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A Likely Story – Farce
by
II
[MR. WELLING; MR. CAMPBELL]
CAMPBELL:“Why, Welling, what the devil are you doing there?”
WELLING:“Trying to get away.”
CAMPBELL:“To get away? But you sha’n’t, man! I won’t let you. I was just going to see you. How long have you been there?”
WELLING:“I’ve just come.”
CAMPBELL:“What have you heard?”
WELLING:“Nothing–nothing. I was knocking on the window-casing to make you hear, but you seemed preoccupied.”
CAMPBELL:“Preoccupied! convulsed! cataclysmed! Look here: we’re in a box, Welling. And you’ve got us into it.” He pulls Welling’s note out of his pocket, where he has been keeping his hand on it, and pokes it at him. “Is that yours?”
WELLING,examining it with bewilderment mounting into anger: “It’s mine; yes. May I ask, Mr. Campbell, how you came to have this letter?”
CAMPBELL:“May I ask, Mr. Welling, how you came to write such a letter to my wife?”
WELLING:“To your wife? To Mrs. Campbell? I never wrote any such letter to her.”
CAMPBELL:“Then you addressed it to her.”
WELLING:“Impossible!”
CAMPBELL:“Impossible? I think I can convince you, much as I regret to do so.” He makes search about Mrs. Campbell’s letters on the table first, and then on the writing-desk. “We have the envelope. It came amongst a lot of letters, and there’s no mistake about it.” He continues to toss the letters about, and then desists. “But no matter; I can’t find it; Amy’s probably carried it off with her. There’s no mistake about it. I was going to have some fun with you about it, but now you can have some fun with me. Whom did you send Mrs. Campbell’s letter to?”
WELLING:“Mrs. Campbell’s letter?”
CAMPBELL:“Oh, pshaw! your acceptance or refusal, or whatever it was, of her garden fandango. You got an invitation?”
WELLING:“Of course.”
CAMPBELL:“And you wrote to accept it or decline it at the same time that you wrote this letter here to some one else. And you addressed two envelopes before you put the notes in either. And then you put them into the wrong envelopes. And you sent this note to my wife, and the other note to the other person–“
WELLING:“No, I didn’t do anything of the kind!” He regards Campbell with amazement, and some apparent doubt of his sanity.
CAMPBELL:“Well, then, Mr. Welling, will you allow me to ask what the deuce you did do?”
WELLING:“I never wrote to Mrs. Campbell at all. I thought I would just drop in and tell her why I couldn’t come. It seemed so formal to write.”
CAMPBELL:“Then will you be kind enough to tell me whom you did write to?”
WELLING:“No, Mr. Campbell, I can’t do that.”
CAMPBELL:“You write such a letter as that to my wife, and then won’t tell me whom it’s to?”
WELLING:“No! And you’ve no right to ask me.”
CAMPBELL:“I’ve no right to ask you?”
WELLING:“No. When I tell you that the note wasn’t meant for Mrs. Campbell, that’s enough.”
CAMPBELL:“I’ll be judge of that, Mr. Welling. You say that you were not writing two notes at the time, and that you didn’t get the envelopes mixed. Then, if the note wasn’t meant for my wife, why did you address it to her?”
WELLING:“That’s what I can’t tell; that’s what I don’t know. It’s as great a mystery to me as it is to you. I can only conjecture that when I was writing that address I was thinking of coming to explain to Mrs. Campbell that I was going away to-day, and shouldn’t be back till after her party. It was too complicated to put in a note without seeming to give my regrets too much importance. And I suppose that when I was addressing the note that I did write I put Mrs. Campbell’s name on because I had her so much in mind.”