I see him down-town late at night sometimes with Mrs. P.
They’re thick as thieves together.
I guess she’s a bad egg.
This is all for this time.
John Duke was shot and killed by the house detective at the Whitstone hotel Sunday night.
He was drunk and threatening to shoot every one.
It’s a sad thing for his wife.
He left three children.
She was in to see me today.
He was well-liked by every one but a terror when he drank.
My heart bled for her.
She’s a pretty little woman.
Liquor has caused more misery than all the other evils in the world put together.
I curse the day it was first invented.
Enclosed find a small check to buy yourself a present.
God knows what we’re coming to.
Aff. Your Father, W.
O.
Gant.”
She saved carefully all his letters — written on his heavy slick business stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his crippled right hand.
In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length to Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and citrous fruits, the Pentlands waited her approach, Pett, with a cold lust of battle on her face, Will with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand.
24
With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his torso from loin to chin.
“Now, let me see,” he whined with studious deliberation, “what he gives on this.”
He fumbled for the notes.
Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the window, a low sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips.
Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand stroking his grave pallid face.
“Entgegen,” said Eugene, in a small choked voice, “follows its object.”
John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head, still searching the notes.
“I’m not so sure of that,” he said.
Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds.
Tom Davis hurled himself violently downward over his desk.
John Dorsey looked up, adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth.
From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught him a little German, a language of which he had been quite happily ignorant.
The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked it over with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation in order to enjoy his bewilderment.
Sometimes, deliberately, they salted their pages with glib false readings, sometimes they interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting exultantly for his cautious amendment of a word that did not exist.
“Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in which the old man was sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and finally,”— Guy Doak looked up slyly at his tutor, “giving him a good punch in the eye.”
“No-o,” said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin, “not exactly.
‘Catching him squarely in the eye’ gets the idiom better, I think.”
Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling noises into his desk, and waited for the classic evasion.
It came at once.
“Let me see,” said John Dorsey, turning the pages, “what he gives on this.”
Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled wad and thrust it on Eugene’s desk.
Eugene read:
“Gebe mir ein Stuck Papier,
Before I bust you on the ear.”
He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and wrote in answer:
“Du bist wie eine bum-me.”
They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German tear-gulps: Immensee, Hoher als die Kirche, Der Zerbrochene Krug.
Then, Wilhelm Tell.