The Green Mouse
Her parent emitted a low, melodious sort of sound, a kind of mellifluous
howl.
"Pa-pah!" they exclaimed in gentle consternation.
He beat at the empty air for a moment like a rotund fowl about to seek
its roost. Suddenly he ran distractedly at an armchair and kicked it.
They watched him in sorrowful amazement.
"If we are going to sketch Cooper's Bluff this morning," observed
Drusilla to Flavilla, "I think we had better go--quietly--by way of the
kitchen garden. Evidently Pa-pah does not care for Mr. Yates."
Orlando, the family cat, strolled in, conciliatory tail hoisted. Mr. Carr
hurled a cushion at Orlando, then beat madly upon his own head with both
hands. Servants respectfully gave him room; some furniture was
overturned--a chair or two--as he bounced upward and locked and bolted
himself in his room.
What transports of fury he lived through there nobody else can know; what
terrible visions of vengeance lit up his outraged intellect, what cold
intervals of quivering hate, what stealthy schemes of reprisal, what
awful retribution for young Mr. Yates were hatched in those dreadful
moments, he alone could tell. And as he never did tell, how can I know?
However, in about half an hour his expression of stony malignity changed
to a smile so cunningly devilish that, as he caught sight of himself in
the mirror, his corrugated countenance really startled him.
"I must smooth out--smooth out!" he muttered. "Smoothness does it!" And
he rang for a servant and bade him seek out a certain Mr. Yates among the
throng of young men who had been taking snapshots.
XV
DRUSILLA
_During Which Chapter Mr. Carr Sings and One of His Daughters Takes her
Postgraduate_
Mr. Yates came presently, ushered by Ferdinand, and looking extremely
worried. Mr. Carr received him in his private office with ominous
urbanity.
"Mr. Yates," he said, forcing a distorted smile, "I have rather abruptly
decided to show you exactly how one of the Destyn-Carr instruments is
supposed to work. Would you kindly stand here--close by this table?"
Mr. Yates, astounded, obeyed.
"Now," said Mr. Carr, with a deeply creased smile, "here is the famous
Destyn-Carr apparatus. That's quite right--take a snapshot at it without
my permission----"
"I--I thought----"
"Quite right, my boy; I intend you shall know all about it. You see it
resembles the works of a watch.... Now, when I touch this spring the
receiver opens and gathers in certain psychic waves which emanate from
the subconscious personality of--well, let us say you, for example!...
And now I touch this button. You see that slender hairspring of Rosium
uncurl and rise, trembling and waving about like a tentacle?"
Young Yates, notebook in hand, recovered himself sufficiently to nod. Mr.
Carr leered at him:
"That tentacle," he explained, "is now seeking some invisible, wireless,
psychic current along which it is to transmit the accumulated psychic
waves. As soon as the wireless current finds the subconscious personality
of the woman you are destined to love and marry some day----"
"I?" exclaimed young Yates, horrified.
"Yes, you. Why not? Do you mind my trying it on you?"
"But I am already in love," protested the young man, turning, as usual, a
ready red. "I don't care to have you try it on me. Suppose that machine
should connect me with--some other--girl----"
"It has!" cried Carr with a hideous laugh as a point of bluish-white fire
tipped the tentacle for an instant. "You're tied fast to something
feminine! Probably a flossy typewriter--or a burlesque actress--somebody
you're fitted for, anyway!" He clapped on his monocle, and glared
gleefully at the stupefied young man.
"That will teach you to enter my premises and hold my daughter's hand
when she is drawing innocent pictures of Cooper's Bluff!" he shouted.
"That will teach you to write poems to my eighteen-year-old daughter,
Drusilla; that will teach you to tell her you are in love with her--you
young pup!"
"I am in love with her!" said Yates, undaunted; but he was very white
when he said it. "I do love her; and if you had behaved halfway decently
I'd have told you so two weeks ago!"
Mr. Carr turned a delicate purple, then, recovering, laughed horribly.
"Whether or not you were once in love with my daughter is of no
consequence now. That machine has nullified your nonsense! That
instrument has found you your proper affinity--doubtless below stairs----"
"I _am_ still in love with Drusilla," repeated Yates, firmly.
"I tell you, you're not!" retorted Carr. "Didn't I turn that machine on
you? It has never missed yet! The Green Mouse has got _you_ in the
Mouseleum!"
"You are mistaken," insisted Yates, still more firmly. "I was in love
with your daughter Drusilla before you started the machine; and I love
her yet! Now! At the present time! This very instant I am loving her!"
"You can't!" shouted Carr.
"Yes, I can. And I do!"
"No, you don't! I tell you it's a scientific and psychical impossibility
for you to continue to love her! Your subconscious personality is now in
eternal and irrevocable accord and communication with the subconscious
personality of some chit of a girl who is destined to love and marry you!
And she's probably a ballet-girl, at that!"
"I shall marry Drusilla!" retorted the young man, very pale; "because I
am quite confident that she loves me, though very probably she doesn't
know it yet."
"You talk foolishness!" hissed Carr. "This machine has settled the whole
matter! Didn't you see that spark?"
"I saw a spark--yes!"
"And do you mean to tell me you are not beginning to feel queer?"
"Not in the slightest."
"Look me squarely in the eye, young man, and tell me whether you do not
have a sensation as though your heart were cutting capers?"
"Not in the least," said Yates, calmly. "If that machine worked at all it
wouldn't surprise me if you yourself had become entangled in it--caught
in your own machine!"
