And if you ever gave another thought to this plea, you determined to use whatever influence you had with the dramatic editor to this effect, that the young woman would have to exhibit very decided cleverness indeed ere she should have "something nice" said about her in the paper.

Welty was not wont to retain one divinity on the altar of his conversation longer than a week. But he did so once. He talked about the same girl every day for a month. And thereby came his undoing.

She was a slender little girl who was singing badly a small role in a certain comic opera at the time of these occurrences. She had a babyish manner across the footlights, and she was thought to be a blonde, for she was wearing a yellow wig over her own short black hair that season.

Her first name was Emily.

Welty managed to be introduced to her by thrusting himself upon a little party of which she was a member, and in which was one acquaintance of his, at a restaurant one night. He called upon her at her boarding house the next day, where she received him with some surprise, and left most of the conversation to him. When he visited there again, she caused him to be told that she was out, and this took place a half dozen times.

Their real acquaintance never went any further, but an imaginary acquaintance between them, growing from Welty's wish, made great progress in his fancy and in the stories told by him at his club to groups of men, some of whom doubted and looked bored, while others believed and grinned and envied.

It was at the point where Emily had quite forgotten Welty, and Welty's stories portrayed her as recklessly adoring him and seeking him in cabs at all hours, that Barry McGettigan, a despised young reporter, "doing police," heard one of Welty's accounts of an alleged interview with Emily; and Barry, who had a way of knowing human nature and observing people, suspected.

Now Barry cherished a deep-rooted grudge against Welty, all the more dangerous because Welty was unaware of it. Its exact cause has never been torn from Barry's breast. Some have ascribed it to Welty's having mimicked Barry's brogue before a crowd in a saloon one night. Others have laid it to the following pa.s.sage of words, which is now a part of the ancient history of the Nocturnal Club.

"Spakin' of ancestors," Barry began, "I'd loike to bet--"

"I'd like to bet," broke in Welty, "that your own ancestry leads directly to the Shandy family."

There was a general laugh, which Barry, whose nose was as flat as any Shandy's could have been but who had never read Sterne, did not understand.

"What did he mane?" Barry asked a friend. The friend told him to read "Tristram Shandy." He spent two hours in a public library next day and learned how his facial peculiarity had been used by Welty to create a laugh and incidentally to insult him.

This he never forgave. And he bided his time.

Now, having heard Welty boast of being the object of this Emily's infatuation, Barry McGettigan deflected his mind from the contemplation of murders, infanticides, fires, and other matters of general interest, and gave his best thoughts and skill to investigating this talked-of love affair of Welty's.

He discovered the true situation within three days. He found that Emily was engaged to be married to a college football player who came to the city once a week to see her.

He borrowed money, made himself very agreeable to Welty, and also got himself introduced to the football player. The latter was a tall, lithe, heavy-shouldered, brown-faced, thick-knuckled youth, who practiced all kinds of athletic diversions.

Barry McGettigan sounded the football man in one brief interview one night, between the acts of the comic opera, at the saloon next door. He found a means of fastening himself upon the football player's esteem.

The collegian expressed a mild desire to see something of police-station life. Barry invited him to spend an evening with him on duty at Central Station. The collegian accepted. Barry appointed a time and named a certain cafe as a meeting place.

Then Barry invited Welty to dine with him at the same cafe on the same evening at the same hour. By means of his borrowed money, he had lavished costly drinks upon Welty of late, and Welty had reason to antic.i.p.ate a dinner worth the accepting. Barry told Welty nothing of the collegian and he told the collegian nothing more of Welty.

When the evening came, Barry found Welty awaiting him at the cafe. The two sat down at a table. The preliminary c.o.c.ktail had only arrived when in walked the collegian. Barry saluted him as if the meeting had only occurred by chance. He made the collegian and Welty known to each other by name only. And then he ordered dinner.

When a bottle had been drunk, Barry innocently turned the current of the conversation to women. He spoke modestly of a mythical conquest he had recently made. The football player listened without showing much interest. Presently Barry paused.

Welty took a drink and began:

"No, my boy," said he to Barry, "you're wrong there. It's like you youngsters to think you know all about the s.e.x, but the older you grow the less you think you know about them, until you get to my age."

