The Man Who Could Not Lose
The Carters had married in haste and refused to repent at leisure. So blindly were they in love, that they considered their marriage their greatest asset. The rest of the world, as represented by mutual friends, considered it the only thing that could be urged against either of them. While single, each had been popular. As a bachelor, young "Champ" Carter had filled his modest place acceptably. Hostesses sought him for dinners and week-end parties, men of his own years, for golf and tennis, and young girls liked him because when he talked to one of them he never talked of himself, or let his eyes wander toward any other girl. He had been brought up by a rich father in an expensive way, and the rich father had then died leaving Champneys alone in the world, with no money, and with even a few of his father's debts. These debts of honor the son, ever since leaving Yale, had been paying off. It had kept him very poor, for Carter had elected to live by his pen, and, though he wrote very carefully and slowly, the editors of the magazines had been equally careful and slow in accepting what he wrote.
With an income so uncertain that the only thing that could be said of it with certainty was that it was too small to support even himself, Carter should not have thought of matrimony. Nor, must it be said to his credit, did he think of it until the girl came along that he wanted to marry.
The trouble with Dolly Ingram was her mother. Her mother was a really terrible person. She was quite impossible. She was a social leader, and of such importance that visiting princes and society reporters, even among themselves, did not laugh at her. Her visiting list was so small that she did not keep a social secretary, but, it was said, wrote her invitations herself. Stylites on his pillar was less exclusive. Nor did he take his exalted but lonely position with less sense of humor. When Ingram died and left her many millions to dispose of absolutely as she pleased, even to the allowance she should give their daughter, he left her with but one ambition unfulfilled. That was to marry her Dolly to an English duke. Hungarian princes, French marquises, Italian counts, German barons, Mrs. Ingram could not see. Her son-in-law must be a duke. She had her eyes on two, one somewhat shopworn, and the other a bankrupt; and in training, she had one just coming of age. Already she saw her self a sort of a dowager duchess by marriage, discussing with real dowager duchesses the way to bring up teething earls and viscounts. For three years in Europe Mrs.Ingram had been drilling her daughter for the part she intended her to play. But, on returning to her native land, Dolly, who possessed all the feelings, thrills, and heart-throbs of which her mother was ignorant, ungratefully fell deeply in love with Champneys Carter, and he with her. It was always a question of controversy between them as to which had first fallen in love with the other. As a matter of history, honors were even.
He first saw her during a thunder storm, in the paddock at the races, wearing a rain-coat with the collar turned up and a Panama hat with the brim turned down. She was talking, in terms of affectionate familiarity, with Cuthbert's two-year- old, The Scout. The Scout had just lost a race by a nose, and Dolly was holding the nose against her cheek and comforting him. The two made a charming picture, and, as Carter stumbled upon it and halted, the race-horse lowered his eyes and seemed to say: "Wouldn't YOU throw a race for this?" And the girl raised her eyes and seemed to say: "What a nice-looking, bright- looking young man! Why don't I know who you are?"
So, Carter ran to find Cuthbert, and told him The Scout had gone lame. When, on their return, Miss Ingram refused to loosen her hold on The Scout's nose, Cuthbert apologetically mumbled Carter's name, and in some awe Miss Ingram's name, and then, to his surprise, both young people lost interest in The Scout, and wandered away together into the rain.
After an hour, when they parted at the club stand, for which Carter could not afford a ticket, he asked wistfully: "Do you often come racing?" and Miss Ingram said: "Do you mean, am I coming to-morrow?"
"I do!" said Carter.
"Then, why didn't you say that?" inquired Miss Ingram. "Otherwise I mightn't have come. I have the Holland House coach for to-morrow, and, if you'll join us, I'll save a place for you, and you can sit in our box.
"I've lived so long abroad," she explained, "that I'm afraid of not being simple and direct like other American girls. Do you think I'll get on here at home? "
"If you get on with every one else as well as you've got on with me," said Carter morosely, I will shoot myself."
