# Tales from a Rolltop Desk/The Prize Package

TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK
THE PRIZE PACKAGE
Lester Valiant came back from Oxford with the degree of B. Litt., some unpaid tailors' bills, and the conviction that the world owed him a living because he had been suffered within the sacred precincts of Balliol College for three years. A Rhodes scholarship is one of the most bounteous gifts the world holds for a young man; but in Lester's case Oxford piled upon Harvard left him with a perilous lot to unlearn. You can tell a lot about a man when you know what he is proud of; and Lester was really proud of having worn a wrist watch and a dinner jacket with blue silk lapels three or four years before they became habitual in the region of Herald Square. But let us be just: he was also proud of his first editions of Conrad and George Moore; for he was much afflicted with literature.
​Lester originated in the yonder part of Indiana, but when he returned from Oxford he made up his mind to live in New York. He felt it appropriate that he should be connected in some way with the production of literature, and after hiring a bedroom on the fourth floor of an old house on Madison Avenue, where two friends of his were living, he set out to visit the publishers.
There is a third-rate club in London called the Litterateurs' Club. A few years ago it was in urgent need of funds, and a brilliant idea struck the managing committee. Every writer listed in the American "Who's Who" was circularized and received a very flattering letter saying that, owing to the distinction of his contributions to contemporary letters, the Litterateurs' Club of London would be very much pleased to welcome him as a member, upon a nominal payment of five guineas. About seven hundred guileless persons complied, and transatlantic travel became appreciably denser on account of these men of letters crossing to England to revel in their importance as members of a club of which no one in London has ever heard. And by some fluke the managing committee had got hold of the name of Lester Valiant, then at Oxford—perhaps because he had once published a story in the Cantharides Magazine. Probably they ​bought a mailing list from some firm in Tottenham Court Road.
Cecil Rhodes's executors paid his five guineas, and he had his cards engraved:
LESTER G. P. VALIANT
The use of these pasteboards brought him ready entrée in the offices of New York publishers. If he had not been so eager to impress the gentlemen he interviewed with his literary connoisseurship, undoubtedly he would have landed a job much sooner. But publishers are justly suspicious of anything that savours of literature, and Lester's innocent allusions to George Moore and Chelsea did much to alarm them. At length, however, Mr. Arundel, the president of the Arundel Company, took pity on the young man and gave him a desk in his editorial department and fifteen dollars a week. Mr. Arundel had once walked through the quadrangle of Balliol, and he was not disposed ​to be too severe toward Lester's naïve mannerisms.
To his amazement and dismay, Lester found his occupation not even faintly flavoured with literature. He was set to work writing press notes about authors of whom he had never heard at Oxford and whose books he soon discovered to be amateurish or worse. He had been nourishing himself upon the English conception of a publisher's office: a quaint, dingy rookery somewhere in Clifford's Inn, where gentlemen in spats and monocles discuss, over cups of tea and platters of anchovy toast, realism and the latest freak of the Spasmodists. The Arundel office was a wilderness of light walnut desks and filing cases, throbbing with typewriters, adding machines, and hoarse cries from the shipping room at the rear. Here sat Lester, gloomily writing blurbs for literary editors, and wondering how long it would be before he would earn forty dollars a week. He reckoned that was what one ought to get before incurring matrimony.
Like all young men of twenty-three, Lester thought a good deal about marriage, although he had not yet chosen his quarry. The feeling that he could marry almost anybody was delicious to him. But this heavenly eclecticism endures such ​a short time! For youth abhors generalities and seeks the concrete instance. Also, much reading of George Moore sets the mind brooding on these things. Lester used to stroll in Madison Square at dusk before going back to his room, and his visions were often of a dark-panelled apartment in the Gramercy Park neighbourhood where an open fire would be burning and someone sitting in silk stockings to endear him as he returned from the office.
