An Officer and a Lady Read Online Free Page A

Harlem flat I left for upstate. The parting was tender and tearful. It was the first time I’d ever left for the front looking backward, and as I ran into an ash cart while turning to throw a final kiss up at the window where my wife sat, I felt for an instant that life had been robbed of one of its sweetest pleasures. But by the time I’d reached the 125th Street Station and bought a mileage book, I was thinking how dignified and noble it was to go out into the world and work for the support of a wife and the preservation of a home.
    I shall never forget that trip up and down the river. I had never before realized the full extent of my success and popularity. If I told you all the incidents of that eventful month it would sound like the plot of a musical comedy or the autobiography of a jackass. At each stop it seemed as though everybody I didn’t want to see was waiting for me at the station.
    I’d got no farther than Peekskill when I discovered that no man should ever become a Secret Sorrow unless he intends to stick on the job. If you tell a woman she’s all the world to you, she’s usually willing enough to let you fall off the earth; but if you can get her to put her hand in yours just once, and then tell her how sad it makes you to feel that you can never love her, she’ll never let go. If you say you love her, she yawns indifferently and asks what time it is; if you say you can’t love her she looks at you dreamy and sad and makes you promise to stay over an extra day on your spring trip. Multiply that by 249 and you’ll have some idea of what I was up against.
    It wouldn’t have mattered so much if I’d been willing to sit tight in the front parlor and explain things. But nothing like that for me. You’ll get an inkling of my state of mind when I tell you that I cut out Harris & Puler at Troy because they’ve got a lady buyer who always expects a box of candy and a pleasant smile. Each morning I said over to myself a Lord Tennyson vow about faithfulness in word, thought and deed, and I was getting better every day. I figured that if I came through that first trip with a whole skin the rest would be plain sailing; and what with going down side streets and taking the first train out of towns and spending my Sundays in places where I’d never left my mark, I was exceeding my own fondest hopes.
    Every night I wrote a long letter to my wife, full of lonesomeness. Hers were a little more cheerful. She and her mother were picking all the department stores to pieces and filling the flat with everything from pillows to pills; and at the end of my third week out she wrote me that her brother was in New York for a few days and had already invited them to two concerts and four plays. It was in the same letter that she told me about tying a pink ribbon on the sponge in my humidor. It didn’t make me feel any better to know that she could be gay and happy while I was lonesome and homesick—to say nothing of the awful temptations I was dodging—but still I knew that was better than if she was there all alone. And of course I didn’t complain any. Instead, I wrote her to be sure and have her brother stay till I got back, so I could show him a corner or two which he’d probably miss without a guide.
    By this time I was going along pretty easy. The worst territory had all been covered, and I’d proved my mettle by steering straight between Scylla and Charybdis without blinking an eye. I had only a week more to go, and I began to breathe easy and natural, feeling that all danger was past. I even got so cheerful and gay that I wrote my wife I wouldn’t arrive till Saturday, thinking to get in on Thursday and give her a little surprise.
    Thursday morning I called on Marshall Bros, of Poughkeepsie—my last stop. I’d been selling them for ten years, and I knew that all I had to do was to run over the stock and fill in the empty places. So I went back to the office and got Billy and we had the job finished up in an