telling Jane we managed to get out unseen by Blakie.
All the others would come, too, in their natural appearance, except that we made them wash their hands and faces. We happened to be flush of chink, so we let them come.
"But if you do," Oswald said, "you must surround us in a hollow square of four."
So they did. And we got down to the station all right. But in the train there were two ladies who stared, and porters and people like that came round the window far more than there could be any need for. Oswald's boots must have shown as he got in. He had forgotten to borrow a pair of Jane's, as he had meant to, and the ones he had on were his largest. His ears got hotter and hotter, and it got more and more difficult to manage his feet and hands. He failed to suck any courage, of any nation, from the peppermints.
Owing to the state Oswald's ears were now in, we agreed to take a cab at Cannon Street. We all crammed in somehow, but Oswald saw the driver wink as he put his boot on the step, and the porter who was opening the cab door winked back, and I am sorry to say Oswald forgot that he was a high-born lady, and he told the porter that he had better jolly well stow his cheek. Then several bystanders began to try and be funny, and Oswald knew exactly what particular sort of fool he was being.
But he bravely silenced the fierce warnings of his ears, and when we got to the Editor's address we sent Dick up with a large card that we had written on,
"Miss Daisy Dolman
and
The Right Honourable Miss
Etheltruda Bustler.
On urgent business."
and Oswald kept himself and Alice concealed in the cab till the return of the messenger.
"All right; you're to go up," Dicky came back and said; "but the boy grinned who told me so. You'd better be jolly careful."
We bolted like rabbits across the pavement and up the Editor's stairs.
He was very polite. He asked us to sit down, and Oswald did. But first he tumbled over the front of his dress because it would get under his boots, and he was afraid to hold it up, not having practised doing this.
"I think I have had letters from you?" said the Editor.
Alice, who looked terrible with the transformation leaning right-ear-ward, said yes, and that we had come to say what a fine, bold conception we thought the Doge's chapter was. This was what we had settled to say, but she needn't have burst out with it like that. I suppose she forgot herself. Oswald, in the agitation of his clothes, could say nothing. The elastic of the hat seemed to be very slowly slipping up the back of his head, and he knew that, if it once passed the bump that backs of heads are made with, the hat would spring from his head like an arrow from a bow. And all would be frustrated.
"Yes," said the Editor; "that chapter seems to have had a great success—a wonderful success. I had no fewer than sixteen letters about it, all praising it in unmeasured terms." He looked at Oswald's boots, which Oswald had neglected to cover over with his petticoats. He now did this.
"It is a nice story, you know," said Alice timidly.
"So it seems," the gentleman went on. "Fourteen of the sixteen letters bear the Blackheath postmark. The enthusiasm for the chapter would seem to be mainly local."
Oswald would not look at Alice. He could not trust himself, with her looking like she did. He knew at once that only the piano-tuner and the electric bell man had been faithful to their trust. The others had all posted their letters in the pillar-box just outside our gate. They wanted to get rid of them as quickly as they could, I suppose. Selfishness is a vile quality.
The author cannot deny that Oswald now wished he hadn't. The elastic was certainly moving, slowly, but too surely. Oswald tried to check its career by swelling out the bump on the back of his head, but he could not think of the right way to do this.
"I am very pleased to see you," the Editor went on slowly, and there was something about the way he spoke that made Oswald think of a cat playing with a mouse. "Perhaps you can tell me. Are there many spiritualists in Blackheath? Many clairvoyants?"
"Eh?" said Alice, forgetting that that is not the way to behave.
"People who foretell the future?" he said.
"I don't think so," said Alice. "Why?"
His eye twinkled. Oswald saw he had wanted her to ask this.
"Because," said the Editor, more slowly than ever, "I think there must be. How otherwise can we account for that chapter about the 'Doge's Home' being read and admired by sixteen different people before it is even printed. That chapter has not been printed, it has not been published; it will not be published till the May number of the People's Pageant. Yet in Blackheath sixteen people already appreciate its subtlety and its realism and all the rest of it. How do you account for this, Miss Daisy Dolman?"
"I am the Right Honourable Etheltruda," said Alice. "At least—oh, it's no use going on. We are not what we seem."
"Oddly enough, I inferred that at the very beginning of our interview," said the Editor.
Then the elastic finished slipping up Oswald's head at the back, and the hat leapt from his head exactly as he had known it would. He fielded it deftly, however, and it did not touch the ground.
"Concealment," said Oswald, "is at an end."
"So it appears," said the Editor. "Well, I hope next time the author of the 'Golden Gondola' will choose his instruments more carefully."
"He didn't! We aren't!" cried Alice, and she instantly told the Editor everything.
Concealment being at an end, Oswald was able to get at his trousers pocket—it did not matter now how many boots he showed—and to get out Albert's uncle's letter.
Alice was quite eloquent, especially when the Editor had made her take off the hat with the blue bird, and the transformation and the tail, so that he could see what she really looked like. He was quite decent when he really understood how Albert's uncle's threatened marriage must have upset his brain while he was writing that chapter, and pondering on the dark future.
He began to laugh then, and kept it up till the hour of parting.
He advised Alice not to put on the transformation and the tail again to go home in, and she didn't.
Then he said to me: "Are you in a finished state under Miss Daisy Dolman?" and when Oswald said, "Yes," the Editor helped him to take off all the womanly accoutrements, and to do them up in brown paper. And he lent him a cap to go home in.
I never saw a man laugh more. He is an excellent sort.
But no slow passage of years, however many, can ever weaken Oswald's memory of what those petticoats were like to walk in, and how ripping it was to get out of them,
