I'd Die For You Page 3

  For ninety days we prepared for publication. The first page of the book was set up in three alternative kinds of type and two drawings each were ordered from five sky-priced artists before the jacket par excellence was selected. The final proof was read by no less than seven expert proof-readers lest the slightest tremble in the tail of a comma or the faintest cast in a capital eye should offend the fastidious eyes of the Great American Public.

  Four weeks before the day set for publication huge crates went out to a thousand points of the literate compass. To Chicago alone went twenty-seven thousand. To Galveston, Texas, went seven thousand. One hundred copies apiece were hurled with sighs into Bisbee, Arizona, Redwing, Minnesota and Atlanta, Georgia. The larger cities having been accounted for stray lots of twenty and thirty and forty were dropped here and there across the continent as a sand-artist fills in his nearly completed picture by fine driftings from his hand.

  The actual number of books in the first printing was three hundred thousand.

  Meanwhile the advertising department were busy from nine to five six days of the week, italicizing, underlining, capitalizing, double-capitalizing; preparing slogans, headlines, personal articles and interviews; selecting photographs showing Dr. Harden thinking, musing and contemplating; choosing snapshots of him with a tennis racket, with a golf stick, with a sister-in-law, with an ocean. Literary notes were prepared by the gross. Gift copies were piled in stacks, addressed to the critics of a thousand newspapers and weeklies.

  The date set was April 15th. On the fourteenth a breathless hush pervaded the offices and below in the retail department the clerks were glancing nervously at the vacant spaces where the stacks were to rest and at the empty front windows where three expert window dressers were to work all evening arranging the book in squares and mounds and heaps and circles and hearts and stars and parallelograms.

  On the morning of April 15th at five minutes to nine Miss Jordan, the head stenographer, fainted from excitement into the arms of my junior partner. On the stroke of nine an old gentleman with Dundreary whiskers purchased the first copy of The Aristocracy of the Spirit World. The great book was out.

  It was three weeks after this that I decided to run out to Joliet, Ohio, to see Dr. Harden. This was a case of Mohammed (or was it Moses?) and the mountain. He was of a shy and retiring disposition; it was necessary to encourage him, to congratulate him, to forestall the possible advances of rival publishers. I intended to make the necessary arrangements for securing his next book and with this in mind I took along several neatly worded contracts that would take all disagreeable business problems off his shoulders for the next five years.

  We left New York at four o’clock. It is my custom when on a trip to put half a dozen copies of my principal book in my bag and lend them casually to the most intelligent looking of my fellow passengers in the hope that the book may thereby be brought to the attention of some new group of readers. Before we came to Trenton a lady with a lorgnette in one of the staterooms was suspiciously turning the pages of hers, the young man who had the upper of my section was deeply engrossed in his and a girl with reddish hair and peculiarly mellow eyes was playing tic-tac-toe in the back of a third.

  For myself I drowsed. The New Jersey scenery changed unostentatiously to Pennsylvania scenery. We passed many cows and a great number of woods and fields and every twenty minutes or so the same farmer would appear sitting in his wagon beside the village station, chewing tobacco and gazing thoughtfully at the Pullman windows.

  We must have passed this farmer ten or fifteen times when my nap was suddenly terminated by the realization that the young man who shared my section was moving his foot up and down like a base drummer in an orchestra and uttering little cries and grunts. I was both startled and pleased for I could see that he was much moved, moved by the book he clutched tightly in his long white fingers—Dr. Harden’s Aristocracy of the Spirit World.

  “Well,” I remarked jovially, “you seem interested.”

  He looked up—in his thin face were the eyes that are seen in only two sorts of men: those who are up on spiritualism and those who are down on spiritualism.

  As he seemed still rather dazed I repeated my inquiry.

  “Interested!” he cried, “Interested! My God!”

  I looked at him carefully. Yes, he was plainly either a medium or else one of the sarcastic young men who write humorous stories about spiritualists for the popular magazines.

  “A remarkable piece of—work,” he said. “The—hero, so to speak, has evidently spent most of his time since his death dictating it to his uncle.”

  I agreed that he must have.

  “Its value of course,” he remarked with a sigh, “depends entirely on the young man being where he says he is.”

  “Of course.” I was puzzled, “The young man must be in—in paradise and not in—in purgatory.”

  “Yes,” he agreed thoughtfully, “it would be embarrassing if he were in purgatory—and more so if he were in a third place.”

  This was rather too much.

  “There was nothing in the young man’s life which pre-supposed that he might be in—be in—”

  “Of course not. The region you refer to was not in my thoughts. I merely said it would be embarrassing if he were in purgatory but even more embarrassing were he somewhere else.”

  “Where, sir?”

  “In Yonkers, for instance.”

  At this I started.

  “What?”

  “In fact if he were in purgatory it would only be a slight error of his own—but if he were in Yonkers—”

  “My dear sir,” I broke out impatiently, “what possible connection is there between Yonkers and The Aristocracy of the Spirit World.”

  “None. I merely mentioned that if he were in Yonkers—”

  “But he’s not in Yonkers.”

