Part 39

"It is a nice story, you know," said Alice timidly.

"So it seems," the gentleman went on. "Fourteen of the sixteen letters bear the Blackheath postmark. The enthusiasm for the chapter would seem to be mainly local."

Oswald would not look at Alice. He could not trust himself, with her looking like she did. He knew at once that only the piano-tuner and the electric bell man had been faithful to their trust. The others had all posted their letters in the pillar-box just outside our gate. They wanted to get rid of them as quickly as they could, I suppose. Selfishness is a vile quality.

The author cannot deny that Oswald now wished he hadn't. The elastic was certainly moving, slowly, but too surely. Oswald tried to check its career by swelling out the bump on the back of his head, but he could not think of the right way to do this.

"I am very pleased to see you," the Editor went on slowly, and there was something about the way he spoke that made Oswald think of a cat playing with a mouse. "Perhaps you can tell me. Are there many spiritualists in Blackheath? Many clairvoyants?"

"Eh?" said Alice, forgetting that that is not the way to behave.

"People who foretell the future?" he said.

"I don't think so," said Alice. "Why?"

His eye twinkled. Oswald saw he had wanted her to ask this.

"Because," said the Editor, more slowly than ever, "I think there must be. How otherwise can we account for that chapter about the 'Doge's Home' being read and admired by sixteen different people before it is even printed. That chapter has not been printed, it has not been published; it will not be published till the May number of the People's Pageant. Yet in Blackheath sixteen people already appreciate its subtlety and its realism and all the rest of it. How do you account for this, Miss Daisy Dolman?"

"I am the Right Honourable Etheltruda," said Alice. "At least--oh, it's no use going on. We are not what we seem."

"Oddly enough, I inferred that at the very beginning of our interview," said the Editor.

Then the elastic finished slipping up Oswald's head at the back, and the hat leapt from his head exactly as he had known it would. He fielded it deftly, however, and it did not touch the ground.

"Concealment," said Oswald, "is at an end."

"So it appears," said the Editor. "Well, I hope next time the author of the 'Golden Gondola' will choose his instruments more carefully."

"He didn't! We aren't!" cried Alice, and she instantly told the Editor everything.

Concealment being at an end, Oswald was able to get at his trousers pocket--it did not matter now how many boots he showed--and to get out Albert's uncle's letter.

Alice was quite eloquent, especially when the Editor had made her take off the hat with the blue bird, and the transformation and the tail, so that he could see what she really looked like. He was quite decent when he really understood how Albert's uncle's threatened marriage must have upset his brain while he was writing that chapter, and pondering on the dark future.

He began to laugh then, and kept it up till the hour of parting.

He advised Alice not to put on the transformation and the tail again to go home in, and she didn't.

Then he said to me: "Are you in a finished state under Miss Daisy Dolman?" and when Oswald said, "Yes," the Editor helped him to take off all the womanly accoutrements, and to do them up in brown paper. And he lent him a cap to go home in.

I never saw a man laugh more. He is an excellent sort.

But no slow passage of years, however many, can ever weaken Oswald's memory of what those petticoats were like to walk in, and how ripping it was to get out of them, and have your own natural legs again.

We parted from that Editor without a strain on anybody's character.

He must have written to Albert's uncle, and told him all, for we got a letter next week. It said--

"MY DEAR KIDDIES,--Art cannot be forced. Nor can Fame. May I beg you for the future to confine your exertions to blowing my trumpet--or Fame's--with your natural voices? Editors may be led, but they won't be druv. The Right Honourable Miss Etheltruda Bustler seems to have aroused a deep pity for me in my Editor's heart. Let that suffice. And for the future permit me, as firmly as affectionately, to reiterate the assurance and the advice which I have so often breathed in your long young ears, 'I am not ungrateful; but I do wish you would mind your own business.'"

"That's just because we were found out," said Alice. "If we'd succeeded he'd have been sitting on the top of the pinnacle of Fame, and he would have owed it all to us. That would have been making him something like a wedding present."

What we had really done was to make something very like----but the author is sure he has said enough.