CHAPTER XIX
Claude and his men, B Company, were holding the Boar’s Head trench. He knew that the German attack might be expected about dawn. The smoke and darkness had begun to take on the livid color that announced the coming of daybreak, when a corporal hurried to him, saluted and announced that the linemen had completed the connection and that Claude was called on the telephone.
He went to the dug-out, took down the receiver.
“Lieutenant Wheeler, in command B Company in H-2, speaking.”
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
“What? Miss _Willa_? For the land’s sake, what’re _you_ doing way out here?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“_Course_ you are, Miss Willa. I know that, but you hadn’t ought to come out in such a dangerous place, just to look out for _me_. _Really_, ma’am, I’m getting along all right. You don’t have to tell me every little thing.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“You want me to _what_?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“On the _parapet_ when the attack comes? You don’t mean _really_ do it, Miss Willa!”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Why, good Lord, Miss Willa, I wouldn’t do that for a farm. They’ll be shootin’ honest-to-God _lead bullets_!”
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
“I _got_ to do it? How’s that? I don’t see why.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Yes’m, I know that. I know you are. I read it in a piece in a magazine. Said you were one of America’s serious novelists. Yes’m, called you a serious artist of high purpose, the piece did.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“But, say, you know that’s _awful_ dangerous. I might easy get killed.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“You _expect_ me to? Look here, lady, I don’t know what you’re driving at.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, yes, o’ course, I know that. I know I got to do what you say after I signed up with you.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“No’m, I might not be. I know that. I might be in the draft at a trainin’ camp or somewhere back there or prob’ly I’d got exempted on account of bein’ the only one on the farm—if it wasn’t for you.”
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
“Well, if you was right out in this trench now I don’t think you’d think there was any special thanks due for your gettin’ me here.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“No, _ma’am! I don’t!_ I ain’t hungry for just that kind o’ glory. _You bet not._ I’ll be satisfied to go home alive.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, Lord, yes! I got plenty to do when I get home.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“How’s that? Spoiled? Oh, no, Miss Willa, my life ain’t spoiled _yet_, but I’ve got a hunch it would be if I got up on that parapet. Oh, no, I’ve got a lot o’ plans. Don’t you worry about that. Ain’t many young fellows gets their life spoiled at twenty-three.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“My wife? Sure, she’s left me, all right. An’, Miss Willa, I hope you won’t get mad if I say I think that was really your fault. I’m pretty sure Enid wouldn’t of gone to China ’f you hadn’t kind of mesmerized her and made her go. I think ’f you’d a let her alone, she’d be on the farm now.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Yes’m, she did. She went, all right, and I’m not sure she’s comin’ back, but if she don’t, why—I don’t know as I’d die of grief. You see, she was a kind of cold proposition. Her and I never—oh, well, there’s plenty more. Gladys, f’r instance. An’ that’s another thing I kind of got against you, Miss Willa. If you’d left the three of us alone, I think me and Gladys might of——”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, yes, course I know that—there wouldn’t of been much of a book ’f you hadn’t mixed in some. Still, ’f I get home I think I can straighten things out. After I get a good rest on the farm, I’m thinkin’ some of goin’ into the movies. Put a pair of goggles on me an’ you couldn’t tell me from Harold Lloyd.”
____ ____ ____
“No’m, I ain’t tryin’ to get off the point.”
____ ____ ____
“Go out on that parapet when the attack begins an’ get killed? No, ma’am, I most certainly an’ absolutely _will not_.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Yes’m, I know it. I told you I know you’re a serious novelist an’ I suppose you got to do those kind o’ things to make it tragic and important an’ all that, so’s not to have a happy endin’.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“No’m, I don’t think it is natural, if that’s what you want. There ain’t only about six killed in action out of a thousand Americans in this war, an’ I don’t see why you pick on me. How’d I get elected?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Yes, _ma’am_, I said three times already I know you’re serious. Good lan’! Miss Willa, I ought to know. Why, I ain’t had a real good laugh, hardly once since I begun working for you. But you don’t seem to understand I’m serious, too, an’ this whole business you’re proposin’ is more serious to me than it’s got any chance of bein’ to you. I’ve got a _lot_ of things to do in the next fifty years.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“No, lady, _I will not_.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Well, first place, that’s no place for an officer in command. Officers are supposed to take care of theirselves an’ not expose theirselves unnecessarily. They got to look out for their men, not try to be heroes or anything.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Well, I s’pose it will. But, see here, if I’ve got to choose between spoilin’ the book an’ gettin’ spoiled myself—forever, it’s only natural, ain’t it?—_Say, listen!_ D’you ever go to the _movies_?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, ex_cuse me_. I thought maybe you might of once or twice.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Oh, nothin’. Never mind. But, say, have I really got to get shot on the parapet? Won’t anything else do?”