Miss Ingram smiled thoughtfully. "At eleven, then," she said, "in front of the Holland House."
Carter walked away with a flurried, heated suffocation around his heart and a joyous lightness in his feet. Of the first man he met he demanded, "Who was the beautiful girl in the rain-coat?" And when the man told him, Carter left him without speaking. For she was quite the richest girl in America. But the next day that fault seemed to distress her so little that Carter, also, refused to allow it to rest on his conscience, and they were very happy. And each saw that they were happy because they were together.
The ridiculous mother was not present at the races, but after Carter began to call at their house and was invited to dinner, Mrs. Ingram received him with her habitual rudeness. As an impediment in the success of her ambition she never considered him. As a boy friend of her daughter's, she classed him with "her" lawyer and "her" architect and a little higher than the "person" who arranged the flowers. Nor, in her turn, did Dolly consider her mother; for within two months another matter of controversy between Dolly and Carter was as to who had first proposed to the other. Carter protested there never had been any formal proposal, that from the first they had both taken it for granted that married they would be. But Dolly insisted that because he had been afraid of her money, or her mother, he had forced her to propose to him.
"You could not have loved me very much," she complained, "if you'd let a little thing like money make you hesitate."
"It's not a little thing," suggested Carter. "They say it's several millions, and it happens to be YOURS. If it were MINE, now!" "Money," said Dolly sententiously, "is given people to make them happy, not to make them miserable."
"Wait until I sell my stories to the magazines," said Carter, "and then I will be independent and can support you."
The plan did not strike Dolly as one likely to lead to a hasty marriage. But he was sensitive about his stories, and she did not wish to hurt his feelings.
"Let's get married first," she suggested, "and then I can BUY you a magazine. We'll call it CARTER'S MAGAZINE and we will print nothing in it but your stories. Then we can laugh at the editors!"
"Not half as loud as they will," said Carter.
With three thousand dollars in bank and three stories accepted and seventeen still to hear from, and with Dolly daily telling him that it was evident he did not love her, Carter decided they were ready, hand in hand, to leap into the sea of matrimony. His interview on the subject with Mrs. Ingram was most painful. It lasted during the time it took her to walk out of her drawing-room to the foot of her staircase. She spoke to herself, and the only words of which Carter was sure were "preposterous" and "intolerable insolence." Later in the morning she sent a note to his flat, forbidding him not only her daughter, but the house in which her daughter lived, and even the use of the United States mails and the New York telephone wires. She described his conduct in words that, had they come from a man, would have afforded Carter every excuse for violent exercise.
Immediately in the wake of the note arrived Dolly, in tears, and carrying a dressing-case. "I have left mother!" she announced. "And I have her car downstairs, and a clergyman in it, unless he has run away. He doesn't want to marry us, because he's afraid mother will stop supporting his flower mission. You get your hat and take me where he can marry us. No mother can talk about the man I love the way mother talked about you, and think I won't marry him the same day!"
Carter, with her mother's handwriting still red before his eyes, and his self-love shaken with rage flourished the letter.
"And no mother," he shouted, "can call ME a 'fortune-hunter' and a 'cradle-robber' and think I'll make good by marrying her daughter! Not until she BEGS me to!"
Dolly swept toward him like a summer storm. Her eyes were wet and flashing. "Until WHO begs you to?" she demanded. "WHO are you marrying; mother or me?"
"If I marry you," cried Carter, frightened but also greatly excited, "your mother won't give you a penny!"
"And that," taunted Dolly, perfectly aware that she was ridiculous, "is why you won't marry me!"
For an instant, long enough to make her blush with shame and happiness, Carter grinned at her. "Now, just for that," he said, "I won't kiss you, and I WILL marry you!" But, as a matter of fact, he DID kiss her. Then he gazed happily around his small sitting-room. "Make yourself at home here," he directed, "while I pack my bag."
