The Indiscreet Letter | Page 4

as many as
thirty-four tucked away in her top bureau drawer!'--'I wouldn't wonder,'
says Martha, stooping lower and lower over Thomkins's blue cotton
shirt that she's trying to cut down into rompers for the baby. 'And,
Martha,' I says, 'that letter is just a joke. One of the boys sure put it up
on him!'--'Why, of course,' says Martha, with her mouth all puckered
up crooked, as though a kid had stitched it on the machine. 'Why, of
course! How dared you think--'"
Forking one bushy eyebrow, the Salesman turned and stared quizzically
off into space.
"But all the samey, just between you and I," he continued judicially,
"all the samey, I'll wager you anything you name that it ain't just death
that's pulling Martha down day by day, and night by night, limper and
lanker and clumsier-footed. Martha's got a sore thought. That's what
ails her. And God help the crittur with a sore thought! God help
anybody who's got any one single, solitary sick idea that keeps thinking
on top of itself, over and over and over, boring into the past, bumping
into the future, fussing, fretting, eternally festering. Gee! Compared to
it, a tight shoe is easy slippers, and water dropping on your head is
perfect peace!--Look close at Martha, I say. Every night when the
blowsy old moon shines like courting time, every day when the
butcher's bill comes home as big as a swollen elephant, when the
crippled stepson tries to cut his throat again, when the youngest kid
sneezes funny like his father--'WHO WAS ROSIE? WHO WAS
ROSIE?'"
"Well, who was Rosie?" persisted the Youngish Girl absent-mindedly.
"Why, Rosie was nothing!" snapped the Traveling Salesman; "nothing
at all--probably." Altogether in spite of himself, his voice trailed off
into a suspiciously minor key. "But all the same," he continued more
vehemently, "all the same--it's just that little darned word 'probably'
that's making all the mess and bother of it--because, as far as I can
reckon, a woman can stand absolutely anything under God's heaven
that she knows; but she just up and can't stand the littlest, teeniest,
no-account sort of thing that she ain't sure of. Answers may kill 'em

dead enough, but it's questions that eats 'em alive."
For a long, speculative moment the Salesman's gold-rimmed eyes went
frowning off across the snow-covered landscape. Then he ripped off his
glasses and fogged them very gently with his breath.
"Now--I--ain't--any--saint," mused the Traveling Salesman
meditatively, "and I--ain't very much to look at, and being on the road
ain't a business that would exactly enhance my valuation in the eyes of
a lady who was actually looking out for some safe place to bank her
affections; but I've never yet reckoned on running with any firm that
didn't keep up to its advertising promises, and if a man's courtship ain't
his own particular, personal advertising proposition--then I don't know
anything about--anything! So if I should croak sudden any time in a
railroad accident or a hotel fire or a scrap in a saloon, I ain't calculating
on leaving my wife any very large amount of 'sore thoughts.' When a
man wants his memory kept green, he don't mean--gangrene!
"Oh, of course," the Salesman continued more cheerfully, "a sudden
croaking leaves any fellow's affairs at pretty raw ends--lots of queer,
bitter-tasting things that would probably have been all right enough if
they'd only had time to get ripe. Lots of things, I haven't a doubt, that
would make my wife kind of mad, but nothing, I'm calculating, that she
wouldn't understand. There'd be no questions coming in from the office,
I mean, and no fresh talk from the road that she ain't got the
information on hand to meet. Life insurance ain't by any means, in my
mind, the only kind of protection that a man owes his widow. Provide
for her Future--if you can!--That's my motto!--But a man's just a plain
bum who don't provide for his own Past! She may have plenty of
trouble in the years to come settling her own bills, but she ain't going to
have any worry settling any of mine. I tell you, there'll be no ladies
swelling round in crape at my funeral that my wife don't know by their
first names!"
With a sudden startling guffaw the Traveling Salesman's mirth rang
joyously out above the roar of the car.
"Tell me about your wife," said the Youngish Girl a little wistfully.

Around the Traveling Salesman's generous mouth the loud laugh
flickered down to a schoolboy's bashful grin.
"My wife?" he repeated. "Tell you about my wife? Why, there isn't
much to tell. She's little. And young. And was a school-teacher. And I
married her four years ago."
"And were happy--ever--after," mused the Youngish Girl teasingly.
"No!" contradicted the Traveling Salesman