Further Foolishness | Page 6

his head fall again.

This kind of thing goes on until, if possible, the reader is persuaded into
thinking that there is nothing going to happen. Then:
"He turned to The Woman. 'Go in there,' he said, pointing to the
bedroom door. Mechanically she obeyed." This, by the way, is the first
intimation that the reader has that the room in which they were sitting
was not a bedroom. The two men were alone. Dangerfield walked over
to the chair where he had thrown his coat.
"I bought this coat in St. Louis last fall," he said. His voice was quiet,
even passionless. Then from the pocket of the coat he took a revolver
and laid it on the table. Marsden watched him without a word.
"Do you see this pistol?" said Dangerfield.
Marsden raised his head a moment and let it sink.
Of course the ignorant reader keeps wondering why he doesn't explain.
But how can he? What is there to say? He has been found out of his
own room at night. The penalty for this in all the snoopopathic stories
is death. It is understood that in all the New York hotels the night
porters shoot a certain number of men in the corridors every night.
"When we married," said Dangerfield, glancing at the closed door as he
spoke, "I bought this and the mate to it--for her--just the same, with the
monogram on the butt--see! And I said to her, 'If things ever go wrong
between you and me, there is always this way out.'"
He lifted the pistol from the table, examining its mechanism. He rose
and walked across the room till he stood with his back against the door,
the pistol in his hand, its barrel pointing straight at Marsden's heart.
Marsden never moved. Then as the two men faced one another thus,
looking into one another's eyes, their ears caught a sound from behind
the closed door of the inner room--a sharp, hard, metallic sound as if
some one in the room within had raised the hammer of a pistol--a
jewelled pistol like the one in Dangerfield's hand.
And then--
A loud report, and with a cry, the cry of a woman, one shrill despairing
cry--
Or no, hang it--I can't consent to end up a story in that fashion, with the
dead woman prone across the bed, the smoking pistol, with a jewel on
the hilt, still clasped in her hand--the red blood welling over the white
laces of her gown--while the two men gaze down upon her cold face
with horror in their eyes. Not a bit. Let's end it like this:

"A shrill despairing cry--'Ed! Charlie! Come in here quick! Hurry! The
steam coil has blown out a plug! You two boys quit talking and come
in here, for heaven's sake, and fix it.'" And, indeed, if the reader will
look back he will see there is nothing in the dialogue to preclude it. He
was misled, that's all. I merely said that Mrs. Dangerfield had left her
husband a few days before. So she had--to do some shopping in New
York. She thought it mean of him to follow her. And I never said that
Mrs. Dangerfield had any connection whatever with The Woman with
whom Marsden was in love. Not at all. He knew her, of course, because
he came from Brick City. But she had thought he was in Philadelphia,
and naturally she was surprised to see him back in New York. That's
why she exclaimed "Back!" And as a matter of plain fact, you can't
pick up a revolver without its pointing somewhere. No one said he
meant to fire it.
In fact, if the reader will glance back at the dialogue--I know he has no
time to, but if he does--he will see that, being something of a
snoopopath himself, he has invented the whole story.

III. Foreign Fiction in Imported Instalments.
Serge the Superman: A Russian Novel
(Translated, with a hand pump, out of the original Russian)
SPECIAL EDITORIAL NOTE, OR, FIT OF CONVULSIONS INTO
WHICH AN EDITOR FALLS IN INTRODUCING THIS SORT OF
STORY TO HIS READERS. We need offer no apology to our readers
in presenting to them a Russian novel. There is no doubt that the future
in literature lies with Russia. The names of Tolstoi, of
Turgan-something, and Dostoi-what-is-it are household words in
America. We may say with certainty that Serge the Superman is the
most distinctly Russian thing produced in years. The Russian view of
life is melancholy and fatalistic. It is dark with the gloom of the great
forests of the Volga, and saddened with the infinite silence of the
Siberian plain. Hence the Russian speech, like the Russian thought, is
direct, terse and almost crude in its elemental