When I was sufficiently recovered, the young man gave me a history of his experiences since he had been reported dead. Three months in a German prison-ten months in a hospital with brain fever-another month before he could remember his own name. Half an hour after his arrival in New York, he had met an old friend who had stared at him, choked, and then fainted dead away. When he revived, they went together to a drugstore to get a cocktail and in an hour Cosgrove Harden had heard the most astonishing story about himself that a man ever listened to.
He took a taxi to a bookstore. The book he sought was sold out. Immediately he had started on the train for Joliet, Ohio, and by a rare stroke of fortune the book had been put in his hands.
My first thought was that he was a blackmailer, but by comparing him with his photograph on page 226 of “The Aristocracy of the Spirit World” I saw that he was indubitably Cosgrove P. Harden. He was thinner and older than in the picture, the mustache was gone, but it was the same man.
I sighed—profoundly and tragically.
“Just when it’s selling better than a book of fiction.”
“Fiction!” he responded angrily. “It is fiction!”
“In a sense—” I admitted.
“In a sense? It is fiction! It fulfills all the requirements of fiction: it is one long sweet lie. Would you call it fact?”
“No,” I replied calmly. “I should call it nonfiction. Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact.”
He opened the book at random and uttered a short poignant cry of distress that made the red-haired girl pause in what must have been at least the semifinals of her tic-tac-toe tournament.
“Look!” he wailed miserably. “Look! It says ‘Monday.’ Consider my existence on this ‘further shore’ on ‘Monday.’ I ask you! Look! I smell flowers. I spend the day smelling flowers. You see, don’t you? On page 194, on the top of the page, I smell a rose—”
I lifted the book carefully to my nostrils.
“I don’t notice anything,” I said. “Possibly the ink—”
“Don’t smell!” he cried. “Read! I smell a rose and it gives me two paragraphs of rapture about the instinctive nobility of man. One little smell! Then I devote another hour to daisies. God! I’ll never be able to attend another college reunion.”
He turned a few pages and then groaned again.
“Here I am with the children—dancing with them. I spend all day with them and we dance. We don’t even do a decent shimmy. We do some aesthetic business. I can’t dance. I hate children. But no sooner do I die than I become a cross between a nurse girl and a chorus man.”
“Here, now,” I ventured reproachfully, “that has been considered a very beautiful passage. See, it describes your clothes. You are dressed in—let’s see—well, a sort of filmy garment. It streams out behind you—”
“—a sort of floating undergarment,” he said morosely, “and I’ve got leaves all over my head.”
I had to admit it—leaves were implied.
“Still,” I suggested, “think how much worse it could have been. He could have made you really ridiculous if he’d had you answering questions about the number on your grandfather’s watch or the $3.80 you owed as a poker debt.”
There was a pause.
“Funny egg, my uncle,” he said thoughtfully. “I think he’s a little mad.”
“Not at all,” I assured him. “I have dealt with authors all my life and he’s quite the sanest one with whom we’ve ever dealt. He never tried to borrow money from us; he never asked us to fire our advertising department; and he’s never assured us that all his friends were unable to get copies of his book in Boston, Massachusetts.”
“Nevertheless I’m going to take his astral body for an awful beating.”
“Is that all you’re going to do?” I demanded anxiously. “You’re not going to appear under your true name and spoil the sale of his book, are you?”
“What!”
“Surely you wouldn’t do that. Think of the disappointment you’d cause. You’d make 500,000 people miserable.”
“All women,” he said morosely. “They like to be miserable. Think of my girl—the girl I was engaged to. How do you think she felt about my flowery course since I left her? Do you think she’s been approving my dancing around with a lot of children all over—all over page 221. Undraped!”
I was in despair. I must know the worst at once.
“What—what are you going to do?”
“Do?” he exclaimed wildly. “Why, I’m going to have my uncle sent to the penitentiary, along with his publisher and his press agent and the whole crew, down to the merest printer’s devil who carried the blasted type.”
