Mr. J. Herbert Denby, between sips of his morning coffee next day in a secluded corner of the breakfast room of his hotel, was reading for the second time, with an inner glow of satisfaction, a letter which he had just received. It was a brief communication from Chester Bartlett complimenting him upon his success as a lecturer and announcing the manager’s forthcoming arrival in Chicago that very morning.
“I can’t resist the temptation,” Bartlett wrote, “to look in on one of your seances and catch His Royal Highness and yourself in action. I must congratulate you on the success which you have achieved in putting this stunt over on the natives and I have instructed the office to give you a twenty-five per cent increase in salary.”
Mr. Denby laid the letter down and decided that, after all, theatrical managers had their proper place in the scheme of existence. Up to that moment he had always been inclined to consider them as useless encumberers of the earth.
He picked up the morning paper which lay at his elbow, adjusted his glasses and turned to the front page. He glanced cursorily at a story in the left-hand column dealing with the newest series of what are technically known in newspaper circles as “Red Raids;” let his attention wander to an account of the launching of a new presidential boom and then took a look at the right hand corner. What he saw emblazoned there caused him to almost drop the cup which he had just daintily raised to his lips and provoked an audible spluttering that sent the head-waiter hurrying in his direction from the other side of the room.
“Anything wrong, sir?” deferentially inquired the chief servitor, noting with apprehension the startled mien of the eminent lecturer.
Mr. Denby tried to compose himself.
“Nothing important,” he managed to reply. “Just some unwelcome tidings from home. I’ll be all right in a moment or two.”
When the head-waiter had bowed himself away Mr. Denby turned to a perusal of the paper. The words which struck his eyes seemed to spell to him the collapse of all things temporal.
The harrowing details which followed were dressed up in such sarcastic verbiage that Mr. Denby’s soul went sick and his appetite for breakfast vanished. He paid his check and sought the seclusion of his room. He wished to hide his face from the public gaze and apply poultices to his wounded dignity.
Jimmy Martin, coming up unannounced, found him a half hour later gazing pensively out of the window—a picture of incarnate misery. Jimmy wasn’t in a particularly jaunty mood himself, but he assumed his best “cheery-oh” manner when he caught a glimpse of his associate’s face.
“What’s the matter, little song-bird?” he inquired breezily. “You look about as lonely as a bartender.”
Mr. Denby turned a pair of ineffably sad eyes on the press agent and sighed mournfully.
“I’m disgraced, Mr. Martin,” he said feebly, “irretrievably disgraced. I should never have gone into this masquerade—never. My saner judgment should have prevailed. I shall never recover from this. I’m the most miserable man in Chicago this morning—the most utterly miserable.”
“You’ve got another think coming, old popsy-wop,” replied Jimmy. “I’ve just seen his royal highness. You’re a care-free babe in arms compared to that bird. He’s passin’ on to New York on the twelve forty.”
“What I can’t understand,” said Mr. Denby, “is how the story got out. Have you any idea?”
“Yes, I have,” replied the press agent, slowly. “As a matter of fact I gave it out myself.”
“You gave it out yourself,” stammered the bewildered Mr. Denby. “I—I don’t understand. Why did you do such a thing as that?”
“Well, the low-down of it is that I had to. I was out to that Easton dame’s house yesterday afternoon with his royal jiblets and when I saw the way the poor nut was makin’ a fool out of herself over that little brown brother it just made me sick. He’d been milkin’ her for thousands and I could see he was layin’ lines to wish himself into an easy life at her expense. She’s a good-natured old gal, too, but she’d fallen for him so hard that she’d have believed him if he told her he was that Buddha party come back to earth for a little holiday.
“She told me about some fairy tale or other he’d pulled—something about a row with his father and how his allowance had been stopped and so forth and so on and when I took one last look at her at the front door and thought of that baby lollin’ around on sofas and lettin’ her wait on him and callin’ her a lot of flossy names so’s to keep his stock up I didn’t have the heart to let her go through with the marriage thing, story or no story. Somethin’ sort of caught hold of me and wouldn’t let me go on. I wonder what it was?”
“Some philosophers call it the categorical imperative,” replied Mr. Denby, thoughtfully.
“They do, eh? Well, maybe that’s a good name for it, but I’ve got a kind of a hunch that it was the little old Golden Rule that made me ashamed of myself. I thought the best of cramp Rajjy’s style would be to get word to that brother of the blushin’ bride so I got in to see him last night and coughed up everything. He’s a fine fellow. They don’t grow ’em better. He was mighty grateful, but he said it wouldn’t do any good for him to say anything to her. He figured that would make it worse. He said she wouldn’t believe him. The only thing that’d get to her, he said, would be to have some paper expose his royal job-lots and make him ridiculous in the eyes of all her friends.
“So I came down town and slipped an ear-full to Cunningham, a friend of mine on the Times, and he did the rest. I’m sorry, old boy, but I just couldn’t help it. It’d a been one of............