His arrival caused something of an upheaval in the placid breasts of the two old college friends whose sitting room he shared on Madison Avenue. They were sturdy and steady creatures, more familiar with Edward Earle Purinton and Orison Swett Marden than with Swinburne and Crackanthorpe and Mallarmé. To his secret annoyance, Lester learned that both Jack Hulbert and Harry Hanover were earning more than thirty dollars a week, and he even had an uneasy suspicion that they were saving some of it. When he spoke about Beardsley or Will Rothenstein or the Grafton Galleries they were apt to turn the talk upon Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. When he showed them his greatest treasure, a plaster life mask of himself that a sculpturing friend in Chelsea had made, they were frankly ribald. Jack was in the cir​culation department of a popular magazine, and Harry performed some unexplained tasks in the office of a tea importer. Lester was fond of them both, but it seemed to him a bitter travesty that these simple-minded Philistines should possess so much higher earning power than he. So he thought of taking a garret in Greenwich Village, but in the Madison Avenue house he was sharing a big sitting room at little expense. So he spread his books about, hung up his framed letter from Przybyszewski, put his hammered brass tea caddy on the reading table, and made the best of the situation.
Even on fifteen dollars a week a young man may have a very amusing time in New York. For his room and breakfast Lester paid six dollars a week; for his other meals he used to hunt out the little table-d'hôte restaurants of which there are so many in the crosstown streets between the Avenue and Broadway. To come in from the snowy street on a winter evening, sit down to a tureen of Moretti's hot minestrone, open a new packet of ten-cent cigarettes, and prop up a copy of the Oblique Review against the cruet stand, seemed to Lester the prismatic fringe of all that was je ne sais quoi and ne plus ultra. The dandruffians in the little orchestra under the stairs would hammer out some ​braying operatic strains, and Lester would lean back in a swirl of acrid tobacco smoke and survey his surroundings with great content. It was while he was conjugating the verb to live in this manner, and sowing (as someone has said) a notable crop of wild table d'hôtes, that he first realized the importance of Pearl Denver. Miss Pearl was Mr. Arundel's personal stenographer, a young woman remarkable in her profession by the fact that she never exposed the details of her camisole to the public gaze; also when the boss dictated she was able to rescue his subordinate clauses from the airy vacancy in which they hung suspended, and hook them up into new sentences capable of grammatical analysis. As a stenog she was distinctly above par, but not above parsing.
Lester, of course, had a speaking acquaintance with Miss Denver, but her existence had never really penetrated the warm aura of egocentric thoughts that enhaloed him. He knew her simply as one of the contingents of the office; and the office had proved a great disappointment to him. Not one of the "firm" (he called them "directors") wore spats; not one of them had shown the faintest interest in his suggestion that they publish a volume of Clara Tice's drawings. Lester must be ​pardoned for having dismissed Miss Denver, if he had thought of her at all, as not sui generis.
We now proceed more rapidly. Entering the hallway of Moretti's on Thirty-fifth Street, about half past one cocktail of a winter evening, he found the cramped vestibule crowded by several persons taking off their wraps. A copy of the Oblique Review, unmistakable in its garlic-green cover, fell at his feet. Thinking it his own, he picked it up and was about to pocket it when a red tam o'shanter in front of him turned round. He saw the bobbed brown hair and gray eyes of Miss Denver. "Well, Mr. Valiant, what are you doing with my magazine?"
"Oh—why—I beg your pardon! I thought it was mine! I'm awfully sorry!" He was keenly embarrassed, and pulled his own copy out of his overcoat pocket as an evidence of good faith.
She laughed. "I don't wonder you made the mistake," she said. "Probably you thought you were the only person in New York reading the Oblique!"
He felt the alarm that every shy or cautious youth experiences in the presence of beauty, and, with a mumbled apology, fled hastily to a little table in a corner. There, pretending to read some preposterous farrago of free verse, he watched Miss ​Denver meet another girl who was evidently waiting for her. The two chattered with such abandon, smoked so many cigarettes, and seemed so thoroughly at home that Lester envied them their savoir. Manœuvring his spaghetti and parmesan, his gaze passed as direct as the cartoonist's dotted line to the charming contour of the stenographer's cheek and neck. His equanimity was quite overset. Never before had he gazed with seeing eye upon the demure creature sorting out Mr. Arundel's mind into paragraphs. Human nature is what it is; let Lester's first thought be confessed: "I wonder if she knows what my salary is?"