III
When we reached Joliet, Ohio, at nine o’clock the next morning, I had calmed him into a semblance of reason. His uncle was an old man, I told him, a misled man. He had been fooled himself, there was little doubt of it. His heart might be weak and the sight of his nephew coming suddenly up the path might finish him off.
It was, of course, in the back of my mind that we could make some sort of a compromise. If Cosgrove could be persuaded to keep out of the way for five years or so for a reasonable sum, all might still be well.
So when we left the little station we avoided the village and in a depressing silence traversed the half mile to Dr. Harden’s house. When we were within a hundred yards, I stopped and turned to him.
“You wait here,” I urged him. “I’ve got to prepare him for the shock. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
He demurred at first but finally sat down sullenly in the thick grass by the roadside. Drying my damp brow, I walked up the lane to the house.
The garden of Dr. Harden was full of sunshine and blossomed with Japanese magnolia trees dropping pink tears over the grass. I saw him immediately, sitting by an open window. The sun was pouring in, creeping in stealthily lengthening squares across his desk and the litter of papers that strewed it, then over the lap of Dr. Harden himself and up to his shaggy, white-topped face. Before him on his desk was an empty brown envelope and his lean fingers were moving busily over the sheaf of newspaper clippings he had just extracted.
I had come quite close, half hidden by the magnolias, and was about to address him when I saw a girl in a purple morning dress break, stooping, through the low-branched cluster of apple trees that made the north end of the garden and move across the grass toward the house. I drew back and watched her as she came directly up to the open window and spoke unabashed to the great Dr. Harden.
“I want to have a talk with you,” she said abruptly.
Dr. Harden looked up and a section of the Philadelphia Press fluttered from his hand. I wondered if it was the clipping that called him “the new Saint John.”
“About this stuff!” the girl continued.
She drew a book from under her arm. It was “The Aristocracy of the Spirit World.” I recognized it by the red cover with the angels in the corners.
“About this stuff!” she repeated angrily, and then shied the book violently into a bush, where it skimmed down between two wild roses and perched disconsolately among the roots.
“Why, Miss Thalia!”
“Why, Miss Thalia!” she mimicked. “Why, you old fool, you ought to be crocked off for writing this book.”
“Crocked off?” Dr. Harden’s voice expressed a faint hope that this might be some new honor. He was not left long in doubt.
“Crocked off!” she blazed forth. “You heard me! My gosh, can’t you understand English! Haven’t you ever been to a prom?”
“I was unaware,” replied Dr. Harden coolly, “that college proms were held in the Bowery and I know no precedent for using an abbreviation of the noun ‘crockery’ as a transitive verb. As for the book—”
“It’s the world’s worst disgrace.”
“If you will read these clippings—”
She put her elbows on the windowsill, moved as though she intended to hoist herself through, and then suddenly dropped her chin in her hands and looking at him level-eyed began to talk.
“You had a nephew,” she said. “That was his hard luck. He was the best man that ever lived and the only man I ever loved or will love.”
Dr. Harden nodded and made as though to speak but Thalia knocked her little fist on the windowsill and continued.
“He was brave and square and quiet. He died of wounds in a foreign town and passed out of sight as Sergeant Harden, 105th Infantry. A quiet life and an honorable death. What have you done!” Her voice rose slightly until it shook and sent a sympathetic vibration over the window vines. “What have you done! You’ve made him a laughingstock! You’ve called him back to life as a fabulous creature who sends idiotic messages about flowers and birds and the number of fillings in George Washington’s teeth. You’ve—”
Dr. Harden rose to his feet.
“Have you come here,” he began shrilly, “to tell me what—”
“Shut up!” she cried. “I’m going to tell you what you’ve done, and you can’t stop me with all the astral bodies this side of the Rocky Mountains.”
Dr. Harden subsided into his chair.
“Go on,” he said, with an effort at self-control. “Talk your shrewish head off.”
She paused for a moment and turning her head looked into the garden. I could see that she was biting her lip and blinking to keep back the tears. Then she