"I MEAN to make myself very much at home here," said Dolly joyfully, "for the rest of my life."
From the recesses of the flat Carter called: "The rent's paid only till September. After that we live in a hall bedroom and cook on a gas-stove. And that's no idle jest, either."
Fearing the publicity of the City Hall license bureau, they released the clergyman, much to the relief of that gentleman, and told the chauffeur to drive across the State line into Connecticut.
"It's the last time we can borrow your mother's car," said Carter, "and we'd better make it go as far as we can."
It was one of those days in May. Blue was the sky and sunshine was in the air, and in the park little girls from the tenements, in white, were playing they were queens. Dolly wanted to kidnap two of them for bridesmaids. In Harlem they stopped at a jeweler's shop, and Carter got out and bought a wedding-ring.
In the Bronx were dogwood blossoms and leaves of tender green and beds of tulips, and along the Boston Post Road, on their right, the Sound flashed in the sunlight; and on their left, gardens, lawns, and orchards ran with the road, and the apple trees were masses of pink and white.
Whenever a car approached from the rear, Carter pretended it was Mrs. Ingram coming to prevent the elopement, and Dolly clung to him. When the car had passed, she forgot to stop clinging to him.
In Greenwich Village they procured a license, and a magistrate married them, and they were a little frightened and greatly happy and, they both discovered simultaneously, outrageously hungry. So they drove through Bedford Village to South Salem, and lunched at the Horse and Hounds Inn, on blue and white china, in the same room where Major Andre was once a prisoner. And they felt very sorry for Major Andre, and for everybody who had not been just married that morning. And after lunch they sat outside in the garden and fed lumps of sugar to a charming collie and cream to a fat gray cat.
They decided to start housekeeping in Carter's flat, and so turned back to New York, this time following the old coach road through North Castle to White Plains, across to Tarrytown, and along the bank of the Hudson into Riverside Drive. Millions and millions of friendly folk, chiefly nurse- maids and traffic policemen, waved to them, and for some reason smiled.
"The joke of it is," declared Carter, "they don't know! The most wonderful event of the century has just passed into history. We are married, and nobody knows!"
But when the car drove away from in front of Carter's door, they saw on top of it two old shoes and a sign reading: "We have just been married." While they had been at luncheon, the chauffeur had risen to the occasion.
"After all," said Carter soothingly, "he meant no harm. And it's the only thing about our wedding yet that seems legal."
Three months later two very unhappy young people faced starvation in the sitting-room of Carter's flat. Gloom was written upon the countenance of each, and the heat and the care that comes when one desires to live, and lacks the wherewithal to fulfill that desire, had made them pallid and had drawn black lines under Dolly's eyes.
Mrs. Ingram had played her part exactly as her dearest friends had said she would. She had sent to Carter's flat, seven trunks filled with Dolly's clothes, eighteen hats, and another most unpleasant letter. In this, on the sole condition that Dolly would at once leave her husband, she offered to forgive and to support her.
To this Dolly composed eleven scornful answers, but finally decided that no answer at all was the most scornful.
She and Carter then proceeded joyfully to waste his three thousand dollars with that contempt for money with which on a honey-moon it should always be regarded. When there was no more, Dolly called upon her mother's lawyers and inquired if her father had left her anything in her own right. The lawyers regretted he had not, but having loved Dolly since she was born, offered to advance her any money she wanted. They said they felt sure her mother would "relent."
"SHE may," said Dolly haughtily. "I WON'T! And my husband can give me all I need. I only wanted something of my own, because I'm going to make him a surprise present of a new motor-car. The one we are using now does not suit us.
This was quite true, as the one they were then using ran through the subway.
As summer approached, Carter had suddenly awakened to the fact that he soon would be a pauper, and cut short the honey- moon. They returned to the flat, and he set forth to look for a position. Later, while still looking for it, he spoke of it as a "job." He first thought he would like to be an assistant editor of a magazine. But he found editors of magazines anxious to employ new and untried assistants, especially in June, were very few. On the contrary, they explained they were retrenching and cutting down expenses-- they meant they had discharged all office boys who received more than three dollars a week. They further "retrenched," by taking a mean advantage of Carter's having called upon them in person, by handing him three or four of his stories--but by this he saved his postage-stamps.
