Molly Make-Believe.

by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott.

I

The morning was as dark and cold as city snow could make it--a dingy whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fireplace; a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a gla.s.s of stale water, and a vapid, half-eaten grape-fruit.

Packed into his pudgy pillows like a fragile piece of china instead of a human being Carl Stanton lay and cursed the brutal Northern winter.

Between his st.u.r.dy, restive shoulders the rheumatism snarled and clawed like some utterly frenzied animal trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way out. Along the tortured hollow of his back a red-hot plaster fumed and mulled and sucked at the pain like a hideously poisoned fang trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way in. Worse than this; every four or five minutes an agony as miserably comic as a crashing blow on one's crazy bone went jarring and shuddering through his whole abnormally vibrant system.

In Stanton's swollen fingers Cornelia's large, crisp letter rustled not softly like a lady's skirts but bleakly as an ice-storm in December woods.

Cornelia's whole angular handwriting, in fact, was not at all unlike a thicket of twigs stripped from root to branch of every possible softening leaf.

"DEAR CARL" crackled the letter, "In spite of your unpleasant tantrum yesterday, because I would not kiss you good-by in the presence of my mother, I am good-natured enough you see to write you a good-by letter after all. But I certainly will not promise to write you daily, so kindly do not tease me any more about it. In the first place, you understand that I greatly dislike letter-writing. In the second place you know Jacksonville quite as well as I do, so there is no use whatsoever in wasting either my time or yours in purely geographical descriptions. And in the third place, you ought to be bright enough to comprehend by this time just what I think about 'love-letters' anyway. I have told you once that I love you, and that ought to be enough.

People like myself do not change. I may not talk quite as much as other people, but when I once say a thing I mean it!

You will never have cause, I a.s.sure you, to worry about my fidelity.

"I will honestly try to write you every Sunday these next six weeks, but I am not willing to literally promise even that. Mother indeed thinks that we ought not to write very much at all until our engagement is formally announced.

"Trusting that your rheumatism is very much better this morning, I am

"Hastily yours,

"CORNELIA.

"P. S. Apropos of your sentimental pa.s.sion for letters, I enclose a ridiculous circular which was handed to me yesterday at the Woman's Exchange. You had better investigate it. It seems to be rather your kind."

As the letter fluttered out of his hand Stanton closed his eyes with a twitch of physical suffering. Then he picked up the letter again and scrutinized it very carefully from the severe silver monogram to the huge gothic signature, but he could not find one single thing that he was looking for;--not a nourishing paragraph; not a stimulating sentence; not even so much as one small sweet-flavored word that was worth filching out of the prosy text to tuck away in the pockets of his mind for his memory to munch on in its hungry hours. Now everybody who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business letter does not deserve the paper which it is written on unless it contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in the night to remember and think about. And as to the Lover who does not write significant phrases--Heaven help the young mate who finds himself thus mismated to so spiritually commonplace a nature! Baffled, perplexed, strangely uneasy, Stanton lay and studied the barren page before him. Then suddenly his poor heart puckered up like a persimmon with the ghastly, grim shock which a man experiences when he realizes for the first time that the woman whom he loves is not shy, but--_stingy_.

With snow and gloom and pain and loneliness the rest of the day dragged by. Hour after hour, helpless, hopeless, utterly impotent as though Time itself were bleeding to death, the minutes bubbled and dripped from the old wooden clock. By noon the room was as murky as dish-water, and Stanton lay and fretted in the messy, sudsy snow-light like a forgotten knife or spoon until the janitor wandered casually in about three o'clock and wrung a piercing little wisp of flame out of the electric-light bulb over the sick man's head, and raised him clumsily out of his soggy pillows and fed him indolently with a sad, thin soup. Worst of all, four times in the dreadful interim between breakfast and supper the postman's thrilly footsteps soared up the long metallic stairway like an ecstatically towering high-note, only to flat off discordantly at Stanton's door without even so much as a one-cent advertis.e.m.e.nt issuing from the letter-slide.--And there would be thirty or forty more days just like this the doctor had a.s.sured him; and Cornelia had said that--perhaps, if she felt like it--she would write--six--times.

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and s.m.u.tted first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst like the sc.r.a.pe of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish. Then, just as the mawkish cold, gray dawn came nosing over the house-tops, and the poor fellow's mind had reached the point where the slam of a window or the ripping creak of a floorboard would have shattered his brittle nerves into a thousand cursing tortures--then that teasing, tantalizing little friend of all rheumatic invalids--the Morning Nap--came swooping down upon him like a sponge and wiped out of his face every single bit of the sharp, precious evidence of pain which he had been acc.u.mulating so laboriously all night long to present to the Doctor as an incontestable argument in favor of an opiate.

Whiter than his rumpled bed, but freshened and brightened and deceptively free from pain, he woke at last to find the pleasant yellow sunshine mottling his dingy carpet like a tortoise-sh.e.l.l cat.