At last, after smoking many cigarettes and skimming over the Oblique Review, Lester felt it was his move. He walked down the room, looking at his wrist watch with a slight frown as he passed her table. At the door he saw by the reflection in a mirror that she had not even looked up. He hurried back to Madison Avenue, pausing to sniff the crystal frosty air. At the corner of Fifth he stood for a moment, inhaling the miraculous clearness of the night and pondering on the relative values of free verse and ordered rhythms as modes of self-expression.
In spite of a certain bumptiousness among males, Lester was painfully shy with nubile women, and ​it was several days before he had opportunity for further speech with Miss Denver. Moretti's is a fifty-cent table d'hôte, and his regimen was calculated on a forty-cent limit for dinner; but after this meeting with the Oblique Review's fairest abonnée he haunted the place for some evenings. Then one day, taking in some copy for a book jacket to be approved by the sales manager, he encountered Miss Denver in the sample room. During working hours she was "strictly business," and he admired the trim white blouse, the satin-smooth neck, and the small, capable hands jotting pothooks in her notebook as she took a long telephone call. She put down the receiver, and smiled pleasantly at him.
"Don't you go to Moretti's any more?" he asked, and then regretted the brusqueness of the question.
"Sometimes," she said. "Usually when I buy the Oblique I go to a Hartford Lunch. I can sit there as long as I want and read, with doughnuts and coffee."
Lester had a curious feeling of oscillation somewhere to the left of his middle waistcoat button. As the little girl said on the Coney Island switchback, he felt as though he had freckles on his stomach.
​"Will you come to Moretti's with me some night?" he asked.
"I'd love to," she said. "I must hurry now. Mr. Arundel's waiting for this phone call."
A little later in the day, after a good deal of heartburning, Lester called her up from his desk.
"How about to-morrow night?" he said, and she accepted.
Coursing back to his chamber the next evening, Lester was a little worried about the ceremonial demanded by the occasion. Should he put on white linen and a dinner jacket, becoming the conquering male of the upper classes? But the recollection of the Oblique Review suggested that a touch of negligée would be more appropriate. A clean, soft collar and a bow tie of lavender silk were his concessions to unconvention. He was about to scrub out a minute soup stain on the breast of his coat, but concluded that as a badge of graceful carelessness this might remain. At a tobacconist's he bought a package of cheap Russian cigarettes, such as he imagined a Bolshevik might smoke.
There she came, tripping along the street, with something of the quick, alcaic motion of an Undersmith on high. He waved gayly. She depressed ​her shift key and reversed the ribbon. He double-spaced, and they entered the restaurant together.
Lester felt an intellectual tremor as they sat down at a corner table. Never had his mind seemed so relentlessly clear, so keen to leap upon the problems of life and tessellate them. It was as though all his past experience had cumulated and led up to this peak of existence. "Now for a close analysis of Female Mind," was his secret thought as he settled in his chair. He felt almost sorry for this gay, defenceless little shred of humanity who had cast herself under his domineering gaze. A masculine awareness of size and power filled him. And yet—she seemed quite unterrified.
As they began on the antipasto he thought to himself: "I must start very gently. Women like men to veil their power." So he said:
"That was funny, my picking up your magazine the other night, wasn't it? You know I thought it was my copy."
"Oh, the dear old Oblique! Isn't it a scream? I read myself to sleep with it every night. We'll have to make the most of it while we can, because Mr. Arundel says it can't pay its paper bill much longer."
This irreverence rather startled Lester, who was ​writing an article "On the Art of Clara Tice" which he had been hoping the Oblique would buy. In fact, he was startled quite out of the careful conversational paradigm he had planned. He found himself getting a little ahead of his barrage.
"Does Mr. Arundel read it?" he asked.
"Heavens, no!" cried Miss Denver, and effervesced with laughter. "He would rather face a firing squad than read that kind of stuff. But he has an interest in the concern that supplies their paper."
The matter of paper had never occurred to Lester before. Of course he knew a magazine had to have something to print on, but he had never thought of the editors of a radical review being embarrassed by such a paltry consideration.
"Is Mr. Arundel literary?" he asked.