____ ____ ____ ____
“A-a-ll _right_, then. I s’pose I _got_ to. I’ll manage it somehow. You leave it to me. Don’t you worry.”
____ ____ ____ ____
“Don’t mention it. That’s all right. Anything to oblige a serious lady novelist. Good-by, Miss Willa.”
Claude was very busy for the next fifteen minutes. Just as he again took his position on the firing-step, the Hun advance began.
There they were, coming on the run. His men were on their feet again. The rifles began firing. Then something extraordinary happened. There was their commanding officer on the parapet, outlined against the Eastern sky! Stiffly erect he stood, one arm upraised, facing the oncoming foe. They heard his voice, “Steady, men! Steady! It’s up to you!”
They were amazed, astounded, but they responded. A withering fire swept the Hun lines, men were stumbling and falling. Then the solitary figure on the parapet was discovered by the enemy. A bullet rattled on the tin hat, one struck it in the shoulder. It swayed, lost its balance, plunged, face down, outside the parapet. Hicks caught a projecting foot, pulled—and it came off in his hand.
At the same moment the Missourians ran yelling up the communication trench, threw their machine-guns up on the sand-bags and went into action.
Hicks stood petrified, staring at the foot in his hand, when Claude, clad in his Jaegers only, appeared, reached out and dragged the limp figure in by both legs.
“Here, Sergeant, help me with this to the dug-out, so I can get my clothes on before it gets too public.”
“My God, Lieutenant, I thought you was killed. What’s this for? To fool the Heinies?”
“No—that was for the home-folks that read serious novels.”
PARADISE BE DAMNED!
_By_
F. SCOTT FITZJAZZER
_This story was written between 10_ P. M. _and 3_ A. M. _of one night while I was playing bridge._ THE SWIFT SET _paid me enough for it to recoup what I lost at bridge and leave me the price of a diamond tiara and two theatre tickets. The movie rights brought me $60,000. It is probably the worst story I ever wrote—though, for that distinction, it has many rivals._
GRANDPA AND PAPA
Anthony Blaine’s grandfather had all the money in the known world and lived in Tarrytown—a remarkable coincidence. Entirely surrounded by cold cash, he had acquired an austere frigidity of manner and was commonly called “Old Chill Blaine.” This relationship made Anthony constantly conscious of social security, since an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular—whatever that means.
His father, an ineffectual æsthete of that prehistoric period known as the Nineties, had died before he was born, apparently thus reversing the customarily usual process of nature—a phenomenon explicable only on the hypothesis that language sometimes obscures the thought it is supposed to elucidate. The fact is that Anthony was a posthumorous child—a kind of practical joke on his surprised mother.
Anthony inherited from his father nothing but his last name, his taper fingers and a million dollars—a miserable heritage.
MOTHER DEAR
But his mother, Beatrice Blaine! She was a woman!—by curious chance. Born in Boston of the old Puritan family of O’Hara, she was educated in Rome—also in Watertown and Ogdensburg, having been fired from three schools successively. She went abroad and was polished in Poland and finished in Finland.
She learned to smoke Camels in the Desert of Sahara and, at the Hague, to drink the national beverage, double strength. All in all, she absorbed a sort of education and an amount of liquor that it will be impossible ever again to find in this country.
