"Good gracious, no!" laughed the other. "Was that one of the things you dreamed? Maybe you"re thinking of the portrait they are showing at the Academy."
"By George, that"s it!" I said. "I patched the thing up out of all the people I know, and all the things I"ve read in the papers! I had been talking to a German critic, Dr. Henner--or wait a moment! Is he real? Yes, he came before I went to see the picture. He"ll be entertained to hear about it. You see, the picture was supposed to be the delirium of a madman, and when I got this whack on the jaw, I set to work to have a delirium of my own, just as I had seen on the screen. It was the most amazing thing--so real, I mean. Every person I think of, I have to stop and make sure whether I really know them, or whether I dreamed them. Even you!"
"Was I in it?" laughed Mr. Simpkinson. "What did I do?"
But I decided I"d better not tell him. "It wasn"t a polite dream," I said. "Let me see if I can walk now." I started down the aisle.
"Yes, I"m all right."
"Do you suppose that crowd will bother you again? Perhaps I"d better go with you," said the apostle of muscular Christianity.
"No, no," I said. "They"re not after me especially. I"ll slip away in the other direction."
So I bade Mr. Simpkinson good-bye, and went out on the steps, and the fresh air felt good to me. I saw the crowd down the street; the ex-service men were still pushing and shouting, driving people away from the theatre. I stopped for one glance, then hurried away and turned the corner. As I was pa.s.sing an office building, I saw a big limousine draw up. The door opened, and a woman stepped out: a bold, dark, vivid beauty, bedecked with jewels and gorgeous raiment of many sorts; a big black picture hat, with a flower garden and parts of an aviary on top--
Her glance lit on me. "My G.o.d! Will you look who"s here!" She came to me with her two hands stretched out. "Billy, wretched creature, I haven"t laid eyes on you for two months! Do you have to desert me entirely, just because you"ve fallen in love with a society girl with the face of a j.a.panese doll-baby? What"s the matter with me, that I lose my lovers faster than I get them? I just met Edgerton Rosythe; he"s got a good excuse, I admit--I"m almost as much scared of his wife as he is himself. But still, I"d like a chance to get tired of some man first! Want to come upstairs with me, and see what Planchet"s doing to my old grannie in her scalping-shop? Say, would you think it would take three days" labor for half a dozen Sioux squaws to pull the skin off one old lady"s back? And a week to tie up the corners of her mouth and give her a permanent smile! "Why, grannie," I said, "good G.o.d, it would be cheaper to hire Charlie Chaplin to walk around in front of you all the rest of your life."
But the old girl was bound to be beautiful, so I said to Planchet, "Make her new from the waist up, Madame, for you never can tell how the fashions"ll change, and what she"ll need to show.""
And so I knew that I was back in the real world.
APPENDIX
We live in an age, the first in human history, when religion is entirely excluded from politics and politics from religion. It may happen, therefore, that millions of men will read this story and think it merely a joke; not realizing that it is a literal translation of the life of the world"s greatest revolutionary martyr, the founder of the world"s first proletarian party. For the benefit of those whose historical education has been neglected, I append a series of references. The number to the left refers to a page of this book. The number to the right is a parallel reference to a volume of ancient records known as the Bible; specifically to those portions known as the gospels according to Matthew Everett, Mark Abell, Luka Korwsky, and John Colver.