Miss Denver found this very whimsical. "Say, are you kidding me?" she said, with tilted eyebrows. "The chief says literature is the curse of the publishing business. Every time somebody puts over some highbrow stuff on him we lose money on it. The only kind of literature that gets under his ribs is reports from the sales department."
"That's very Philistine, isn't it?"
"Sure it is, but it puts the frogs in the pay envelopes, so what of it?"
"Well, I should expect the head of a big pub​lishing house to be at least interested in some form of literary expression."
"You should worry! That's what we hires you for. Besides he has a literary passion, too—Walt Mason. He thinks Walt is the greatest poet in the world."
"Walter Mason?" murmured Lester. "I don't think I know his work."
"Hasn't Walt made Oxford yet?" asked Miss Denver. "He writes the prose poems in the evening papers, syndicate stuff, you know. Printed to look like prose, just the opposite of the free-verse gag." She smiled reminiscently, and quoted:
When I am as dry as a fish up a tree, then I to the hydrant repair, and fill myself up, without ticket or fee, with the water that's eddying there. I drink all I want—half a gallon or more—and then I lie down on my couch; when I rise in the morning my head isn't sore and I don't wear a dark brindle grouch———"
"Is there any free-verse stuff that can cover that?" she asked.
Lester was somewhat disconcerted. His assessment of Female Mind did not seem to be proceeding methodically. He played for time.
"I thought you enjoyed the Oblique?"
"As a joke, yes: I laugh myself giddy over it. But I know darn well that kind of junk won't last. ​By and by the ghost'll quit putting up and the editors will get jobs as ticket choppers. I guess I'm a Philistine!"
With this deliciously impudent creature beaming at him, Lester felt himself cursedly at a disadvantage. Neither Harvard nor Balliol had informed him about this Walter Mason, and though he had seven hundred quips and anecdotes indexed in a scrapbook marked Jocoseria, none of them seemed to bubble up just now. Darn the girl, her mind wouldn't stand still long enough for him to take its temperature. It was like trying to write captions for the movies while the film was running. He blew a cloud of blue Russian vapour across the board, and smiled at her in a tolerant, veni-vidi-Bolsheviki kind of way. Behind his forehead he was fighting desperately to catch up.
As they wrestled with the spaghetti he remembered that someone had told him that publishers usually depend on the literary judgment of their wives. Perhaps that was the case with Mr. Arundel? But Miss Denver laughed aloud at the suggestion.
"Wrong again!" she said. "He's not married. Petunia Veal, the author of 'Sveltschmerz,' has been angling for him for years, and lots of other lady authors, too. He's so sentimental, he's escaped 'em all so far."
​She bubbled and chuckled and gurgled her way through the rest of Moretti's menu, amazing him more and more by the spontaneity, sophistication, and charm of her wit. He escorted her home, and then stood under a lamp-post for three minutes removing the soup stain with a handkerchief. "She's immense!" he said to himself. "Why she's—she's a poem by William Butler Yeats!"
As an afterthought, he made a mental memorandum to visit the library and look up the work of Walter Mason.
A few days later Mr. Arundel sent for Lester, who hurried to the private office with visions of a raise in salary. The president was sitting at his desk turning over some papers; he motioned Lester to a chair and seemed curiously loath to begin conversation. At last he turned, saying:
"Mr. Valiant, your life at Oxford did a great deal to mitigate your literary sensibilities?"
Lester hardly knew what to say, and murmured some meaningless syllables.
"I think that your abilities can be of very great service to us," continued Mr. Arundel, "and as an evidence of that I am asking the cashier to raise your salary five dollars a week."
Lester bowed gently; he was not capable of articulate speech.
​"I want to ask you a rather delicate question," pursued the president, who seemed as much embarrassed as his visitor. "Do you ever write poetry?"
Lester's voice was amazingly hoarse and choky, but in a spasm of puzzlement and gratification he ejaculated: "Sometimes!"
"What I really mean," said Mr. Arundel, "is this: do you ever write verses of a sentimental nature—hum—what might be called endearments?"
The young man sat speechless in surprise and embarrassment. As a matter of fact, he had been trolling some amatory staves in secret, in honour of Miss Denver; and he imagined they had come in some way under his employer's eye.
