And she had called him a book!
By ’phone and messenger, help was brought to “26 Hogan street.” They broke in the locked door, conveyed the sick woman to the care of good nurses, clean linen and real food. Her little brood they kept with her, and so, in this one instance out of many, lightened the dark hours of the very poor. Blynn confessed with shame that before this experience he had not really known of their existence.
Soon after the groggery episode Professor Blynn was scheduled for a banquet speech at the annual meeting of a local Drama Club. The subject, selected long before, was “Realism in Modern Dramatic Art and the Decadence of True Fantasy.” Certain notes which he had put lovingly together for that evening were not at all consulted as he talked. The musty references to Freytag, Horace, and Boileau did not suit his mood. He could not get out of his mind some of the stirring realities of the life about him; so, casually, and without any deep professional manner, he talked of the material near at hand out of which great dramas might come. He drew on his most recent stores. For stage setting he proferred the blinking steamboats on the dark river, crowded with returning excursionists, and humming with harp and violin; for characters, “Simple,” “Low-brow,” “Evil,” “Toothless,” “Braggart,” “Sloth”; and for theme, The Birth of New Life in the Houses of Failure.
The newspaper boys were bent on putting him back on the first page—he grinned inwardly at the story he really could give them! That is why they condensed the remarks of really important speakers and put Allen Blynn forth almost verbatim.
Out of it all he got one dubious result, a letter.
“You are getting on, my dear Professor,” it began abruptly, without heading or date line. “You are no longer a book; you have developed into a newspaper. Eventually, you may become wholly human. Press on.”
It was signed, “The Lady of the Interruption,” a title he remembered he had given her when reporters had interviewed him about her on her first startling appearance.
At various times these and other exciting adventures were dictated to the impersonal stenographer-by-the-hour and mailed to the Levering family.
“The anonymity of the Lady distresses me,” he wrote once. “If I could put my whole case before her, I am sure she would give me a higher rating. For already one of my friends of the Public Square benches has found me out and successfully negotiated the loan of a dollar. Let someone try to get an unearned dollar out of any ‘newspaper.’”
And that was not all. His companion of the excursion steamer—the male—had caught him on the campus, where no doubt he had been lying in wait, and had sold him tickets for the annual Expressmen’s Ball.