Short Fiction

ask people where they have been. It’s not civil. If you are curious, ask where they are going.”

Lilian laughed. Dressed not in the mode of the moment, but of the morrow, she was radiant. She turned to Claire. “Belovedest, I am so glad you are here.” She turned to Harry. “Yes, and I’ll tell you. I am going to give you a birthday present. Fred and I have been selecting it. Fred came here after luncheon to see you and⁠—But wait a moment, I’ll order tea.” Turning again, she vanished.

Fred nodded. “So I did and in the hall here I saw a letter for you. I could not help seeing it. It was the twin of one that I got. Before coming here, I took mine, together with a receipt for wages, to Marvalho, the handwriting expert. He said my ex-butler wrote them both. I propose to have him up for it. Give me yours and I will turn it in with mine.”

Harry blinked. He had been about to have a kick at the apple cart, but Fred’s directness, Lilian’s manner, these things superposing on Claire’s mockery and abruptly he saw that there was no cart to kick. But he could not get in a rage and out of it in a moment.

“What was in this letter of yours?” he suddenly and severely inquired.

Fred patted a smile. “Well, though addressed to me, it must have been intended for Lilian. It said that you were a model husband, yes, the model of what a husband ought not to be.”

“Oh!” said Harry. He found but that.

Claire looked up at her husband. “Then it was like one I got about you. As for Harry’s, dear me! It made him foam at the mouth.”

Harry flushed. “Nonsense! I saw at once that it was rubbish.”

But now Lilian reappeared. Behind her two men in livery were bringing a great silver salver that was heaped with things.

“Well then, Harry,” Fred resumed. “You give me your letter and Claire, you give me yours. Marvalho says it’s five years.”

“But⁠—” Harry laboriously protested. The plan did not at all suit his book. However clear other skirts might be, his own were not for exhibition.

“But what?” Fred threw at him.

“You see,” Claire cut in, “Harry probably thinks that if you have the butler up, our names will be in all the papers.”

Bravely Harry helped himself to a hot and buttered scone. “That is just what I do think.”

“The dear boy!” Lilian admiringly exclaimed. “He is so delightfully old-fashioned.”

The Golden Chimera5

I

“Janet Ferrol to the bar!”

At Oriol, before the war, in the dining-room of the Hôtel des Bains where I sat, memory had raised a latch and, from behind it, echoed that cry.

Without were the Côtes d’Or, the golden slopes of meridional France. Within was the simple comfort of the room, which was practically deserted at the time, and from which, a moment previous, a guest had gone.

At table he had sat opposite me. I could have sworn that I had seen him before. Yet where? For information I turned to the waiter.

“Léopold, who was that?”

Léopold rubbed his hands.

“A M. Bundy.” He paused and concisely added: “From the Americas.”

Bundy! That was it. At once a curtain had risen. The waiter, the dining-room, the Côtes d’Or, everything had vanished. In my quality of reporter, I was assisting again at the trial of Janet Ferrol, whom Bundy had defended.

That was in New York, four years ago. Previously Mrs. Ferrol had been currently quoted “among those present.” The fashion magazines supplied her picture. You saw her at Palm Beach, at Belmont Park, at Tuxedo. She was shown on the sands, on the ice, at the races. People who did not know better fancied her a widow. Of Ferrol there was no accompanying picture, no mention, and many must have concluded that if he were a man of the world, it was of a world other than this.

They would not have been far wrong, either. Hall Ferrol moved and had his being in the world of thought⁠—a region perhaps unexplored by the lady who lived so palpably in the newspapers. Then presently her husband, whom they had ignored, created just a little ripple in them. He died, and you learned of his existence only through hearing that he was dead.

That was the ripple. It was followed by a lull, which was succeeded by a roar. Mrs. Ferrol was arrested, charged with his murder.

It was ridiculous, I told myself, for not long before I had interviewed this man, who was occupied⁠—of all things!⁠—with alchemy. Ordinarily I would have carefully avoided both him and it; but about that time an English scientist, Sir William Ramsay, had announced that with a certain combination of cathode rays and vacuum tubes the dream of the alchemists could be realized.

The subject was one on which the city editor had no erudition to conceal and none to display. But he felt that the man in the subway might relish a stick or two about it, and so, precisely as I was later told off to report the trial, I was then told off to get those sticks.

The task was not herculean. In the office encyclopedia I looked up “alchemy,” and found there that Hall Ferrol had written about it; looked up his address; went to Park Avenue, where, in a duplex apartment which for all I know to the contrary may have been triplex, I bearded him in his den. This was a great, bare room, totally devoid of any necromantic paraphernalia, in which he presented the melancholy spectacle of a rich man trying to be richer and, while he was at it, looking like a dentist.

I stated my errand. The tone in which I put it may have lacked seriousness, for he said, civilly enough, as if remarking about the weather:

“You don’t believe in alchemy.”

“Oh,” I answered, “I have three hundred and sixty-five beliefs, one for every day