Young Yates, notebook in hand, recovered himself sufficiently to nod. Mr.
Carr leered at him:
"That tentacle," he explained, "is now seeking some invisible, wireless, psychic current along which it is to transmit the acc.u.mulated psychic waves. As soon as the wireless current finds the subconscious personality of the woman you are destined to love and marry some day----"
"I?" exclaimed young Yates, horrified.
"Yes, you. Why not? Do you mind my trying it on you?"
"But I am already in love," protested the young man, turning, as usual, a ready red. "I don"t care to have you try it on me. Suppose that machine should connect me with--some other--girl----"
"It has!" cried Carr with a hideous laugh as a point of bluish-white fire tipped the tentacle for an instant. "You"re tied fast to something feminine! Probably a flossy typewriter--or a burlesque actress--somebody you"re fitted for, anyway!" He clapped on his monocle, and glared gleefully at the stupefied young man.
"That will teach you to enter my premises and hold my daughter"s hand when she is drawing innocent pictures of Cooper"s Bluff!" he shouted.
"That will teach you to write poems to my eighteen-year-old daughter, Drusilla; that will teach you to tell her you are in love with her--you young pup!"
"I am in love with her!" said Yates, undaunted; but he was very white when he said it. "I do love her; and if you had behaved halfway decently I"d have told you so two weeks ago!"
Mr. Carr turned a delicate purple, then, recovering, laughed horribly.
"Whether or not you were once in love with my daughter is of no consequence now. That machine has nullified your nonsense! That instrument has found you your proper affinity--doubtless below stairs----"
"I _am_ still in love with Drusilla," repeated Yates, firmly.
"I tell you, you"re not!" retorted Carr. "Didn"t I turn that machine on you? It has never missed yet! The Green Mouse has got _you_ in the Mouseleum!"
"You are mistaken," insisted Yates, still more firmly. "I was in love with your daughter Drusilla before you started the machine; and I love her yet! Now! At the present time! This very instant I am loving her!"
"You can"t!" shouted Carr.
"Yes, I can. And I do!"
"No, you don"t! I tell you it"s a scientific and psychical impossibility for you to continue to love her! Your subconscious personality is now in eternal and irrevocable accord and communication with the subconscious personality of some chit of a girl who is destined to love and marry you!
And she"s probably a ballet-girl, at that!"
"I shall marry Drusilla!" retorted the young man, very pale; "because I am quite confident that she loves me, though very probably she doesn"t know it yet."
"You talk foolishness!" hissed Carr. "This machine has settled the whole matter! Didn"t you see that spark?"
"I saw a spark--yes!"
"And do you mean to tell me you are not beginning to feel queer?"
"Not in the slightest."
"Look me squarely in the eye, young man, and tell me whether you do not have a sensation as though your heart were cutting capers?"
"Not in the least," said Yates, calmly. "If that machine worked at all it wouldn"t surprise me if you yourself had become entangled in it--caught in your own machine!"
"W-what!" exclaimed Carr, faintly.
"It wouldn"t astonish me in the slightest," repeated Yates, delighted to discover the dawning alarm in the older man"s features. "_You_ opened the receiver; _you_ have psychic waves as well as I. _I_ was in love at the time; _you_ were not. What was there to prevent your waves from being hitched to a wireless current and, finally, signaling the subconscious personality of--of some pretty actress, for example?"
Mr. Carr sank nervously onto a chair; his eyes, already wild, became wilder as he began to realize the risk he had unthinkingly taken.
"Perhaps _you_ feel a little--queer. You look it," suggested the young man, in a voice made anxious by an ever-ready sympathy. "Can I do anything? I am really very sorry to have spoken so."
A damp chill gathered on the brow of Bushwyck Carr. He _did_ feel a trifle queer. A curious lightness--a perfectly inexplicable buoyancy seemed to possess him. He was beginning to feel strangely youthful; the sound of his own heart suddenly became apparent. To his alarm it was beating playfully, skittishly. No--it was not even beating; it was skipping.
"Y-Yates," he stammered, "you don"t think that I could p-possibly have become inadvertently mixed up with that horrible machine--do you?"
Now Yates was a generous youth; resentment at the treatment meted out to him by this florid, bad-tempered and pompous gentleman changed to instinctive sympathy when he suddenly realized the plight his future father-in-law might now be in.
"Yates," repeated Mr. Carr in an agitated voice, "tell me honestly: _do_ you think there is anything unusual the matter with me? I--I seem to f-feel unusually--young. Do I look it? Have I changed? W-watch me while I walk across the room."
Mr. Carr arose with a frightened glance at Yates, put on his hat, and fairly pranced across the room. "Great Heavens!" he faltered; "my hat"s on one side and my walk is distinctly jaunty! Do you notice it, Yates?"
"I"m afraid I do, Mr. Carr."
"This--this is infamous!" gasped Mr. Carr. "This is--is outrageous! I"m forty-five! I"m a widower! I detest a jaunty widower! I don"t want to be one; I don"t want to----"
Yates gazed at him with deep concern.
"Can"t you help lifting your legs that way when you walk--as though a band were playing? Wait, I"ll straighten your hat. Now try it again."
Mr. Carr pranced back across the room.
"I _know_ I"m doing it again," he groaned, "but I can"t help it! I--I feel so gay--dammit!--so frivolous--it"s--it"s that infernal machine.
W-what am I to do, Yates," he added piteously, "when the world looks so good to me?"
"Think of your family!" urged Yates. "Think of--of Drusilla."
"Do you know," observed Carr, twirling his eyegla.s.s and twisting his mustache, "that I"m beginning not to care what my family think!... Isn"t it amazing, Yates? I--I seem to be somebody else, several years younger.
Somewhere," he added, with a flourish of his monocle--"somewhere on earth there is a little birdie waiting for me."
"Don"t talk that way!" exclaimed Yates, horrified.
"Yes, I will, young man. I repeat, with optimism and emphasis, that _somewhere_ there is a birdie----"
"Mr. Carr!"
"Yes, merry old Top!"
"May I use your telephone?"
"I don"t care what you do!" said Carr, gayly. "Use my telephone if you like; pull it out by the roots and throw it over Cooper"s Bluff, for all I care! But"--and a sudden glimmer of reason seemed to come over him--"if you have one grain of human decency left in you, you won"t drag me and my terrible plight into that scurrilous New York paper of yours."
"No," said Yates, "I won"t. And that ends my career on Park Row. I"m going to telephone my resignation."