In an absent-minded moment, she married Stephen Blaine, because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad and more than a little bit pie-eyed. He tried to keep step with her, but in less than a year cheerfully died. So Anthony was born fatherless.
LITTLE CHILD, WHO MADE YOU?
His childhood and youth were spent in the midst of privations—private cars, private yachts and private tutors.
At the age of seven he bit bell-boys, at eight smoked cigarettes, at nine played poker, at ten read Rabelais, at eleven imbibed intoxicants, at twelve kissed chorus-girls, and at thirteen his mother died of delirium tremens. He was sent to school at St. Ritz’s.
TOM BROWN AT RUGBY
St. Ritz’s isn’t Eton but it is pretty strong on drinkin’. Anthony’s private stock was recruited from all parts of the world.
“What’s ’is pink stuff, Anthony?” asked a fellow dipsomaniac of the fourth form, in the intimacy of intoxication.
“’At’s ole genevieve from Geneva. ‘At green’s grenadine from Grenada, an’ ‘at yellow’s yataghan from Yap. Make a fairish cocktail, if you lace it with l’il ole wood-alcohol. Keeps a fella fit, ’is stuff does.”
He drank liquors of incomparable strength and iridescent beauty, in whose mysterious depths all the lost lures of Mont Marter and of 42nd and Broadway shivered and shimmied languorously in resplendent redundancy. Also he took a shot of hop now and then.
He read enormously. In his first term he accomplished Rousseau’s Confessions, “The Newgate Calendar,” Boswell’s Life of Johnston, “Frank in the Mountains,” Kant’s Critique, The Arabian Nights in fourteen volumes, “Ten Nights in a Bar-room,” “The Dutch Twins,” the Memoirs of Cazanova, Petronius, Suetonius, Vitruvius, Vesuvius, Plato, Cato, Keats, Yeats and all the Elsie books.
INCIDENT OF THE IMPUDENT HEADMASTER
Clad in an opalescent dressing-gown, the color of peacock’s eyes and emu’s fins, Anthony was lying on a luxurious lounge of mauve satin stuffed with eiderdown and aigrettes, reading Ghunga Dhin and drinking Ghordon Ghin. A timid knock on the door preceded the entrance of the headmaster. He stood in the doorway sheepishly, hat in hand, pulling an obsequious forelock.
“Blaine—er—er—Mister Blaine,” he said.
“Well, Margotson? What is it?”
“I called—er—to ask you, sir, if—er—er—you wouldn’t kindly attend a recitation—er—now and then—er—just as a matter of form, you know?”
“Go to hell!” said Anthony coldly, turning again to his liquor.
“Yes, sir. Very good, sir.”
The headmaster faded through the doorway and, doubtless, went as he had been directed.
“Damn his impudence!” muttered Anthony.
INCIDENTAL DIVERSIONS
He was leading man in all the school plays, editor of the _St. Ritz Bartenders’ Guide_, quarterback on the eleven, first base on the nine, second bass on the glee club, forward on the hockey team and backward in his studies. He carried off first honors in the hundred-yards, the mile, the hurdles, the hammer-throw, the standing long drink, the debating society and the bacchanalian orgies.
Thus Anthony at eighteen, six feet tall and narrow in proportion, green eyes that shone through a tangled mass of tawny eyelashes, scornful of the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat, entered Princeton.
SPIRES AND GURGLES
From the first he loved Princeton, the pleasantest country club in America. He loved the tall, towering tapestries of trees, infinitely transient, transiently infinite, yearning infinitely with infinite melancholy—the dreamy double chocolate jiggers pleasing the palate, drenching the innards with a joy akin to pleasure—the early moon, mistily mysterious, more mysterious than mystery itself—the deep insidious devotion of the dreaming peaks, in their lofty aspiration toward the empyrean—through it all the melancholy voices, singing “Old Nassau,” blent in a pæan of pain. While over all the two great dreaming towers towered toward the sky, like a gigantic pair of white flannel trousers, reversed.