Instinctively with his first yawny return to consciousness he reached back under his pillow for Cornelia's letter.

Out of the stiff envelope fluttered instead the tiny circular to which Cornelia had referred so scathingly.

It was a dainty bit of gray j.a.panese tissue with the crimson-inked text glowing gaily across it. Something in the whole color scheme and the riotously quirky typography suggested at once the audaciously original work of some young art student who was fairly splashing her way along the road to financial independence, if not to fame. And this is what the little circular said, flushing redder and redder and redder with each ingenuous statement:

THE SERIAL-LETTER COMPANY.

Comfort and entertainment Furnished for Invalids, Travelers, and all Lonely People.

Real Letters

from

Imaginary Persons.

Reliable as your Daily Paper. Fanciful as your Favorite Story Magazine. Personal as a Message from your Best Friend.

Offering all the Satisfaction of _receiving_ Letters with no Possible Obligation or even Opportunity of Answering Them.

SAMPLE LIST.

Letters from a j.a.panese Fairy. (Especially acceptable Bi-weekly. to a Sick Child. Fragrant with Incense and Sandal Wood. Vivid with purple and orange and scarlet. Lavishly interspersed with the most adorable j.a.panese toys that you ever saw in your life.)

Letters from a little Son. (Very st.u.r.dy. Very Weekly. s.p.u.n.ky. Slightly profane.)

Letters from a Little Daughter. (Quaint. Old-Fashioned.

Weekly. Daintily Dreamy.

Mostly about Dolls.)

Letters from a Banda-Sea Pirate. (Luxuriantly tropical.

Monthly. Salter than the Sea.

Sharper than Coral.

Unmitigatedly murderous.

Altogether blood-curdling.)

Letters from a Gray-Plush Squirrel. (Sure to please Nature Irregular. Lovers of Either s.e.x. Pungent with wood-lore. Prowly.

Scampery. Deliciously wild. Apt to be just a little bit messy perhaps with roots and leaves and nuts.)

Letters from Your Favorite (Biographically consistent.

Historical Character. Historically reasonable.

Fortnightly. Most vivaciously human. Really unique.)

Love Letters. (Three grades: Shy.

Daily. Medium. Very Intense.)

In ordering letters kindly state approximate age, prevalent tastes,--and in case of invalidism, the presumable severity of illness. For price list, etc., refer to opposite page.

Address all communications to Serial Letter Co. Box, etc., etc.

As Stanton finished reading the last solemn business detail he crumpled up the circular into a little gray wad, and pressed his blond head back into the pillows and grinned and grinned.

"Good enough!" he chuckled. "If Cornelia won't write to me there seem to be lots of other congenial souls who will--cannibals and rodents and kiddies. All the same--" he ruminated suddenly: "All the same I'll wager that there's an awfully decent little brain working away behind all that red ink and nonsense."

Still grinning he conjured up the vision of some grim-faced spinster-subscriber in a desolate country town starting out at last for the first time in her life, with real, cheery self-importance, rain or shine, to join the laughing, jostling, deliriously human Sat.u.r.day night crowd at the village post-office--herself the only person whose expected letter never failed to come! From Squirrel or Pirate or Hopping Hottentot--what did it matter to her? Just the envelope alone was worth the price of the subscription. How the pink-cheeked high school girls elbowed each other to get a peep at the post-mark! How the--. Better still, perhaps some hopelessly unpopular man in a dingy city office would go running up the last steps just a little, wee bit faster--say the second and fourth Mondays in the month--because of even a bought, made-up letter from Mary Queen of Scots that he knew absolutely without slip or blunder would be waiting there for him on his dusty, ink-stained desk among all the litter of bills and invoices concerning--shoe leather. Whether 'Mary Queen of Scots' prattled pertly of ancient English politics, or whimpered piteously about dull-colored modern fashions--what did it matter so long as the letter came, and smelled of faded fleur-de-lis--or of Darnley's tobacco smoke? Altogether pleased by the vividness of both these pictures Stanton turned quite amiably to his breakfast and gulped down a lukewarm bowl of milk without half his usual complaint.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Good enough!" he chuckled]

It was almost noon before his troubles commenced again. Then like a raging hot tide, the pain began in the soft, fleshy soles of his feet and mounted up inch by inch through the calves of his legs, through his aching thighs, through his tortured back, through his cringing neck, till the whole reeking misery seemed to foam and froth in his brain in an utter frenzy of furious resentment. Again the day dragged by with maddening monotony and loneliness. Again the clock mocked him, and the postman shirked him, and the janitor forgot him. Again the big, black night came crowding down and stung him and smothered him into a countless number of new torments.

Again the treacherous Morning Nap wiped out all traces of the pain and left the doctor still mercilessly obdurate on the subject of an opiate.

And Cornelia did not write.