"Please do not be alarmed," said Mr. Arundel, seeing his discomfiture. "This is purely a matter of business. As it happens, I have a need for some poems of an intimately sentimental character, and, being totally unfitted to produce them myself, I wondered if you would sell me some? I would be glad to pay market rates for them."
Still Lester could do no more than bow.
"I shall have to be frank," said Mr. Arundel, "and I must beg you to keep this matter absolutely confidential. I have your word of honour in that regard?"
​"Absolutely," said Lester, quite vanquished by amazement.
The president's sense of humour seemed to have mastered his diffidence. A quaint smile lurked behind the furrows that years of royalties had carved on his face.
"I want to do some wooing in rhyme; and I want you to turn out some verses for me of a superlatively lyric sort, it being understood that I purchase all rights in these poems, including that of authorship. Would you be willing to do me half a dozen, at say ten dollars each?"
Lester, although staggered by the proposal, was still able to multiply six by ten, and his answer was affirmative and speedy.
"I do not wish to give you any specifications as to the object of your vicarious amour," said the president. "It is a lady, of course; young and fair. How soon can you despoil the English language of half a dozen songs of passion worthy of the best Oxford traditions?"
Jack and Harry found Lester good company that evening. When they got back to the sitting room on Madison Avenue he was lying on a couch, nursing a large calabash and contemplating the ceiling with dreamy brow. As they entered, stripping off their overcoats and chucking the night ​extras across the room at him, he smiled the rich, tolerant smile of Alexander at the Macedon polo grounds.
"Well, Lester," said Jack, "why the Cheshire-cat grin?"
"I've sold sixty dollars' worth of verse," said Lester, benignly; "also I've had a raise."
"My God!" said Harry. "Think how many starving cubists you could endow on that! There'll be a riot in Greenwich Village."
"Pity the poor bartenders on a night like this!" cried Jack. Then they went to Browne's chophouse for dinner. After a three-finger steak and several beakers of dog's nose, Lester was readily persuaded to enounce the first number of his sonnet sequence, which had accreted or (as its author expressed it) nucleolated, while he was walking home from the office.
"Sonnet, in the Petrarchan mode, item No. 1," he proclaimed:
"Seems strange," said Harry, "that a man can buy a good meal with a thing like that!"
"What is a petrarch, anyway?" said Jack.
"Gee, you'll have to brush your hair to keep it out of your eyebrows," said Harry. "Herod was petrarch of Galilee, don't you remember? It's a kind of comptroller or efficiency expert."
"Nonsense," said Harry. "Herod was patriarch of Galilee, not petrarch."
At this moment Lester was busy multiplying twenty by fifty-two, and adding sixty, and he did not attempt to put Laura's friend right in the eyes of his companions.
The next morning, at the office, Lester took occasion to stroll over to the corner where Miss Denver was tickling the keys. Her delicious, able fingers flashed like the boreal aurora; the incomparable smoothness of her neck and throat fascinated him; her clear, blue-washed gray eyes startled him with their merry archness. Wam​bling inwardly, he met her gaze as coolly as he might.
'Come to Moretti's to-night?" he asked.
"I'm sorry; I've got a date to-night."
He ached in spirit. "To-morrow night?"
She hesitated a moment, tapping the desk with a rosy finger nail. Then her face brightened. "I'd love to."
As he returned to his desk and the dull routine of writing press notes for Petunia Veal's latest novel, he uttered a phrase that he had caught from Harry Hanover. It was the first sign of his emancipation from Mallarmé and the Oxford Movement, for certainly that phrase had never been heard on the quilted lawns of Balliol: "She's a prize package, all right, all right!"
Ten days elapsed. All six sonnets had been delivered and paid for, and Mr. Arundel had bargained for a few extra rondeaux, at five dollars each.
