More Jonathan Papers | Page 5

look anywhere else? I suppose I may be mistaken. Perhaps I did take it back to the desk."
"That's just what I thought myself," said Jonathan. "So I went there, and looked, and then I looked on all the mantelpieces and your bureau. You must have put it in your bag the last minute--bet it's there now!"
"Bet it isn't."
It wasn't. For two weeks more I was driven to using other pens--strange and distracting to the fingers and the eyes and the mind. Then Jonathan was to go up again.
"Please look once more," I begged, "and don't expect not to see it. I can fairly see it myself, this minute, standing up there on the right-hand side, just behind the machine oil can."
"Oh, I'll look," he promised. "If it's there, I'll find it."
He returned penless. I considered buying another. But we were planning to go up together the last week of the hunting season, and I thought I would wait on the chance.
We got off at the little station and hunted our way up, making great sweeps and jogs, as hunters must, to take in certain spots we thought promising--certain ravines and swamp edges where we are always sure of hearing the thunderous whir of partridge wings, or the soft, shrill whistle of woodcock. At noon we broiled chops and rested in the lee of the wood edge, where, even in the late fall, one can usually find spots that are warm and still. It was dusk by the time we came over the crest of the farm ledges and saw the huddle of the home buildings below us, and quite dark when we reached the house. Fires had been made and coals smouldered on the hearth in the sitting-room.
"You light the lamp," I said, "and I'll just take a match and go through to see if that pen should happen to be there."
"No use doing anything to-night," said Jonathan. "To-morrow morning you can have a thorough hunt."
But I took my match, felt my way into the next room, past the fireplace, up to the cupboard, then struck my match. In its first flare-up I glanced in. Then I chuckled.
Jonathan had gone out to the dining-room, but he has perfectly good ears.
"NO!" he roared, and his tone of dismay, incredulity, rage, sent me off into gales of unscrupulous laughter. He was striding in, candle in hand, shouting, "It was not there!"
"Look yourself," I managed to gasp.
This time, somehow, he could see it.
"You planted it! You brought it up and planted it!"
"I never! Oh, dear me! It pays for going without it for weeks!"
"Nothing will ever make me believe that that pen was standing there when I looked for it!" said Jonathan, with vehement finality.
"All right," I sighed happily. "You don't have to believe it."
But in his heart perhaps he does believe it. At any rate, since that time he has adopted a new formula: "My dear, it may be there, of course, but I don't see it." And this position I regard as unassailable.
One triumph he has had. I wanted something that was stored away in the shut-up town house.
"Do you suppose you could find it?" I said, as gently as possible.
"I can try," he said.
"I think it is in a box about this shape--see?--a gray box, in the attic closet, the farthest-in corner."
"Are you sure it's in the house? If it's in the house, I think I can find it."
"Yes, I'm sure of that."
When he returned that night, his face wore a look of satisfaction very imperfectly concealed beneath a mask of nonchalance.
"Good for you! Was it where I said?"
"No."
"Was it in a different corner?"
"No."
"Where was it?"
"It wasn't in a corner at all. It wasn't in that closet."
"It wasn't! Where, then?"
"Downstairs in the hall closet." He paused, then could not forbear adding, "And it wasn't in a gray box; it was in a big hat-box with violets all over it."
"Why, Jonathan! Aren't you grand! How did you ever find it? I couldn't have done better myself."
Under such praise he expanded. "The fact is," he said confidentially, "I had given it up. And then suddenly I changed my mind. I said to myself, 'Jonathan, don't be a man! Think what she'd do if she were here now.' And then I got busy and found it."
"Jonathan!" I could almost have wept if I had not been laughing.
"Well," he said, proud, yet rather sheepish, "what is there so funny about that? I gave up half a day to it."
"Funny! It isn't funny--exactly. You don't mind my laughing a little? Why, you've lived down the fountain pen--we'll forget the pen--"
"Oh, no, you won't forget the pen either," he said, with a certain pleasant grimness.
"Well, perhaps not--of course it would be a pity to forget that. Suppose I say, then, that we'll always regard the pen