  “No, he’s not.” He paused and sighed again, “In fact he has lately crossed from Ohio into Pennsylvania.”

  This time I jumped—from sheer nervousness. I had not yet realized at what he was driving yet I felt that his remarks hinted at some significance.

  “You mean,” I demanded quickly, “that you feel his astral presence.”

  The young man drew himself up fiercely.

  “There’s been enough of that,” he said, intensely. “It seems that for the last month I have been the sport of the credulous queens and Basil Kings of the entire United States. My name, sir, happens to be Cosgrove P. Harden. I am not dead; I have never been dead, and after reading that book I will never again feel it quite safe to die!”

  II

  The girl across the aisle was so startled at my cry of grief and astonishment that she put down a tic instead of a tac.

  I had an immediate vision of a long line of people stretching from 40th Street, where my publishing house stands, down to the Bowery—five hundred thousand people each one hugging a copy of The Aristocracy of the Spirit World, each one demanding the return of his or her $2.50. I considered quickly whether I could change all the names and shift it from my non-fiction to my fiction. But it was too late even for this. Three hundred thousand copies were in the hands of the American Public.

  When I was sufficiently recovered the young man gave me a history of his experiences since he had been reported dead. Three months in a German prison—ten months in a hospital with brain fever—another month before he could remember his own name. Half an hour after his arrival in New York he had met an old friend who had stared at him, choked and then fainted dead away. When he revived they went together to a drug-store to get a cocktail and in an hour Cosgrove Harden had heard the most astonishing story about himself that a man ever listened to.

  He took a taxi to a book store. The book he sought was sold out. Immediately he had started on the train for Joliet, Ohio, and by a rare stroke of fortune the book had been put in his hands.

  My first thought was that he was a blackmailer but by comparing him with his photograph on page 226 of The Aristocracy of t
he Spirit World I saw that he was indubitably Cosgrove P. Harden. He was thinner and older than in the picture, the mustache was gone but it was the same man.

  I sighed—profoundly and tragically.

  “Just when it’s selling better than a book of fiction.”

  “Fiction!” he responded angrily, “It is fiction!”

  “In a sense—” I admitted.

  “In a sense? It is fiction! It fulfills all the requirements of fiction: it is one long sweet lie. Would you call it fact?”

  “No,” I replied calmly, “I should call it non-fiction. Non-fiction is a form of literature that lies half-way between fiction and fact.”

  He opened the book at random and uttered a short poignant cry of distress that made the red-haired girl pause in what must have been at least the semi-finals of her tic-tac-toe tournament.

  “Look!” he wailed miserably, “Look! It says ‘Monday’. Consider my existence on this ‘further shore’ on ‘Monday’. I ask you! Look! I smell flowers. I spend the day smelling flowers. You see, don’t you? On page 194, on the top of the page I smell a rose—”

  I lifted the book carefully to my nostrils.

  “I don’t notice anything,” I said, “possibly the ink—”

  “Don’t smell,” he cried, “Read! I smell a rose and it gives me two paragraphs of rapture about the instinctive nobility of man. One little smell! Then I devote another hour to daisies. God! I’ll never be able to attend another college reunion.”

  He turned a few pages and then groaned again.

  “Here I am with the children—dancing with them. I spend all day with them and we dance. We don’t even do a decent shimmee. We do some aesthetic business. I can’t dance. I hate children. But no sooner do I die than I become a cross between a nurse girl and a chorus man.”

  “Here now,” I ventured reproachfully, “that has been considered a very beautiful passage. See, it describes your clothes. You are dressed in—let’s see—well, a sort of filmy garment. It streams out behind you—”

  “—a sort of floating under-garment,” he said morosely, “and I’ve got leaves all over my head.”

  I had to admit it—leaves were implied.

  “Still,” I suggested, “think how much worse it could have been. He could have made you really ridiculous if he’d had you answering questions about the number on your grandfather’s watch or the $3.80 you owed as a poker debt.”

  There was a pause.

  “Funny egg, my uncle,” he said thoughtfully, “I think he’s a little mad.”

  “Not at all,” I assured him, “I have dealt with authors all my life and he’s quite the sanest one with whom we’ve ever dealt. He never tried to borrow money from us; he never asked us to fire our advertising department, and he’s never assured us that all his friends were unable to get copies of his book in Boston, Massachusetts.”

  “Nevertheless I’m going to take his astral body for an awful beating.”

  “Is that all you’re going to do?” I demanded anxiously. “You’re not going to appear under your true name and spoil the sale of his book, are you?”

  “What!”

  “Surely you wouldn’t do that. Think of the disappointment you’d cause. You’d make 500,000 people miserable.”

  “All women,” he said morosely, “they like to be miserable. Think of my girl—the girl I was engaged to. How do you think she felt about my flowery course since I left her. Do you think she’s been approving my dancing around with a lot of children all over—all over page 221. Undraped!”

  I was in despair. I must know the worst at once.

  “What—what are you going to do?”

  “Do,” he exclaimed wildly, “Why, I’m going to have my uncle sent to penitentiary along with his publisher and his press agent and the whole crew down to the merest printer’s devil who carried the blasted type.”