"W-what!" exclaimed Carr, faintly.
"It wouldn't astonish me in the slightest," repeated Yates, delighted to
discover the dawning alarm in the older man's features. "_You_ opened the
receiver; _you_ have psychic waves as well as I. _I_ was in love at the
time; _you_ were not. What was there to prevent your waves from being
hitched to a wireless current and, finally, signaling the subconscious
personality of--of some pretty actress, for example?"
Mr. Carr sank nervously onto a chair; his eyes, already wild, became
wilder as he began to realize the risk he had unthinkingly taken.
"Perhaps _you_ feel a little--queer. You look it," suggested the young
man, in a voice made anxious by an ever-ready sympathy. "Can I do
anything? I am really very sorry to have spoken so."
A damp chill gathered on the brow of Bushwyck Carr. He _did_ feel a
trifle queer. A curious lightness--a perfectly inexplicable buoyancy
seemed to possess him. He was beginning to feel strangely youthful; the
sound of his own heart suddenly became apparent. To his alarm it was
beating playfully, skittishly. No--it was not even beating; it was
skipping.
"Y-Yates," he stammered, "you don't think that I could p-possibly have
become inadvertently mixed up with that horrible machine--do you?"
Now Yates was a generous youth; resentment at the treatment meted out to
him by this florid, bad-tempered and pompous gentleman changed to
instinctive sympathy when he suddenly realized the plight his future
father-in-law might now be in.
"Yates," repeated Mr. Carr in an agitated voice, "tell me honestly: _do_
you think there is anything unusual the matter with me? I--I seem to
f-feel unusually--young. Do I look it? Have I changed? W-watch me while
I walk across the room."
Mr. Carr arose with a frightened glance at Yates, put on his hat, and
fairly pranced across the room. "Great Heavens!" he faltered; "my hat's
on one side and my walk is distinctly jaunty! Do you notice it, Yates?"
"I'm afraid I do, Mr. Carr."
"This--this is infamous!" gasped Mr. Carr. "This is--is outrageous! I'm
forty-five! I'm a widower! I detest a jaunty widower! I don't want to be
one; I don't want to----"
Yates gazed at him with deep concern.
"Can't you help lifting your legs that way when you walk--as though a
band were playing? Wait, I'll straighten your hat. Now try it again."
Mr. Carr pranced back across the room.
"I _know_ I'm doing it again," he groaned, "but I can't help it! I--I
feel so gay--dammit!--so frivolous--it's--it's that infernal machine.
W-what am I to do, Yates," he added piteously, "when the world looks
so good to me?"
"Think of your family!" urged Yates. "Think of--of Drusilla."
"Do you know," observed Carr, twirling his eyeglass and twisting his
mustache, "that I'm beginning not to care what my family think!... Isn't
it amazing, Yates? I--I seem to be somebody else, several years younger.
Somewhere," he added, with a flourish of his monocle--"somewhere on earth
there is a little birdie waiting for me."
"Don't talk that way!" exclaimed Yates, horrified.
"Yes, I will, young man. I repeat, with optimism and emphasis, that
_somewhere_ there is a birdie----"
"Mr. Carr!"
"Yes, merry old Top!"
"May I use your telephone?"
"I don't care what you do!" said Carr, gayly. "Use my telephone if you
like; pull it out by the roots and throw it over Cooper's Bluff, for all
I care! But"--and a sudden glimmer of reason seemed to come over him--"if
you have one grain of human decency left in you, you won't drag me and my
terrible plight into that scurrilous New York paper of yours."
"No," said Yates, "I won't. And that ends my career on Park Row. I'm
going to telephone my resignation."
Mr. Carr gazed calmly around and twisted his mustache with a satisfied
and retrospective smile.
"That's very decent of you, Yates; you must pardon me; I was naturally
half scared to death at first; but I realize you are acting very
handsomely in this horrible dilemma----"
"Naturally," interrupted Yates. "I must stand by the family into which I
am, as you know, destined to marry."
"To be sure," nodded Carr, absently; "it really looks that way, doesn't
it! And, Yates, you have no idea how I hated you an hour ago."
"Yes, I have," said Yates.
"No, you really have not, if you will permit me to contradict you, merry
old Top. I--but never mind now. You have behaved in an unusually
considerate manner. Who the devil are you, anyway?"
Yates informed him modestly.
"Well, why didn't you say so, instead of letting me bully you! I've known
your father for twenty years. Why didn't you tell me you wanted to marry
Drusilla, instead of coming and blushing all over the premises? I'd have
told you she was too young; and she is! I'd have told you to wait; and
you'd have waited. You'd have been civil enough to wait when I explained
to you that I've already lost, by marriage, two daughters through that
accursed machine. You wouldn't entirely denude me of daughters, would
you?"
"I only want one," said John Yates, simply.
"Well, all right; I'm a decent father-in-law when I've got to be. I'm
really a good sport. You may ask all my sons-in-law; they'll admit it."
He scrutinized the young man and found him decidedly agreeable to look
at, and at the same time a vague realization of his own predicament
returned for a moment.
"Yates," he said unsteadily, "all I ask of you is to keep this terrible
n-news from my innocent d-daughters until I can f-find out what sort of a
person is f-fated to lead me to the altar!"
Yates took the offered hand with genuine emotion.
"Surely," he said, "your unknown intended must be some charming leader in
the social activities of the great metropolis."
"Who knows! She may be m-my own l-laundress for all I know. She may be