Mr. Brewster, when only half-way through the Vascal Course, laid out the cards for his wife, and told her she would be wrong to insist on going to the theatre that evening, because the show would stink. She did insist, and it did stink.
Convinced by these, and by scores of other unsolicited testimonials, Myra Wilkins decided she could hardly do better than enroll as a student. Her idea was a big one; she meant to play her cards properly. She considered that sooner or later, among the numerous young men who would flock to consult her, she would strike one for whom she could forsee an enormous fortune arriving in the near future from some unsuspected source. She had no intention of unsettling this happy young man by telling him what the future held, but thought rather she might warn him against any Queens of Hearts or Diamonds with whom he might be involved, and guide him gently toward a marriage with a high-grade Spade, for Myra was a brunette.
She graduated with the highest honours, and set up in a shadowy little nook in the West Forties, above the establishment of a dancing instructress with whom she was acquainted. She figured that young men who suddenly took dancing lessons often had a great yearning to know what the future held for them, and she hoped these would form the nucleus of a clientele.
Myra had very little capital, and this was exhausted in furnishing her nook with bead-curtain, witch balls, images of Buddha, and similar junk, to create a convincing atmosphere for her visitors. She set her fee very low, in order to get the widest possible range of clients, and thus increase her chances of finding a future millionaire among them.
She shuffled and spread her greasy pack of cards, foretelling for innumerable insignificant young men the details of futures that were little better than pasts, which of course they would become one of these days. As far as the imminent fortune was concerned, the whole business was like a game of solitaire that never came out. The average future wealth of her clients was somewhere about the Two of Diamonds, and work and worry loomed up like a grand slam.
The months stretched on into years, and the dust lay thick upon the witch ball and the Buddha. Myra had nothing but her dreams of wealth, and these, like an old knife, were sharpened to a razor keenness. At last, late one afternoon, when the shadows were at their deepest, the stairway groaned beneath a heavy tread, and a hulking figure tried to get four ways at once through the bead-curtain that screened her alcove.
The new customer was an ugly one, and a more prosperous fortune teller would probably have sent him straight back to the Zoo. Myra, however, could not afford to pass up a dollar, so she wearily laid out her pack. The Two of Clubs frisked around fairly actively in the near foreground, in a context that gave it the significance of a copper's night stick. She saw he was in some danger of visiting a large building, full of men in strange clothes, but vaguer influences seemed to indicate a postponement of this necessity.
Suddenly she had to repress a cry that rose unbidden to her lips. It was as if his future, dark as a cannibal king, had smiled, and revealed a golden tooth. Vascal declared unequivocally that a handsome fortune was coming to this young man on the death of someone very near to him.
«Have you any relations?» she asked. «Any near relations, I mean, who are well off?»
«No, »said he. «Not unless Uncle Joe soaked anything away before they got him.»
«That must be it,» she thought. «Well,» she said aloud, «it doesn't matter much. There's no sign of any uncle leaving you anything. This card means money troubles. This means you're doublecrossed by a blonde. Looks like you're beaten up, too. I don't know what these two men in uniform are doing.»
She continued prattling and laying out the cards, her mind working meanwhile like a three-ring circus. One ring was taken up with the story she was telling to her visitor, the second in reading the real future as it unfolded itself, and the third in wondering what she was going to do about it.
She stole another glance at her unattractive client. The fortune, as far as she could judge, appeared to be rather more than a million. Her visitor, on the other hand, seemed a good deal less than human. Myra had not expected romance, but there are things which make a nice girl hesitate, and he was one of them.
While she pondered she was still automatically laying out the cards. Suddenly her eyes brightened. She looked again. It was true. All her troubles were ended. The cards indicated, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that her client would die of a sudden, violent shock within a few months of inheriting the money. This made quite an eligible bachelor of him.
Myra at once began her manoeuvres. «You seem,» said she, «to be at the parting of the ways. One road leads to misery, poverty, sickness, despair, prison …»
«I'll take the other,» said the young man.
«You show great powers of judgment,» said Myra. «But I can tell you it is not as easy as all that. The other road, which leads to riches and happiness, can only be travelled hand in hand with a good woman. Do you know a good woman?»
«Oh, phooey!» said her client in dismay.
«What a pity!» said Myra. «Because if you did, and if she was dark, and not bad-looking, and wore a number-five shoe, all you'd have to do would be to marry her, and you'd be rich for life. Very rich. Look — here it is. Money, money, money — coming to you from someone very near to you. If you marry that girl, that is. Look — this card means you at the Waldorf. Look — this is you at Palm Beach. Here you are at Saratoga. Gosh! You've backed a big winner!»
«Say, lady,» said her client. «What size shoe do you wear?»
«Well,» said Myra with a smile, «I can squeeze into a four. But usually …»
«Look, baby,» said he, taking her hand. «It's you and me. Like that. See?» With that he extended his other hand with two fingers crossed, as an emblem of connubial bliss.
Myra controlled a shudder. «When he's dead,» thought she, «I'll have a million, and get me one of these young film stars, in order to forget!»
Soon afterwards they were married, and took a small shack in an unprepossessing part of Long Island. Lew appeared to have strong reasons for living in inconspicuous retirement. Myra commuted, and drudged harder than ever with her greasy pack of cards, in order to keep them both until death should them part, leaving her a rich widow.
As time went on, and the fortune still failed to materialize, she was bitterly reproached by her hulking husband, whose stunted mind was as impatient as a child's, and who began to fear he had been married under false pretenses. He was also a little sadistic.
«Maybe you ain't the right dame after all,» said he, pinching her black and blue. «Maybe you don't wear a five. Maybe you wear a six. Gimme a divorce and let me marry another dark dame. The money don't come along, and you're black and blue anyway. I don't like a black and blue dame. Come on, gimme a divorce.»
«I won't,» said she. «I believe marriages are made in Heaven.»
This would lead to an argument, for he claimed to have evidence to the contrary. In the end his brutish wits would be baffled; he would fling her to the ground with a curse, and go into the back yard, where he would dig an enormously deep hole, into which he would gaze for a long time, and then fill it in again.
This continued for some months, and Myra herself began to wonder if the Vascal System could possibly have let her down. «Supposing he doesn't come into the money. Here I am — Mrs. King Kong, and working for it! Maybe I'd better get that divorce after all.»
These defeatist notions came to a head one gloomy winter evening as she trudged home from the ferry. Crossing the dark yard of the shack, she stumbled into another of the enormous holes dug by her simple-minded husband. «That settles it,» thought she.
