The Bibliophile/Chapter 6

The child dancer seemed to think that I ought to be able to manage it somehow, so of course I had to. We took counsel together, and the result of the conclave was that I went to that sad and dreary pile of stones on Forty-second Street and hunted hours and hours for a book to influence Claudius.

My experiment proved interesting because a girl with wide gray eyes caught the idea. She seemed to be a very sympathetic person and to know books, and, observing my list of book reviews and the heap of current fiction I drew, waded through, and returned, she finally asked me what I was looking for, saying that she herself was a book reviewer and might be able to help me. So I thankfully took her into my confidence—told her that my best friend was in a fair way to make a mess of his life and that the only stimulus to which he reacted was that of the printed page, preferably fiction. This aroused her curiosity and, seeing that it was not merely idle, I explained the whole business. I think she must have laughed ten minutes without stopping; then she put aside her own work and lent herself to the task of rescue.

We were at it three days before we got results. The story which we stumbled on as a corrective for Claudius' quixotism might have been written with that distinct purpose, being the tale of a highly honorable chump who permitted himself to be victimized by a designing cat in such a silly way that one had scarcely the patience to read it. But it was just the sort of sentimental drool to appeal to Claudius. The subtlety of the yarn, in its perfect application to Claudius' case, was the cleverly worked-out demonstration of the infinite folly of a man's trying to square his account with a woman by marrying her. If he dislikes her enough to make his marriage a penalty, he might better choke her at once and be done with it.

Having found the antidote, as we hoped, the next thing was to administer it without the use of a gag and a tube, Claudius would have smelled a rat if I had tried to bell him with that book. Here Miss Grayling, my library friend, stepped into the breach. She got the reviewing of the book, which was just out, and I took the child dancer into the plot and had her force the review on Claudius in the Times. He swallowed it, sinker and all, bought the book the very next day, and sat up with it all night. He rang me up at ten o'clock the following morning, asking me to lunch at the Savarin and discuss it with him. I primed him up, and that night he called on Suzanne.

Just what passed between them I never knew, but I think it probable that there may have been certain concession on both sides, followed by an honorable and enduring peace, because, when I took Miss Grayling to inspect Claudius and the Casa Pompeiana some days later, the first thing by which we were forcibly struck on entering was the child dancer fleeing from the righteous wrath of her guardian, who had been at work on a new synthetic compound. Apparently Clarissa had been muddling about and capsized a jar containing a thousand dollars' worth of smell.

But I didn't mind the smell because I was so pleased to find Claudius back on the job. That meant a clear sky, good barometric conditions, and no danger of Vesuvius spewing red-hot mud on the Casa Pompeiana.

In a word, everything appeared to be entirely all right, so far as one could judge from the curve registered by the personnel consisting of Cocky, Pussy, Polly, Cholly, and the child dancer.