"I mean that I have written and sent out to the editors of the papers you write for a half a dozen poems and short stories."
"What has all that got to do with me?" I demanded.
"A great deal," he said. "You"ll get the pay. _I signed your name to "em_."
"Y--you--you--you--did what?" I cried.
"Signed your name to "em. There was a sonnet to "A Coal Grab"--that was the longest of the lot. I think it will cover at least six magazine pages--"
"But," I cried, "a sonnet never contains more than fourteen lines-- you--fool!"
"Oh yes, it does," he replied, calmly. "This one of yours had over four hundred. And then I wrote a three-page quatrain on "Immortality," which, if I do say it, is the funniest thing I ever read. I sent that to the _Weekly Methodist_."
"Good Lord, good Lord, good Lord!" I moaned. "A three-page quatrain!"
"Yes," he observed, calmly lighting one of his accursed cigars. "And you"ll get all the credit."
A ray of hope entered my soul, and it enabled me to laugh hysterically. "They"ll know it isn"t mine," said I. "They know my handwriting at the office of the _Weekly Methodist_."
"No doubt," said he, dashing all my hopes to the ground. "But--ah-- to remedy that drawback I took pains to find out what type-writer you used, and I had my quatrain copied on one of the same make."
"But the letter--the note with the ma.n.u.script?" I put in.
"Oh, I got over that very easily," he said. "I had that written also on the machine, on thin paper, and traced your signature at the bottom. It will be all right, my dear fellow. They"ll never suspect."
And then, looking at the spirit-watch which he carried in his spectral fob-pocket, he vanished, leaving me immersed in the deepest misery of my life. Not content with ruining me socially, and as a lecturer; not satisfied with destroying me mentally on the seas, he had now attacked me on my most vulnerable point, my literary aspirations. I could not rest until I had read his "three-page quatrain" on "Immortality." Vulgar as I knew him to be, I felt confident that over my name something had gone out which even in my least self-respecting moods I could not tolerate. The only comfort that came to me was that his verses and his type-writing and his tracings of my autograph would be as spectral to others as to the eye not attuned to the seeing of ghosts. I was soon to be undeceived, however, for the next morning"s mail brought to my home a dozen packages from my best "consumers," containing the maudlin frivolings of this--this--this--well, there is no polite word to describe him in any known tongue. I shall have to study the Aryan language--or Kipling--to find an epithet strong enough to apply to this especial case. Every point, every single detail, about these packages was convincing evidence of their contents having been of my own production. The return envelopes were marked at the upper corner with my name and address. The handwriting upon them was manifestly mine, although I never in my life penned those particular superscriptions. Within these envelopes were, I might say, pounds of MSS., apparently from my own typewriting machine, and signed in an autograph which would have deceived even myself.
And the stuff!
Stuff is not the word--in fact, there is no word in any language, however primitive and impolite, that will describe accurately the substance of those pages. And with each came a letter from the editor of the periodical to which the tale or poem had been sent _advising me to stop work for a while_, and one _suggested the Keeley cure!_
Immediately I sat down and wrote to the various editors to whom these productions had been submitted, explaining all--and every one of them came back to me unopened, with the average statement that until I had rested a year they really hadn"t the time to read what I wrote; and my best friend among them, the editor of the _Weekly Methodist_, took the trouble to telegraph to my brother the recommendation that I should be looked after. And out of the mistaken kindness of his heart, he printed a personal in his next issue to the effect that his "valued contributor, Mr. Me, the public would regret to hear, was confined to his house by a sudden and severe attack of nervous prostration," following it up with an estimate of my career, which bore every mark of having been saved up to that time for use as an obituary.
And as I read the latter--the obituary--over, with tears in my eyes, what should I hear but the words, spoken at my back, clearly, but in unmistakable c.o.c.kney accents,
"Shove the fifth!" followed by uproarious laughter. I grabbed up the ink-bottle and threw it with all my strength back of me, and succeeded only in destroying the wall-paper.
IV--THE FAILURE
The destruction of the wall-paper, not to mention the wiping out in a moment of my means of livelihood, made of the fifth shove an intolerable nuisance. Controlling myself with difficulty, I put on my hat and rushed to the telegraph office, whence I despatched a message, marked "Rush," to Peters.
"For Heaven"s sake, complete your exorcism and bring it here at once," I wired him. "Answer collect."
Peters by no means soothed my agitation by his immediate and extremely flippant response.
"I don"t know why you wish me to answer collect, but I suppose you do. So I answer as you request: Collect. What is it you are going to collect? Your scattered faculties?" he telegraphed. It was a mean sort of a telegram to send to a man in my unhappy state, and if he hadn"t prepaid it I should never have forgiven him. I was mad enough when I received it, and a hot retort was about to go back, when the bothersome spook turned up and drew my mind off to other things.
"Well, what do you think of me?" he said, ensconcing himself calmly on my divan. "Pretty successful shover myself, eh?" Then he turned his eye to the inkspots on the wall. "Novel design in decoration, that. You ought to get employment in some wall-paper house. Given an accurate aim and plenty of ink, you can"t be beaten for vigorous spatter-work."