THE SUB-DEB
_The time is in the evening of any day in any month in any year. The place is the front room of an apartment in 52nd Street, New York, the library of a house in 68th Street, the ball-room of the Ritz-Royce, a limousine outside the Country Club in Louisville, the Princeton campus, anywhere else you choose._
_Enter Rosalind—kissable mouth, other details unnecessary. Enter to her Anthony Blaine._
HE: Will you kiss me?
SHE: Sure!
(_They kiss—definitely and thoroughly—in a most workmanlike manner._)
HE: Did you ever kiss anyone before?
SHE: (_Dreamily_) Dozens, hundreds, thousands of boys.
HE: Kiss me again.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: How old are you?
HE: Nineteen-past.
SHE: I’m sixteen-just.
HE: Kiss me again.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: You’re some kisser yourself.
HE: Of course—Princeton, you know.
SHE: I knew it. Now, Yale men——
HE: Don’t mention the brutes!
SHE: But Harvard men——
HE: Sissies! Kiss me again.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: When I was in——
HE: You’re so loquacious.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: By the way, who are you?
HE: Anthony Blaine.
SHE: I’ve heard——
HE: Don’t talk.
(_They kiss._)
SHE: I’m——
HE: What difference does it make who you are? Let’s get married.
SHE: Can’t. I’m engaged.
HE: Whom to?
SHE: What?
HE: To who—who to?
SHE: Oh. Why, to Dawson Ryder and Skeets McCormick and Amory Patch and—to a boy named Wilson—don’t remember his first name and—to a Yale boy I met in the dark and don’t know any of his names or what he looks like and to—oh, lots of others.
HE: You love me, don’t you?
(_They kiss._)
SHE: I love you! I love you! I’m mad about you. I can’t do without you.
(_They kiss._)
HE: My God! You’re spoiling both our lives.
SHE: My God! Am I?
HE: Here! we’re losing time.
(_They kiss—kiss—kiss._)
SHE: You’ve broken my heart.
HE: My God!
SHE: My God!
HE: Time’s up. I have a date with Cecelia Connage.
SHE: She’s my sister. She’s not very good at it.
HE: Good-by! You’ve broken my heart and mussed me all up.
(_They kiss. He stumbles toward the exit—a broken man—then—throws back his head with that proud Princeton gesture—and goes out._)
SHE: Oh, God! I want to die!
(_She looks about her—misty-eyed—with a deep aching sadness—that will pass—that will pass in time—say, three minutes.—She looks for her vanity-bag—powders her nose—renews the carmine on those tired lips——_)
SHE: Well? Are they going to keep me waiting all night? Next boy, please!
MORE GURGLES
The last light fades and drifts across the land, The low, long land, the land of towers and spires, That wanders lonely lest the lurid lyres Press thy pale petals with a passionate hand— Enchanted essences and pagan pyres— Oh, dream that sleeps and sleep that knows no dreaming! So wert thou wrought in fragrant fadeless fires. So wert thou wrapt in garments goldly gleaming And dying knew not what should end this seeming.
The ghosts of evenings haunt these afternoons. The mid-day twilight shifts with my desire. Nor yet before my eyes do they conspire There to distil the fragrance of the moons That burn and are consumed with splendid fire, And hurl them to abide in their abode Where young Fitjazzer tuned his youthful lyre And sang to Princeton his melodious ode Which, what it means, there’s no one never knowed.
COLLARS AND TIES
Anthony Blaine paused in the process of adjusting the universe to himself and looked about him—an apartment in a house of murky material, windows that loomed gloomily down upon Fifty-second Street, voluminous chairs, a fireplace of murky black, a flamboyant exotic rug of crimson velvet, an orange-colored lamp—everything suggested the solidarity of wealth, an entré into the best society.
He yawned and sauntered to his bathroom, an enormous room, where he spent most of his time. He usually took five baths a day; on Sundays, seven.
Emerging from his bath, he polished himself with fine sandpaper, finishing with chamois-skin, until his smooth skin shone like satin. From the closets bursting with clothes—underwear for an army, silk shirts for a city, collars and ties for a multitude—he selected his attire.
He taxied to Brooks’s, to buy him some ties and collars, then to the grill-room of the Jazza.
