes to compensate for what it had lost during the night. Now she was ready for work. As she wound up the clock, the usual thought occurred to her--when would she be able to buy herself the handsome little wrist watch she coveted? There were a lot of them in the jeweller's shop on Park Row, and she admired them every morning on her way to the office. But when one is supporting one's self and an invalid mother in an uptown apartment, and has to pay for a woman to come in during the day to lend a hand, all on fifty dollars a week, in an era of post-bellum prices, wrist watches have to wait. However, as Ann made the daily correction in her laggard clock she used to say to herself: “There's a better time coming.” She was not devoid of humour, you see.

Then the office boy would bring in the big pile of morning mail, grinning as he laid it on the pullout slide of her desk. He may be excused for grinning, because Ann was the kind of creature who would bring a smile to the surliest face. She was just a nice size, with a face that was both charming and sensible, and merry brown eyes (when it wasn't too close to the first of the month). Also, that pile of mail _was_ rather amusing. Those letters, so many of them written on cheap pink or blue stationery and addressed in unsophisticated handwriting, were not directed to Miss Ann Austin, but to “Cynthia,” and the office boy knew pretty well the kind of messages that were in them. For Ann, under the pseudonym of “Cynthia,” conducted the _Planet's_ department of Advice to the Lovelorn, and daily several score of puzzled or distracted beings bared their hearts to her. The pile of letters was growing bigger, too. The _Planet_, which was not a very flourishing paper just at that time, had started the Advice to the Lovelorn department a few months before, and had put Ann in charge of it because she had done so well writing sob stories. It was beginning to “pull” quite surprisingly as a circulation feature, especially since her smiling little picture, vignetted in a cut with a border of tiny hearts, had been put at the head of the column. Under the cut was the legend: “Cynthia, a Sympathetic Adviser in Matters of the Heart.” Ann didn't know whether to be pleased or not at the growing popularity of her feature. This was not quite the kind of thing she had hoped for when she entered the newspaper world. But--the more letters there were from the lovelorn, the sooner she might get that needed raise.

With a little sigh she got out her penknife, began slitting the envelopes, ceased to be Ann Austin and became Cynthia, the sage and gentle arbiter over her troubled parliament of love.

It was a task that required no small discretion and tact, because Cynthia, whatever her private misgivings, tried to perform it with some honest idealism. In the first place, the letters that were obviously merely humorous, or were amorous attempts to inveigle her into private correspondence, were discarded. Then the letters to be used in the next day's column had to be selected, and laid aside to be printed with her comment on the ethical or sociological problems involved. The remaining letters had all to be answered, and data noted down that would be useful in compiling the pamphlet “1001 Problems of Courtship” that the managing editor insisted on her preparing. He said it would be great circulation dope. Ann didn't care much for the managing editor, Mr. Sikes. He had a way of coming into her room, closing the door behind him, leaning over her desk, and saying: “Well, how's little Miss Cupid?” If it hadn't been for that habit of his, Ann would have spoken to him about a raise before now. But she had an uneasy feeling that it would not be pleasing to put herself in the position of asking him favours. She would have been still more disturbed if she had known that some of the boys in the city room used to talk about “Cupid and Sikey” when they saw him visit her room. They said it angrily, because Ann was a general office favourite. Even the coloured elevator man had brought his wooing problems to her one day, wanting to be reassured as to his technique.

It is all very well for you to scoff, superior reader, but letters such as Ann had to read every morning bring an honest pang to an understanding heart; particularly when that heart is in collaboration with twenty-two years of bright, brown-eyed, high-spirited girlhood. Perhaps you don't realize how many of us are young and ignorant and at work in offices, and absorbed, out of working hours, in the universal passion. A good many make shift to be cynical and worldly-wise in public, but who knows how ravishingly sentimental we are in private? Some say that Doctor Freud didn't tell the half of it. As that waggish poet Keith Preston has remarked,

Love, lay thy phobias to rest,

Inhibit thy taboo!

We twain shall share, forever blest,

A complex built for two!

A complex built for two was the ambition of most of Ann's correspondents; but mainly her letters exhibited the seamy side of Love's purple mantle. You see, when lovers are perfectly happy, they don't write to the papers about it. And when she pondered gravely over “Brokenhearted's” letter saying that she has just learned that a perfectly splendid fellow she is so infatuated with has a wife and three children in Detroit; or over “Puzzled's” inquiry as to whether she is “a bum sport” because she wouldn't let the dark young man kiss her good-night, she sometimes said to herself that Napoleon was right. Napoleon, you remember, remarked that Love causes more unhappiness than anything else in the world. And then she would turn to her typewriter, and put under “Puzzled's” inquiry:

_No, “Puzzled,” do not let him kiss you unless you are betrothed. If any one is a “bum sport” it is he for wanting to do so. If he “always kisses the girls good-night when he has had a good time,” he is not your sort. A man that does not respect a girl before marriage will certainly not respect her afterward._

After she had typed these replies she always hastily took the paper out of her typewriter and tucked it away in her desk. She did not like the idea of Mr. Sikes coming in and reading it over her shoulder, as he had done once. That was the time she had used the quotation “Pains of Love are sweeter far than all other pleasures are” in answering “Desolate.” The managing editor had repeated the verse in a way that both angered and alarmed her.

