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Read Ebook: Tales from a Rolltop Desk by Morley Christopher Duncan Walter Jack Illustrator
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Ebook has 970 lines and 58167 words, and 20 pages
"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.
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.
"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 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 Mallarm? 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!"
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