LIFE IN LARGE CITIES
_The grill-room of the Jazza. Anthony seated. Enter Richard Caramel. In person short, in pocket shorter. His figure is round—he is always round where Anthony is buying drinks._
ANTHONY: Hello, Caramel, old sweet!
DICK: Thanks, I will.
ANTHONY: Waiter! Two double Dacharis in tea cups and four more to follow.
DICK: Sounds to me!
ANTHONY: Pour it down, beardless boy! How many can you hold?
DICK: Don’t know—never had enough.
ANTHONY: Waiter! two dozen quadruple Dacharis in bath-tubs. Who’s the luscious débutante across the room?
DICK: My cousin, Gloria Goodle, the Speed Girl from Kansas City.
ANTHONY: No!
DICK: Yes! These short lines are lifesavers, aren’t they?
ANTHONY: Indeed. Also this dialogue stuff—so snappy. What were we talking about?
DICK: Gloria Goodle.
ANTHONY: Oh, yes——
DICK: The Speed Girl from Kansas City.
ANTHONY: Aren’t we nearly at the bottom of the page?
DICK: Yes, turn over.
ANTHONY: Your cousin?
DICK: Want to meet her?
ANTHONY: Gloria who?
DICK: Goodle.
ANTHONY: Funny name.
DICK: Funny girl.
ANTHONY: What’s her line?
DICK: Legs.
ANTHONY: Whose?
DICK: Her own.
ANTHONY: My God! lead me to her!
DICK: Come on.
ANTHONY: Wait a minute. I’ve got something on my mind.
DICK: Get it off before you meet Gloria.
ANTHONY: Suppose I were an Athenian—too proud to be enigmatic, too supple to eventuate, too incongruous to ratify, too courageous to adorn—
DICK: Cut it! Suppose you were an author too young to be wise, too self-sufficient to learn, too impatient to wait, too successful to stop—that’s the kind of bunk you’d write.
GLORIOUS GLORIA
She was dazzling—alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance—hair full of heavenly glamour—mouth full of gum drops.
“Where are you from?” inquired Anthony.
“K. C., Mo. Got any gum drops?”
“Gum drops! My God!”
The clock on the mantel struck five with a querulous fashionable beauty. Then, as if a brutish sensibility in him was reminded by those thin, tinny beats that the petals were falling from the flowered afternoon, Anthony pulled her to him and held her helpless without breath, with scarcely room to masticate the gum drops, in a kiss like a chloroformed sponge.
The clock struck six.
PASSION VS. GUM DROPS
ANTHONY: Will you marry me, Gloria?
GLORIA: Are you rich?
ANTHONY: Haven’t a cent.
GLORIA: Thought you were a millionaire.
ANTHONY: Absolutely stony. Spent it all on neckties and collars.
GLORIA: I must have gum drops.
ANTHONY: Impossible.
GLORIA: My God! how I love you!—but I must have gum drops.
ANTHONY: My God! You’ve broken my heart!
GLORIA: My God! have I? Try a gum drop.
ANTHONY: My God! woman, you’re heartless.
GLORIA: I’m Gloria Goodle—the Speed Girl, Coast to Coast Gloria.
ANTHONY: Coast to coast!—ashes to ashes! dust to dust! My love is dead.
(_Then a thick impenetrable darkness descended on his mind—though you’d hardly notice the difference._)
THE DAWNING OF A BRIGHTER DAY
At seven-thirty of the same evening, Anthony was sitting on the floor of the front room of his apartment, with three books before him—a child again playing with his stamp-albums—when Gloria and Dick came in.
“Anthony!” she cried, “your grandfather has died and left you a hundred million bucks.”
“Go ’way,” he answered with petulant gentleness, “I’ve got a five-pistache stamp of Jugo-Rumania and there isn’t any place for it in the damned old book.”
“Jugo-Rumania!” gasped Dick. “Ain’t that the truth? The poor gink’s got ’em. He always was a wet one.”
“Never mind,” said glorious Gloria gently. “I’ll marry him and take him to Arabia where the gum comes from and you can get a decent drink. His trouble ain’t so much the humidity as the hooch.”