This particular morning, among the other letters was one that interested her both by the straightforward simplicity of its statement and by the clear, vigorous handwriting on sensible plain notepaper. It ran thus:

_Dear Cynthia:_

_I am a young business man, very much in love, and I need your help. I have fallen in love with a girl who does not know me. I do not even know her name but I know her by sight, and I know where she works. She looks like the only one for me, but I don't want to do anything disrespectful. Would it be a mistake for me to call at her office and try to get a chance to meet her? Do you think she would be offended? She looks very adorable. Please tell me honestly what you think._

_Respectfully yours,_

_Sincerity._

Wearied by the maunderings of many idiotic flappers and baby vamps, this appeal attracted her. She put it into the column for the following day, writing underneath it:

_You never can tell, “Sincerity”! It all depends upon you. If you are the right kind of man, she ought not to be offended. Why not take a chance? Faint heart never won fair lady._

It was trying enough, Ann used to think, to have to pore over the troubles of her lovelorn clients on paper; but the worst times were when they came to call on her at the office. Fortunately this did not happen very often, for the stricken maidens and young Lochinvars who make up the chief support of such columns as hers are safely and busily shut up among typewriters and filing cases during the daytime; their wounds do not begin to burn intolerably until about five-thirty p.m. But now and then some forlorn and baffled creature would find his or her way to “Cynthia” and ask her advice. She would listen sympathetically, apply such homely febrifuge as her inexperienced but wise heart suggested to her, and after the patient had gone she would add the case to her list of 1001 Problems. The material for the pamphlet was growing rapidly.

One morning, while the managing editor was in her room asking her how soon the booklet would be ready, the office boy brought in a card neatly engraved _Mr. Arthur Caldwell_. Now as a rule Cynthia did not see masculine visitors, because (after one or two trying experiences) she had found that they were inclined to transfer to her the heart that someone else had bruised. But in this case she welcomed the caller because Mr. Sikes was being annoyingly facetious. He had looked over her laboriously gathered data for the 1001 Problems, and had said: “Well, you're getting to be quite an experienced little girl in these matters, hey?” He had seemed disposed to linger on the topic with pleasure. Therefore Cynthia told the office boy to send Mr. Caldwell in, though the name meant nothing to her. Mr. Sikes went out, and the caller was introduced.

Mr. Caldwell proved to be a young man, quite as nice-looking as the collar-advertising young men without being so desperately handsome. Cynthia liked him from the first glance. There was something that seemed very genuine about his soft collar and his candid, clean-shaven face and the little brown brief-case he carried. He had on brown woollen socks, too, she noticed, in one of those quick feminine observations. He seemed very embarrassed, and his face suddenly went ruby red.

“Is this Cynthia?” he said.

“Yes,” said Ann, pushing aside a mass of lovelorn correspondence, and wondering what the trouble could be.

“My name's Caldwell,” he said. “Look here, I suppose you'll think me an awful idiot, but I wanted to ask your advice. I--I wrote you a letter the other day, and your answer in the column made me think that perhaps you wouldn't mind giving me some help. I wrote that letter signed 'Sincerity'.”

He was obviously ill at ease, and Ann tried to help him out.

“I remember the letter perfectly,” she said. “Did you take my advice?”

“Well, I'm a bit uncertain about it,” he said.

“I just wanted to explain to you a little more fully, and see what you think. You see I happened to see this girl one day, going into her office. I suppose the idea about love at first sight is all exploded, but I had a hunch as soon as I saw her that----Oh, well, that I would like to know her. I've seen her going in and out of the building, but she has never seen me, never even heard of me. I don't know any one who can introduce me to her, and I can't just walk up to her and tell her I'm crazy about her. They don't do that except in Shakespeare. I don't know much about girls and I thought maybe you could suggest some way in which I could meet her without frightening her.”

Ann pondered. She liked the young man's way of putting his problem, and it was plain from his genuine embarrassment that he was sincere.

“I'd love to help you, if I could,” she said. “It seems to me that the only way to go about it is to arrange some business with the firm she works for, and try to meet her that way. Couldn't that be done?”

“She's secretary to one of the big bugs in the Telephone Company,” he said. “I'm in the publishing business. I don't see any way in which I could fake up a business connection there. The worst of it is, there may be a dozen fellows in love with her already, for all I know. I suppose I might get a job with the Telephone Company, but by the time I had worked up far enough to have an excuse for going into the vice-president's office where she works, someone else might have married her.” He laughed, a boyish, ingratiating chuckle.