I pretended to ignore his presence, and there was a short pause, after which he began again:
"Sulky, eh? Oh, well, I don"t blame you. There"s nothing in this world that can so harrow up one"s soul as impotent wrath. I"ve heard of people bursting with it. I"ve had experiences in the art of irritation before this case. There was a fellow once hired my cab for an hour. Drove him all about London, and then he stopped in at a chop-house, leaving me outside. I waited and waited and waited, but he never came back. Left by the back door, you know. Clever trick, and for a while the laugh was on me; but when I got to the point where I could haunt him, I did it to the Regent"s taste. I found him three years after my demise, and through the balance of his life pursued him everywhere with a phantom cab. If he went to church, I"d drive my spectre rig right down the middle aisle after him. If he called on a girl, there was the cab drawn up alongside of him in the parlor all the time, the horse stamping his foot and whinnying like all possessed. Of course no one else saw me or the horse or the cab, but he did--and, Lord! how mad he was, and how hopeless! Finally, in a sudden surge of wrath at his impotence, he burst, just like a soap-bubble. It was most amusing. Even the horse laughed."
"Thanks for the story," said I, wishing to anger him by my nonchalance. "I"ll write it up."
"Do," he said. "It will make a clever sixth shove for me. People say your fancies are too wild and extravagant even now. A story like that will finish you at once."
"Again, thanks," said I, very calmly. "This time for the hint.
Acting on your advice, I won"t write it up."
"Don"t," he retorted. "And be forever haunted with the idea. Either way, it suits me."
And he vanished once more.
The next morning Peters arrived at my house.
"I"ve come," he said, as he entered my den. "The scheme is perfected at last, and possibly you can use it. You need help of some kind. I can see that, just by reading your telegram. You"re nervous as a cat. How do you heat your house?"
"What"s that got to do with it?" I demanded, irritably. "You can"t evaporate the little cuss."
"Don"t want to," Peters replied. "That"s been tried before, and it doesn"t work. My scheme is a better one than that. Did you ever notice, while smoking in a house that is heated by a hot-air furnace, how, when a cloud of smoke gets caught in the current of air from the register, it is mauled and twisted until it gets free, or else is torn entirely apart?"
"Yes, I have," said I. "What of it?"
"Well, what"s the matter with being genial with your old c.o.c.kney until he gets in the habit of coming here every night, and bide your time until, without his knowing it, you can turn a blast from the furnace on him that will simply rend him to pieces?"
"By Jove!" I cried, delightedly. "You are a genius, old chap."
I rose and shook his hand until he remonstrated.
"Save your energy for him," said he. "You"ll need it. It won"t be a pleasant spectacle to witness when, in his struggles to get away, he is gradually dismembered. It will be something like the drawing and quartering punishment of olden times."
I shuddered as I thought of it, and for a moment was disposed to reject the plan, but my weakness left me as I thought of the ruin that stared me in the face.
"Oh, I don"t know," I said, shaking my head. "It will have its pleasurable side, however fearsome it may prove as a sight. This house is just fitted for the operation, particularly on warm days. I have seen times when the blasts of hot air from my furnace have blown one of my poems off my table across the room."
"Great Scott!" cried Peters. "What a cyclone of an air-box you must have!"
Fortunately the winter season was on, and we were able to test the capacity of the furnace, with gratifying results. A soap-bubble was blown, and allowed to float downward until the current was reached, and the novel shapes it took, as it was blown about the room in its struggles to escape before it burst, were truly wonderful. I doubted not for an instant, from what I then saw, that the little cad of a spectre that was ruining my life would soon meet his Nemesis. So convinced was I of the ultimate success of the plan that I could hardly wait patiently for his coming. I became morbidly anxious for the horrid spectacle which I should witness as his body was torn apart and gradually annihilated by the relentless output of my furnace flues. To my great annoyance, it was two weeks before he turned up again, and I was beginning to fear that he had in some wise got wind of my intentions, and was turning my disappointment over his absence into the sixth of his series of "shoves." Finally, however, my anxiety was set at rest by his appearance on a night especially adapted to a successful issue of the conspiracy. It was blowing great guns from the west, and the blasts of air, intermittent in their force, that came up through the flues were such that under other circ.u.mstances they would have annoyed me tremendously. Almost everything in the line of the current that issued from the register and pa.s.sed diagonally across the room to my fireplace, and so on up the chimney, was disturbed. The effect upon particles of paper and the fringes on my chairs was almost that of a pneumatic tube on substances placed within it, and on one or two occasions I was seriously apprehensive of the manner in which the flames on the hearth leaped upward into the sooty heights of my chimney flues.
But when, as happened shortly, I suddenly became conscious that my spectre c.o.c.kney had materialized, all my fears for the safety of my house fled, and I surrept.i.tiously turned off the heat, so that once he got within range of the register I could turn it on again, and his annihilation would be as instantaneous as what my newspaper friends call an electrocution. And that was precisely where I made my mistake, although I must confess that what ensued when I got the nauseating creature within range was most delightful.
"Didn"t expect me back, eh?" he said, as he materialized in my library. "Missed me, I suppose, eh?"