“What do they say?”
Tams, releasing the girl’s hand, shifted.
“Well, you see the idea is so brand new that they don’t know whether they are in for rotten eggs or the biggest hit ever.”
“Dear me!”
“Yesterday, Goldburg, who is odiously familiar, clapped me on the back and said: ‘Make it dance, old boy, make it dance. That’s the stunt that’ll get ’em!’ ”
Patiently Mrs. Fay put in: “I should think so.”
“May I smoke?” Tams asked. “And somebody will,” he resumed as he got out a cigarette. “Somebody will do it, That’s inevitable. There’s barely an invention that hasn’t been bettered, There isn’t one that couldn’t be. Just now I’m ahead of this game, but though I can patent the process, I can’t patent the idea.”
Mrs. Fay, to whom that perhaps was Greek, exclaimed, “Oh, can’t you?”
Tams puffed.
“No, and moreover it’s all so simple. Not the machinery of course—that is a bit intricate—but the phonograph is mere a, b, c, and so is the rest of it.”
“Including the gown?”
“What gown?” thought Nelly. “What on earth are they talking about? And why does that creature sit there like a bump on a log? I could bite a tenpenny nail in two!”
Tams spilled his ashes.
“Don’t you like it? Why, I selected it myself. I saw it in a window.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Fay feebly protested, “I don’t mean but what it shows a great deal of taste—”
“And all of it bad,” Tams laughingly cut in. “Well, no doubt you are right. Whatever else I may be, I’m not a—what do you call him?—a Poiret. But that’s just it. I would have liked a suggestion or two from your daughter, whose taste is faultless, but, it appears, she isn’t in, and I have got to turn Gloria over tomorrow. She takes the title role.”
“Gloria?” Nelly indignantly repeated. “Is that that creature?”
Tams threw away his cigarette. “ ‘The Goblin Girl’ is billed for the tenth of next month.”
As he spoke, leaning forward once more, he again took the young woman’s hand.
“Come, my beauty, we must go.”
But his beauty made no reply, no movement even. Her head had not turned, as it previously had, slowly upward to him.
“Hello!” he exclaimed and dropped the hand, which fell limply. “She’s run down!”
“What does he mean?” thought Nelly. “What on earth is he doing?”
Tams, who had extracted a key from his pocket, was poking it at the peacock girdle. He was turning it there. Then he moved closer, masking the creature. But almost at once he turned, and Nelly saw the lips part, saw the teeth, the point of the tongue, and heard the opening sol bémol of a cavatina.
A moment only. Tams fumbled at her again. Abruptly the mouth closed, the aria ceased. It was as if he had bewitched her.
Mrs. Fay nodded applaudingly.
“It is certainly wonderful. I never could have believed that a doll could be made to go on like that. And you say they want it to dance?”
A doll! Amazedly Nelly wondered whether she were going mad or only becoming sane. She could have screamed and, lest scream she might, she clapped a hand to her mouth.
A doll! The bewilderment of it made her dizzy. Without conscious effort, she saw the creature as she had that noon, shooting by like a comet; she saw her as she had at the post office, looking as if the ground were not fit for her to tread on; and she saw her as she had in that fancy ball of the imagination, taking him away.
Then at once an overwhelming relief poured balm all over her.
But in complex emotions the first to assert itself is humiliation. The relief passed, ousted by a sense of shame that she had been tricked into betraying her feelings even to herself.
For it was a trick, she indignantly told herself, and, even otherwise, he ought to have known better. It was disgusting of him to have paraded that thing about like a joy forever and to have acted as if it were alive!
But she could act, too. She would show him and pretty quick!
Her crop under her arm, her head in the air, buttoning a glove as she went, out on the veranda she sailed.
“How do you do, Mr. Tams.” With a little nod, a nod remote and quite infinitesimal, she threw at him those five small words and caressingly, in her most sugary way, smiled at her mother. “Don’t catch more cold, dearest.”
Across the veranda she sailed, floated over the steps, and on and up the path. There was a bit of wind, she noticed. She noticed, too, that the sun was going down. With her crop she decapitated a flower and, stooping, stuck it in her coat.
As she straightened, Tams was beside her.
“Nelly, I love you with all my heart and soul!”
Nelly looked up. The sky was a tent of various colors.
“Nelly, will you marry me?”
The wind sang about her like a flute.
A little later, when together they returned to the house, they found Mrs. Fay at the tea table.
Offering Tams a cup, the old lady said patiently:
“When you are quite ready, I hope you will take your beauty away. She’s uncanny.”
Tams smiled.
“There’s somebody else that I’m going to take away.”
Mrs. Fay, thinking, or affecting to think, of her treasure, started.
“Not Sarah?”
“Your daughter,” Tams with fitting gravity replied. “Your daughter has promised to be my wife.”
“Has she?” Mrs. Fay with amused, but affectionate interest, remarked.
“One lump or two? Well, I can’t honestly say that I didn’t suspect it. When is it to be?”
Nelly, contentedly helping herself to a caviar sandwich, answered for him:
“The day after the first production of ‘The Goblin Girl.’ ”
Endnotes
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The reveal of this story was later reused in the story “The Shudder,” which for that reason was omitted from this collection. —S.E. Editor ↩
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The reader is referred to The Truth About