Barry made no answer, but looked at Welty with becoming deference.

The football man's eyes were wandering about the cafe, showing him to be indifferent to the theme of discussion.

"I know," continued Welty, "that many more or less writers have said, as you say, that women must be sought and pursued to be won. They deduce that theory from the habits of lower animals and of barbarous nations, in which the man obtains the woman by chase and force. But it's all a theory, and simply shows that the learned writers study their books instead of their fellow men and women."

The collegian looked restless, as if the conversation had gotten beyond his depth.

Barry remained silent, and with a flattering aspect of great interest in Welty's observations.

"Now," went on Welty, striking the table with the bottom of his gla.s.s, "I've had a little experience of this sort of thing in my time, and I can say that in nine cases out of ten, once you've attracted the attention of your game, let it alone and it will chase you. That's how to win women."

The collegian looked bored.

"Just to ill.u.s.trate," said Welty, "I'll tell of a little conquest of my own. I use it because it is the first that comes to my mind, not that I'm given to bragging about my success in these matters. I suppose you've seen the opera at the ---- Theatre?"

The collegian ceased looking bored. Barry McGettigan sat perfectly, unnaturally still.

"And," pursued Welty, "you've doubtless noticed the three girls who appear as the queen's maids of honour?"

The collegian looked somewhat concerned. Barry stopped breathing.

"Well," continued Welty, "you mayn't believe it, for we've kept it really quiet, one of them girls is really dead gone on me."

The collegian opened his mouth wide, and Barry began to nervously tap his hand upon the table.

"It's the one," said Welty, "who wears the big blond wig. Her name's Emi--"

There was the noise of upsetting plates, bottles, and gla.s.ses, of a man's feet rapping up against the bottom of a table and his head thumping down against the floor. There was the sight of an agile youth leaping across an overturned table and alighting with one foot at each side of the prostrate form of an astonished man, whose gray whiskers were spattered with blood. There was the quick gathering of a crowd, an excited explanation on the part of the collegian, a slow recovery on the part of the man on the floor, and Barry McGettigan's vengeance was complete.

For, by one of those incredible coincidences that have the semblance of fatality, the football player's fist had reduced Melrose Welty's nose to a flatness which the nose of no imaginable Shandy ever has surpa.s.sed.

XIII. -- THE WHISTLE

She was the wife of a railway locomotive engineer, and the two lived in the newly built house to which he had taken her as a bride a year before.

Many other people in the country railroad town used to laugh at a thing which she had once said to a gossiping neighbour:

"I can tell the sound of the whistle on Tom's engine from all other whistles. Every afternoon when his train gets to the crossing at the planing-mill, I hear that whistle, and then I know it's time to get Tom's supper."

The gossips found something humourous in the fact that the engineer's wife recognized the whistle of her husband's engine and knew by it when to begin to prepare his supper. So are the small manifestations of love and devotion regarded by coa.r.s.e minds. You frequently observe this in the conduct of certain people at the theatre when tender sentiments are uttered upon the stage.

Perhaps the men were envious of the engineer. He had a prettier wife, they said, when he was not present, than was deserved by a mere freight engineer, very recently elevated from the post of fireman. Perhaps, also, the petty malevolence of the women was due to the wife's superior comeliness. Be that as it may, each afternoon at half-past four or thereabouts, when Tom's whistle was blown at the crossing by the planing-mill, loungers in the grocery store and wives in their kitchens smiled knowingly and said:

"Time to begin to get Tom's supper, now."

But the engineer was careless and his wife was disdainful of their neighbours. She loved the sound of that whistle. In the earliest days of their married life it even sent the crimson to her cheeks. The engineer could make it as expressive as music. It began like a sudden glad cry; it died away lingeringly, tenderly. Virtually it said to one pair of ears:

"My darling, I have come back to you."

Whenever the engineer pulled the rope for that particular signal, he pictured his wife arising from her work-basket in their little parlour with a thrill of pleasure and affection, and pa.s.sing out to the kitchen.

She, likewise, at the signal, made a mental image of Tom, seated in the engine cab, his one hand fixed upon the shining lever, his eyes fixed upon the glistening tracks ahead.