  III

  When we reached Joliet, Ohio, at nine o’clock next morning I had calmed him into a semblance of reason. His uncle was an old man, I told him, a misled man. He had been fooled himself, there was little doubt of it. His heart might be weak and the sight of his nephew coming suddenly up the path might finish him off.

  It was, of course, in the back of my mind that we could make some sort of a compromise. If Cosgrove could be persuaded to keep out of the way for five years or so for a reasonable sum all might still be well.

  So when we left the little station we avoided the village and in a depressing silence traversed the half mile to Dr. Harden’s house. When we were within a hundred yards I stopped and turned to him.

  “You wait here,” I urged him, “I’ve got to prepare him for the shock. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  He demurred at first but finally sat down sullenly in the thick grass by the roadside. Drying my damp brow I walked up the lane to the house.

  The garden of Dr. Harden was full of sunshine and bosomed with Japanese magnolia trees dropping pink tears over the grass. I saw him immediately sitting by an open window. The sun was pouring in, creeping in stealthily lengthening squares across his desk and the litter of papers that strewed it; then over the lap of Dr. Harden himself and up to his shaggy, white-topped face. Before him on his desk was an empty brown envelope and his lean fingers were moving busily over the sheaf of newspaper clippings he had just extracted.

  I had come quite close half hidden by the magnolias and was about to address him when I saw a girl dressed in a purple morning dress break stooping through the low-branched cluster of apple trees that made the north end of the garden and move across the grass toward the house. I drew back and watched her as she came directly up to the open window and spoke unabashed to the great Dr. Harden.

  “I want to have a talk with you,” she said abruptly.

  Dr. Harden looked up and a section of the Philadelphia Press fluttered from his hand. I wondered if it was the clipping that called him “The new St. John.”

  “About this stuff!” continued the girl.

  She drew a book from under her arm. It was The Aristocracy of the Spirit World. I recognized it by the red cover with the angels in the corners.

  “About this stuff!” she repeated angrily, and then shied the book violently into a bush where it skimmed down between two wild roses and perched disconsolately among the roots.

  “Why, Miss Thalia!”

  “Why, Miss Thalia!” she mimicked, “Why you old fool you ought to be crocked off for writing this book.”

  “Crocked off?” Dr. Harden’s voice expressed a faint hope that this might be some new honor. He was not left long in doubt.

  “Crocked off!” she blazed forth, “you heard me! My Gosh, can’t you understand English! Haven’t you ever been to a prom!”

  “I was unaware,” replied Dr. Harden coolly, “that college proms were held in the Bowery and I know no precedent for using an abbreviation of the noun crockery as a transitive verb. As for the book—”

  “It’s the world’s worst disgrace.”

  “If you will read these clippings—”

  She put her elbows on the window-sill, moved as though she intended to hoist herself through and then suddenly dropped her chin in her hands and looking at him level-eyed began to talk.

  “You had a nephew,” she said. “That was his hard luck. He was the best man that ever lived and the only man I ever loved or ever will love.”

  Dr. Harden nodded and made as though to speak but Thalia knocked her little fist on the window-sill and continued.

  “He was brave and square and quiet. He died of wounds in a foreign town and passed out of sight as Sergeant Harden, 105th Infantry. A quiet life and an honorable death. What have you done!” Her voice rose slightly until it shook and sent a sympathetic vibration over the window vines. “What have you done! You’ve made him a laughing-stock! You’ve called him back to life as a fabulous creature who sends idiotic messages about flowers and birds and the number of fillings in George Washington’s teeth. You’ve—”

  Dr.
Harden rose to his feet.

  “Have you come here,” he began shrilly, “to tell me what—”

  “Shut up!” she cried. “I’m going to tell you what you’ve done, and you can’t stop me with all the astral bodies this side of the Rocky Mountains.”

  Dr. Harden subsided into his chair.

  “Go on,” he said, with an effort at self-control. “Talk your shrewish head off.”

  She paused for a moment and turning her head looked into the garden. I could see that she was biting her lip and blinking to keep back the tears. Then she turned and fixed her dark eyes on him again.

  “You’ve taken him,” she continued, “and used him as a piece of dough for your crooked medium to make pie out of—pie for all the hysterical women who think you’re a great man. Call you great! Without any respect for the dignity and reticence of death? You’re a toothless yellow old man without even the excuse of real grief for playing on your own credulity and that of a lot of other fools. That’s all—I’m through.”

  With that she turned and as suddenly as she had come walked with her head erect down the path toward me. I waited until she had passed and gone some twenty yards out of sight of the window. Then I followed her along the soft grass and suddenly spoke to her.

  “Miss Thalia.”

  She faced me, somewhat startled.

  “Miss Thalia, I want to tell you that there’s a surprise for you down the lane—somebody you haven’t seen for many months.”

  Her face showed no understanding.

  “I don’t want to spoil anything,” I continued, “but I don’t want you to be frightened if in a few moments you get the surprise of your existence.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked quietly.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just continue along the road and think of the nicest things in the world and all of a sudden something tremendous will happen.”

  With this I bowed very low and stood smiling benevolently with my hat in my hand.