Antipasto, minestrone, breadsticks, force-meat balls, and here we are again at the spaghetti and Hackensack Chianti. Lester had mailed his MS. on "Clara Tice and the Pleinaerists of Greenwich Village" to the Oblique Review that afternoon, and had calculated that the editors could not in any decency offer him less than fifty—or perhaps ​forty—dollars for it. This, added to 20 by 52 plus 60 plus the rondeaux and other probable increments, would certainly support two in a garret for some time. He also had hopes of selling some obscenarios for the movies. Pearl would probably want to go on with her work, for a while at any rate. She was so independent! But those clear eyes of hers, like a March sky with teasings of April in it, how tender and laughing they were! A few nights ago they had taken a long bus ride together, and she had forgotten her muff. She let him warm her hands instead. He went home that night feeling strong enough to bite lamp-posts in two, and had waked up Jack and Harry to put them right about Petrarch.
Pearl was teaching Lester to twirl up his spaghetti with fork and spoon, instead of draping it out of his mouth like Spanish moss. Suddenly she laughed.
"What did I tell you!" she said. "The dear old Oblique has gone blooie! Mr. Arundel called up the editor to-day and told him the Barmecide Company won't supply him with any more paper until he pays his bills. Of course that means he'll have to quit."
Lester was touched in two vital spots: his own private hopes, and his zeal for fly-specked ​literature. "Shades of Frank Harris!" he cried.
"If that isn't just like Arundel! Why, that man is pure and simple bourgeois! I never heard of such a thing. Has he no feeling at all for art?"
Pearl laughed—the pure, musical laugh of careless girlishness, but the recording angel caught in the nimble chords a faint overtone of something else—like the tinkle of ice in a misty tumbler. "Oh, he has his own ideas about art," she said. "He's taken to writing poetry himself. You never heard such stuff—I've been meaning to tell you. What does 'pullulate' mean?"
Lester's valiant heart, Lester's manly hands that had acted as a muff on a Riverside Drive bus, trembled and stiffened. "It pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme," she quoted gayly. "Now what do you make of that, as referring to Mr. Arundel's heart? Sultry is right, too!"
Lion-hearted Harvard, oak-bosomed Balliol, and all the mature essences of manhood were needed to keep Lester calm. How had she seen these secret strains? She must have been peeping into the chief's private correspondence. He hesitated during six inches of spaghetti. "Search me!" he said. "Is it in Walter Mason?"
"No, it's his own stuff, I tell you. "O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!" she chanted, and ​her laughter popped like a champagne cork. The horrid truth burst upon him. The boss was courting the angel of the office with the very ammunition that Lester himself had furnished, and his vow of secrecy forbade him to disclose the truth. Oh, the paltry meanness of fate, the villainy of circumstance! It is impossible to describe the pangs it cost him to dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal the anguish he felt. But dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal he did, and though his heart glowed like an angry cigar stub, he reached home at last.
There he sat down at his table, and amid the healthy snores of his roommates he concocted a fine piece of literary ordnance. Late and grimly he toiled and contrived. At length he had fashioned a sonnet which would be the golden sum and substance of the previous sequence; a cry of the heart so splendidly forensic that Mr. Arundel would pounce upon it, yielding his crisp steel engraving in return. But see, the asp concealed in the basket of fruit, the adder in the woodpile! Read Lester's sonnet as an acrostic:
The discerning reader will spot the glittering falchion of malice lurking in the initial letters. Read them downward, they convey: O MY HOW I HATE YOU! Lester had but to convey this poisoned comfit to his chief: then, playing upon the artless Pearl, persuade her to show it to him—point out the murderous duplicity of the love token; and she would recoil into his arms. Greenwich Village would sound the timbrel of joy, and even the Oblique might find a softer-hearted papyrus vendor. Vos plaudite! With such thoughts, amid the wailing matin song of boarding-house steam pipes, our hero fell into a brief slumber.
That morning Lester hastened to the office. He waited feverishly until the hour when the chief usually arrived, then visited the private office. There he found the vice-president going over the ​morning mail. "Is—is Mr. Arundel in?" he stammered.
"Mr. Arundel isn't here to-day," said the vice-president. "He will be away two weeks."
Lester retired queasily, and hurried to the corner sacred to Miss Denver. Here he found one of the other stenographers using Pearl's machine.
"Where's Miss Denver?" he asked.
The young lady, of humorous turn, looked at her wrist watch. "Getting ready to go over the top," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Haven't you heard? She marries the boss this morning."