“Dinner not good enough for his nibs,” commented one boarder seeking to curry the Sauer favor.
“I’d rather have my boarders pay and not eat than eat and not pay,” said Mrs. Sauer grimly. It was three weeks since she had received a dollar from the speaker.
“Drink,” exclaimed Mr. Clarke, suddenly roused from meditation of a day now dead when a highball could be purchased for fifteen cents. “This food shortage now. That could be settled easily. Take the tax off liquor and people wouldn’t want to eat so much. It’s the high cost of drinking that’s the trouble. What’s the use of calling ourselves a free people? I tell you it was keeping vodka from the Russians that caused the whole trouble. Don’t argue with me. I know.”
Mr. Clarke went from the dinner table to his bed and awoke around midnight possessed with the seven demons of unsatiated thirst. He determined to go down and call upon Anthony Trent. He would plead for enough money to go to the druggist and get his wife’s prescription filled. Trent, good lad that he was, always fell for it. And, he argued, it was a friendly act to do, this midnight call on a hard working young writer who had once been at his command.
For the first time Anthony Trent’s door was locked. And the voice that snapped out an interrogation was different from the leisurely and amiable invitation to enter which was usual. The door was suddenly flung open, so sudden that poor Clarke was startled. And facing him, his fists clenched and a certain tensity of attitude that was a strange one to the visitor, was Anthony Trent still in evening dress. Clarke construed it into an expression of resentment at his intrusion. He could not understand the sudden affability that took possession of his former reporter.
“Come in, Mr. Clarke,” said Trent cordially. “I am sorry your wife’s heart is troubling her but I agree with you that you should rush with all haste to the nearby druggist and have that prescription filled. And as the man who owes you money did not pay you to-day as he promised, but will without fail to-morrow at midday, take this five dollar bill with my blessing.”
“How did you know?” gasped Clarke.
“I am a mind reader,” Trent retorted. “It saves time.” He led Mr. Clarke gently to the door. “Now I’m tired and want to go to sleep so don’t call in on your way back with the change. Just trot up to bed as quietly as you can.”
When the door was locked and a chair-back wedged against the handle, Trent lowered the shades. Then he cleared his table of the litter of paper. A half dozen pages of the first draft of his new story held his attention for a few seconds. Then he deliberately tore the pages into little fragments, threw them into the waste paper basket. And to this cenotaph he added the contents of the table drawer, made up of notes for future stories, the results of weeks of labor.
“Dust to dust,” he murmured, “ashes to ashes!”