Each day, when he returned to the flat, Dolly, who always expected each editor would hastily dust off his chair and offer it to her brilliant husband, would smile excitedly and gasp, "Well?" and Carter would throw the rejected manuscripts on the table and say: "At least, I have not returned empty- handed." Then they would discover a magazine that neither they nor any one else knew existed, and they would hurriedly readdress the manuscripts to that periodical, and run to post them at the letter-box on the corner.
"Any one of them, if ACCEPTED," Carter would point out, "might bring us in twenty- five dollars. A story of mine once sold for forty; so to-night we can afford to dine at a restaurant where wine is NOT 'included.'"
Fortunately, they never lost their sense of humor. Otherwise the narrow confines of the flat, the evil smells that rose from the baked streets, the greasy food of Italian and Hungarian restaurants, and the ever-haunting need of money might have crushed their youthful spirits. But in time even they found that one, still less two, cannot exist exclusively on love and the power to see the bright side of things-- especially when there is no bright side. They had come to the point where they must borrow money from their friends, and that, though there were many who would have opened their safes to them, they had agreed was the one thing they would not do, or they must starve. The alternative was equally distasteful.
Carter had struggled earnestly to find a job. But his inexperience and the season of the year were against him. No newspaper wanted a dramatic critic when the only shows in town had been running three months, and on roof gardens; nor did they want a "cub" reporter when veterans were being "laid off" by the dozens. Nor were his services desired as a private secretary, a taxicab driver, an agent to sell real estate or automobiles or stocks. As no one gave him a chance to prove his unfitness for any of these callings, the fact that he knew nothing of any of them did not greatly matter. At these rebuffs Dolly was distinctly pleased. She argued they proved he was intended to pursue his natural career as an author.
That their friends might know they were poor did not affect her, but she did not want them to think by his taking up any outside "job" that they were poor because as a literary genius he was a failure. She believed in his stories. She wanted every one else to believe in them. Meanwhile, she assisted him in so far as she could by pawning the contents of five of the seven trunks, by learning to cook on a " Kitchenette," and to laundry her handkerchiefs and iron them on the looking-glass.
They faced each other across the breakfast-table. It was only nine o'clock, but the sun beat into the flat with the breath of a furnace, and the air was foul and humid.
"I tell you," Carter was saying fiercely, "you look ill. You are ill. You must go to the sea- shore. You must visit some of your proud, friends at East Hampton or Newport. Then I'll know you're happy and I won't worry, and I'll find a job. I don't mind the heat-and I'll write you love letters"--he was talking very fast and not looking at Dolly--"like those I used to write you, before----"
Dolly raised her hand. "Listen!" she said. "Suppose I leave you. What will happen? I'll wake up in a cool, beautiful brass bed, won't I--with cretonne window-curtains, and salt air blowing them about, and a maid to bring me coffee. And instead of a bathroom like yours, next to an elevator shaft and a fire-escape, I'll have one as big as a church, and the whole blue ocean to swim in. And I'll sit on the rocks in the sunshine and watch the waves and the yachts--"
"And grow well again!" cried Carter. "But you'll write to me," he added wistfully, "every day, won't you?"
In her wrath, Dolly rose, and from across the table confronted him.
"And what will I be doing on those rocks?" she cried. "You KNOW what I'll be doing! I'll be sobbing, and sobbing, and calling out to the waves: 'Why did he send me away? Why doesn't he want me? Because he doesn't love me. That's why! He doesn't LOVE me!' And you DON'T!" cried Dolly. "you DON'T!"
It took him all of three minutes to persuade her she was mistaken.
