What's-His-Name

by George Barr McCutcheon

When the time came for him to begin his work as a solicitor for crayon portraits his reputation was such that not only was he able to gain admittance to every home visited, but he was allowed to remain and chat as long as he pleased, sometimes obtaining an order, but always being invited to call again after the lady of the house had had time to talk it over with her husband.

Sometimes he would lie awake in his bed trying in vain to remember the tales he had told and wondering if the people really believed him. Then he was prone to contrast his fiction with the truth as he knew it, and to blame himself for not having lived the brightly painted life when he had the opportunity. He almost wept when he thought of what he had missed. His imagination carried him so far that he cursed his mistaken rectitude and longed for one lone and indelible reminiscence which he 208 could cherish as a real tribute to that beautiful thing called vice!

In answer to all questions he announced that poor Nellie had been advised to go West for her health. Of the real situation he said nothing.

No day passed that did not bring with it the longing for a letter from Nellie or a word from Phoebe. Down in his heart he was grieving. He wanted them, both of them. The hope that Nellie would appeal to him for forgiveness grew smaller as the days went by, and yet he did not let it die. His loyal imagination kept it alive, fed it with daily prayers and endless vistas of a reconstructed happiness for all of them.

Toward the end of his first summer at Davis’ he was served with the notice that Nellie had instituted proceedings against him in Reno. It was in the days of Reno’s early popularity as a rest cure for those suffering from marital maladies; impediments and complications were not so annoying as they appear to be in these latter times of ours. There was also a legal notice printed in the Blakeville Patriot.

The shock laid him up for a couple of days. If his uncle meant to encourage him by maintaining 209 an almost incessant flow of invectives, he made a dismal failure of it. He couldn’t convince the heartsick Harvey that Nellie was “bad rubbish” and that he was lucky to be rid of her. No amount of cajolery could make him believe that he was a good deal happier than he had ever been before in all his life; he wasn’t happy and he couldn’t be fooled into believing he was. He was miserable—desperately miserable. Looking back on his futile attempts to take his own life, he realised now that he had missed two golden chances to be supremely happy. How happy he could be if he were only dead! He was rather glad, of course, that he failed with the pistol, because it would have been such a gory way out of it, but it was very stupid of him not to have gone out pleasantly—even immaculately—by the other route.

But it was too late to think of doing it now. He was under contract with Mrs. Davis, Mr. Davis having passed on late in the spring, and he could not desert the widow in the midst of the busy season. His last commission as a crayon solicitor had come through Mrs. Davis, two months after the demise of Blakeville’s leading apothecary. She ordered a life-size portrait 210 of her husband, to be hung in the store, and they wept together over the prescription—that is to say, over the colour of the cravat and the shade of the sparse thatch that covered the head of the departed. Mrs. Davis never was to forget his sympathetic attitude. She never quite got over explaining the oversight that had deprived him of the distinction of being one of the pall-bearers, but she made up for it in a measure by insisting on opening the soda fountain at least a month earlier than was customary the next spring, and in other ways, as you will see later on.

Just as he was beginning to rise, phœnixlike, from the ashes of his despond, the Patriot reprinted the full details of Nellie’s complaint as they appeared in a New York daily. For a brief spell he shrivelled up with shame and horror; he could not look any one in the face. Nellie’s lawyers had made the astounding, outrageous charge of infidelity against him!

Infidelity!

He was stunned.