THE TRIALS OF TRIONA
_In_
LOCKE STEP
I
“Why is it, mother?” asked Olivia, “that we have never associated with the county families? Why has the Squire never invited us to dinner? Why is informal tea at the vicarage the summit of our social attainment? Tell me, mother, tell me!”
Had Mrs. Gale lived the normal life of women—not only speaking, but being spoken to—she might have gone to her grave with her secret unrevealed. But infinite sorrow had weakened her and, in this, the last poignant intimacy of her deathbed, she disclosed it to her daughter.
“My dear,” she said, “I am a Bagshawe—with the final e—of that proud old Anglo-Indian family. My father was Bagshawe of the Indian Guides—not to be confounded with Bradshaw of the Railway Guides. _Your_ father, my dear, was an excellent man in his way, whom I loved as fondly as was consistent with the difference in our positions. But they _were_ different, dearest Olivia. As Mrs. Bagshawe—with the final e—I associated with Generals, Colonels and Sirs—and with their wives, of course. As Mrs. Gale, only with trades-people, linen-drapers and haberdashers, tallow-chandlers and ironmongers, with an occasional fishmonger or drysalter, by way of variety.”
“But, why, mother? Why?” cried Olivia. “What did my father do to condemn us to such ignominy?”
“Your father, my dear,” faltered the dying woman, “_your_ father dealt in—_pigs_.”
That was the skeleton in the cupboard. Stephen Gale had been a fine chap, but as someone—whose modest anonymity shall be respected—has so finely phrased it, pigs is pigs.”
II
After her mother’s death, Olivia rented the dear old place, the home of her ancestors for nearly twenty-five years, filled with the priceless possessions purchased from the proceeds of the preposterously profitable porcine proclivities of her papa, but haunted by the family ghosts of Berkshire and Chester White. She fled to London to escape her heritage of shame.
There she met Alexis Triona, the famous author of _Rushing Through Russia_. With his clean-shaven face, broad forehead, gray eyes, humorous mouth, he looked the hero that he wasn’t. He had faked his book from a stolen diary which he always carried about with him so that, at the proper moment, he might be found out.
He was a chauffeur, the son of a laborer, therefore his diction was faultless. “Diction” is the word. He employed it in ordinary conversation unsparingly—diction and contradiction—for he was a wonderful liar. Lacking all the advantages of birth and education, he had, nevertheless, achieved a mendacity of majestic grandeur and ravishing art.
III
It was not until after their marriage that Olivia discovered Triona’s essential greatness—and his essential and fatal defect.
He had taken two drinks of whisky and lay in a drunken slumber. Olivia found on the floor beside him the original notes of the stolen story, preserved for this dénouement. For the first time, she knew him for what he was—no mere recorder of his own experiences and observations, no mere note-book-and-camera author, but an imaginative artist of the first rank.
She was almost stunned by the greatness of her discovery, the realization that he, her husband, was worthy to be placed on a pedestal beside the greatest writers of fictitious travels—Homer, Dante, Milton, Munchausen, Dr. Cook.
Then she made the second, the fatal discovery—that his real name was—_John Briggs_.
IV
The ugly monosyllables struck her like a blow between the eyes. Alexis Triona!—John Briggs! _Briggs!_ How had she labored, erecting her scaling ladders against the wall of exclusion, to enter the fortified city of the upper-classes, the county families! With what daring had she climbed the heights, bearing the banner with a strange device, “Triona”! And now—flat on her back outside the pale, she lay—her _cartes de visite_ scattered confusedly on the ground, each inscribed “Mrs. John Briggs.”
The sound of the word, its assonance, its consonance, its dissonance, rang in her ears. What had she fled from? The supreme horror crashed in upon her consciousness. _Briggs!—pigs!_ Now forever inescapable, her tragic heritage! No one would ever forget it—no one would ever try to forget it.
“Mrs. John Briggs’s father sold pigs!” She could hear the war cry of the aristocracy.
“Briggs—Briggs—pigs, pigs, pigs,” the drumbeat of her conquering enemies.