"Very well, then," sobbed Dolly, "that's settled. And there'll be no more talk of sending me away!
"There will NOT!" said Champneys hastily. "We will now," he announced, "go into committee of the whole and decide how we are to face financial failure. Our assets consist of two stories, accepted, but not paid for, and fifteen stories not accepted. In cash, he spread upon the table a meagre collection of soiled bills and coins. "We have twenty- seven dollars and fourteen cents. That is every penny we possess in the world."
Dolly regarded him fixedly and shook her head. "Is it wicked," she asked, "to love you so?"
"Haven't you been listening to me?" demanded Carter. Again Dolly shook her head.
"I was watching the way you talk. When your lips move fast they do such charming things."
"Do you know," roared Carter, "that we haven't a penny in the world, that we have nothing in this flat to eat?"
"I still have five hats," said Dolly.
"We can't eat hats," protested Champneys.
"We can sell hats!" returned Dolly. "They cost eighty dollars apiece!"
"When you need money," explained Carter, "I find it's just as hard to sell a hat as to eat it."
"Twenty-seven dollars and fourteen cents," repeated Dolly. She exclaimed remorsefully: "And you started with three thousand! What did I do with it?"
"We both had the time of our lives with it!" said Carter stoutly. "And that's all there is to that. Post-mortems," he pointed out, "are useful only as guides to the future, and as our future will never hold a second three thousand dollars, we needn't worry about how we spent the first one. No! What we must consider now is how we can grow rich quick, and the quicker and richer, the better. Pawning our clothes, or what's left of them, is bad economics. There's no use considering how to live from meal to meal. We must evolve something big, picturesque, that will bring a fortune. You have imagination; I'm supposed to have imagination, we must think of a plan to get money, much money. I do not insist on our plan being dignified, or even outwardly respectable; so long as it keeps you alive, it may be as desperate as--"
"I see!" cried Dolly; "like sending mother Black Hand letters!"
"Blackmail----" began that lady's son-in-law doubtfully.
"Or!" cried Dolly, "we might kidnap Mr. Carnegie when he's walking in the park alone, and hold him for ransom. Or"--she rushed on-- "we might forge a codicil to father's will, and make it say if mother shouldn't like the man I want to marry, all of father's fortune must go to my husband!"
"Forgery," exclaimed Champneys, "is going further than I----"
"And another plan," interrupted Dolly," that I have always had in mind, is to issue a cheaper edition of your book, 'The Dead Heat.' The reason the first edition of 'The Dead Heat' didn't sell----"
"Don't tell ME why it didn't sell," said Champneys. "I wrote it!"
"That book," declared Dolly loyally, "was never properly advertised. No one knew about it, so no one bought it!"
"Eleven people bought it!" corrected the author.
"We will put it in a paper cover and sell it for fifty cents," cried Dolly. " It's the best detective story I ever read, and people have got to know it is the best. So we'll advertise it like a breakfast food."
"The idea," interrupted Champneys, "is to make money, not throw it away. Besides, we haven't any to throw away. Dolly sighed bitterly.
"If only," she exclaimed, "we had that three thousand dollars back again! I'd save SO carefully. It was all my fault. The races took it, but it was I took you to the races."
"No one ever had to drag ME to the races," said Carter. " It was the way we went that was extravagant. Automobiles by the hour standing idle, and a box each day, and----"
"And always backing Dromedary," suggested Dolly. Carter was touched on a sensitive spot. "That horse," he protested loudly, "is a mighty good horse. Some day----"
"That's what you always said," remarked Dolly, "but he never seems to have his day." "It's strange," said Champneys consciously. "I dreamed of Dromedary only last night. Same dream over and over again." Hastily he changed the subject.
"For some reason I don't sleep well. I don't know why."
Dolly looked at him with all the love in her eyes of a mother over her ailing infant. "It's worrying over me, and the heat,"' she said. "And the garage next door, and the skyscraper going up across the street, might have something to do with it. And YOU," she mocked ten