“Oh, pigs is pigs and Briggs is Briggs, And never the twain we’ll meet”——
the chant of embattled dowagers.
“One little pig went to market—so two little Briggs stay home!” the warning, the command of the elect, the desired.
It was impossible. It was unthinkable. It was unendurable. All night she sat and kept a ghastly vigil, to confront him in his first awakening with proofs of his Briggishness.
V
Alexis took a ticket for Poland, fleeing the fury of a woman Briggsed. But at Victoria station, his talent for invention revived. He would pretend to be a traffic policeman. Up went his arms, semaphoring the traffic. A cold, incredulous motor lorry refused to believe him. He awoke in a hospital.
VI
Olivia returned to her old home. Blaise Olifant, her tenant there, welcomed her, properly chaperoned by his sister, gave her a home. He was a one-armed man with a long, long nose. He had loved Olivia long. He longed for Olivia’s love. But he was a model of honorable circumspection, and for some time nothing happened to disturb the platonic calm of their relations.
Then the passion of Blaise Olifant suddenly flamed forth. (One is careful in the choice of a verb to describe the conflagration.) He flung his arms about her and kissed her passionately. She half-surrendered. She tried to respond to his kiss—but couldn’t. _His long, long nose intervened._
How he managed to kiss her, she never knew. But there it was. His long, long nose. Impossible to love a man like that. Taper fingers, yes! Tapir nose, no. Olifant!—Elephant!—could he be? But, whether he was or not, she could not kiss him, try as she might. The obstacle was insurmountable, inevitable. So she gave it up and decided to be true to Alexis.
VII
Myra Stebbings, Olivia’s maid, was, as her name implies, long, lean, angular and withered—had been so from the beginning of time.
She had been married but before the honeymoon was over she found her husband wasn’t in his right mind. His mother exonerated Myra, saying:
“’Tain’t your fault. I knowed he was crazy when he said he were goin’ to marry you.”
One day a woman called at the hospital to see John Briggs. They brought him the name:
“Miss Myra Stebbings.”
“Oh, my God!” said he, and fainted.
Myra _had_ that effect upon sensitive natures.
VIII
When he had recovered from the effects of the motor lorry’s skepticism, and Myra’s visit, he got a job as chauffeur. Therefore he met his wife, walking along the road. So he ran right off a precipice. It was the only thing to do to keep up the interest.
But he could not escape her. She came down the precipice after him.
“What are you doing in that absurd livery?”
“Chauffeuring.”
He told her the simple truth. The shock was too great. She left him.
“Go to blazes!” he called after her.
“Blaise’s? It’s not,” she answered. “It’s my own home. I only rented it to him.”
IX
But she thought it all over later. She was Mrs. Alexis Triona, spoken to, invited to many of the homes of the gentry. Here was John Briggs, her husband, a chauffeur, likely to be arrested at any time for trespassing on private precipices. Then the truth might come out! What would the county families say to that? Something must be done.
She went out into the sweet-scented June night, to the highly perfumed garage, where he slept.
X
“Alexis!” she cried.
“Name of John Briggs,” he answered candidly.
“Never again!” she said. “Alexis Triona, when you try on a new name and it suits, wear it.”
She was so bright that her brilliance would have dimmed the Celestial Hierarchy or Broadway at midnight.
She clutched him tight. “Oh, my God, if you had _only_ been killed!”
“Omit the ‘only’ and it goes,” said he.
So they talked through the sweet-scented June night into the equally deliciously odoriferous June dawn. And, of course, she, inadvertently, let slip—the pigs. _Magna est lingua feminae et praevalebit._ What to do, then? “Briggs” could be buried but the paternal pigs pursued her. Alexis rose to the occasion.
“Come, let’s go,” said he, “let us leave this snob-ridden island, populated by porcophobes. Let us go where pigs mean Ancestry, Honors, Family Portraits, High Society and Money in the Bank.”
“Where, oh, where is that delectable place?” she cried.
“Chicago,” he said simply.
CAPTAIN BLOODLESS
_An Episode_
FAR FROM SABATINI